Faster Indeed

Hope you’re doing well and had your fill to eat and celebrate over July 4th. Here’s what I’ve been up to with Cubehero.

I’m wary of pre-mature optimization, but the job times for the queues were taking too long for higher polygon counts. After some benchmarking, turns out the biggest culprit was the STL parser. Originally, I had used Jison to generate a STL parser, but it turns out that was unnecessarily slow. Since STLs are simple enough, I wrote one by hand and the parser is an order of magnitude faster.

Cubehero model viewer appears more responsive now. It can now also show download progress for all modern browsers (except IE 8 and 9). That makes it so you’re not wondering what’s going on as the 3D model loads. Besides seeing the models in a history of diffs, you can now also see the model as it currently is. You can also download the model with the download button. 

For a test project, I started making a coffee cup with a face and two handles for ears. It kinda looks like a monkey. The model has a moderate number of polygons, with rounded surfaces, and convex and concave shapes, so I figured it’s a good test. Plus, I get to design something whimsical along the way. There appears to be a bug that messes up the diff for specific shapes, but I’ll need to dig into it further to see what the cause is.

Well, as always, let me know if you have questions. Otherwise, I’ll keep chugging!