Not your Dad's blackboard.

The blackboard's surface grows exponentially with distance from the centre, instead of the usual linear growth. (Specifically, the blackboard's surface is a 2-dimensional Riemannian manifold with uniform negative curvature. It is rendered conformally as a Poincaré disk.) This allows for the drawing of trees, graphs, and other novel . . . things that would not be possible on a regular blackboard.

Everything you have ever drawn on the infiniboard will be visible, at least at some zoom level. As the blackboard is panned, objects in the centre get smaller as they approach the edge, and objects at the edge get larger as they approach the centre. It is impossible for an object to go out of view, though it may be reduced to an indecipherable pixel.

Responsiveness over prettiness. This is supposed to be a tool for communication and problem solving in real time, just like a real blackboard. Great care has been taken to ensure the blackboard is as responsive as humanly or machinely possible. It's a little hard to tell, but mouse to screen response is currently supposed to be 3ms best case and 1/f+3ms worst case, where f is the monitor's refresh rate. I still observe lag with respect to the system cursor, but that could just be X11 and its perpetually-broken-ass self. Which reminds me.

Supports Wayland. Infiniboard is implemented with glfw, so it should Just Work™ on X11 and on Wayland. Support for X11 is about to get removed, though, because of its general terribleness.

Besides that, it's really just a regular blackboard.

It's still a little raw

Right now, it's just basic drawing on a pannable background. Interpolation has not been implemented yet and there's no undo button. Both are on the todo list. With that in mind,

PREREQUISITES

• glfw
• glew
• OpenGL >= 2.1
• g++
• scons

In Debian-like systems:

sudo apt install g++ scons libglfw3-dev libglew-dev

INSTALLING

There is no mechanism for system-wide installation right now. To compile and run it, in the root directory, run scons && build/infiniboard. To compile an optimised build, run scons debug=0.

TODO

• interpolate drawn segments with some sexy cubic splines.
• handle 2-vertex line special case.
• undo
• erase of every segment in the path of a point cursor
• clipped erase of everything under a finite-area erase cursor of variable size.
• use the background's periodic nature to deliver the illusion of an infinite background with a finite mesh. (Move the mesh back to the centre when the distance exceeds a certain amount, and do it in a way that is impossible to notice.)
• store drawn segments in tiles, so that the size of the blackboard is truly infinite, and to avert floating-point badness at great distances away from the origin.
• quantify mouse to screen response
• touch screens and smart boards, pending acquisition of capable hardware.
• vulkan, pending acquisition of capable hardware. If this ever actually happens, support for OpenGL and its perpetually-broken-ass self will probably be dropped.
• rust rewrite, pending vulkan and the arrival of some definitely-not-broken vulkan and glfw bindings for rust. Because holy actual shit, C is terrible. But there are worse things than C and one of them is debugging broken vulkan and glfw rust bindings.
• antialiasing, provided there is a negligible latency hit

DEFINITELY-WILL-NOT-DO

• DirectX
• Macs. It might work OOTB, but it will not be supported.
• Any operating system that uses the wrong path separator.
• eigen, or any other templatey C++ badness, but especially eigen. As rationale, I would show you literally any compile-time error message produced by that library or any other piece of templated C++ code, but you might go insane, H. P. Lovecraft style. I do want to clean up the math, but I think rust is the way to go there.

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