I'm trying to make the most of Athens rendering. One problem is that AthensCanvas currently does not support clipping. In normal Morphic, when an object changes its appearance, a changed message triggers the damage recorder to mark the full bounds as invalid. On the next redraw cycle, a canvas is sent around with a clipRect that is equivalent to the damaged area. Morphs not intersecting that clipRect are not drawn. This is a fairly efficient process.
Currently, AthensCanvas does not seem to have a clipRect. When an AthensCanvas gets sent the isVisible: message, it returns true. That means all elements are drawn for any update cycle. That's inefficient. I've got a fairly complex application. Instead of the five elements that are necessary to redraw, I get all 100. Now, Athens is so fast that it mainly makes up for that. But, a 20x inefficiency is not a good thing to include in the system. Are there plans to introduce a clipRect functionality into Athens? I noticed that "isVisible:" is called in the "fullDrawOnAthensCanvas:" method, which leads me to think that it should have a meaning (eventually). I do realize that such functionality is a bit more difficult for Athens as it uses relative, rather than global coordinates. Cheers, Jeff -- Jochen "Jeff" Rick, Ph.D. http://www.je77.com/ Skype ID: jochenrick
