Dear Miller & list.
I'm hoping to replace the "scalar" feature with something much more powerful, essentially allowing abstractions to show part of themselves as a panel in the parent.
Here The First goals : Allow any user to create a "visual" or "user interface object" without writing any lines of c code. Just using the pd language.
For this a very simple line object that allow a patch to draw a line into their parent patch could be enougth.
=-=-=-= |line | =-=-=-=
The four intlet allow the patch to move the line. The four outlet give the position of where the user (in non-edit mode only) whant to place the line with the mouse.
Nothing conected to the inlets and outlets imply that the line can't be moved in the non-edit mode If you connect the Ys outlets to the Ys inlets, you'll have a line that can move only on the y axe. You can compute everything from this position too...
But the key point is here : The child patch has to be "inside" the line. I mean that if you select the line into the parent windows and duplicate it, all the code inside the patch who is behind the line has to be duplicate too...
of course we can imagine a rectangle object etc....
If somebody help, I can try to code this. Today I realy don't if it's easy or not.
bye,
Damien.