kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[John Beard <john.j.beard@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 01/05/2019 07:29, Henner Zeller wrote:
> Since this render sequence starts in one corner, it usually takes a
> while until the "meat" of the render hits the interesting parts in the
> middle of the board.

Yes, this is certainly annoying!
> So I implemented an alternative sequence: from the center out, in a
> growing circle.

Very good idea, and a nice patch.

To ease the time long renders take, it is actually two
> complementing checkerboard patterns in consecutive passes (hard to
> explain, you have to patch and look for yourself). I find this much
> more pleasing to watch and also it helps to early see for the user if
> they want to adjust the view as the important parts are rendered
> first.

It's a very nice idea, and an elegant implementations, but I am not sure 
the checkerboard makes it easier to see the result. Perhaps it's just 
me, but it's unclear with the checker pattern as you can't get a "good 
look" at any part of the board until the second pass. So you sacrifice a 
lot of the benefit of rendering the board first, because you still have 
to wait until ~50% before you start getting "nice" results.

> given the complexity and the added end-user confusion and the
> essentially imperceptible performance penalty, I'd tend towards just
> using the simple implementation without menu-bar settings).

I also see a <1% performance difference, so I'm inclined to agree that 
the setting is not really useful (much as I do love to have millions of 
settings!).

But I have a pretty slow machine, perhaps it makes a bigger difference 
on some machines?

> These patches are against the 5.1 branch, but it also applies cleanly to master.

@Wayne, is this too "feature-y" to go to 5.1? It's not really a bug.

Cheers,

John

Attachment: checkerboard.png
Description: PNG image