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IDEAS.md

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Ideas

A smorgasboard of ideas for future work on this project.

For a condensed summary of open research questions, read the conclusion of our paper.

Filtering

  • add filters for object fields
  • automatically identify irrelevant fields
  • aggregate objects
  • restore references from/to filtered objects (e.g., for OrderedCollections/Dictionarys)
  • interactive filtering in scene (how to deal with local layout? button to restart the simularion?)

Serializer

  • convenience: progress displays (objects, children)
  • optimizations:
  • new data: creation time of objects (and maybe gc time?) (hpi-swa-lab/squeak-tracedebugger#31)
  • domain-specific data: object labels (#t4dLabel), filter presets, structural hints (e.g., field names relevant to design pattern such as composite/graph)
  • actually collect class hierarchies for true generic common superclass force!

Visualization

Performance

  • dynamic quality (e.g., texture resolution, number of triangles) depending on hardware/system load
  • Level of Detail (LOD): ???
  • customizable force simulation speed (trade-off between time to stability and smoothness)
  • systematically try to reduce number of geometries/triangles (see traceMap.renderer.info)
  • trail is very ineffficient (esp. to reposition during force simulation) yet low-res (see divisionsPerPoints), maybe needs a different approach
  • [if ever required] optimize trace cursor through indices or binary/exponential search (currently handles 100 steps/frame smoothly, not yet tried anything faster) (see also hpi-swa-lab/squeak-tracedebugger#17)
  • app sometimes crashed when reloading huge trace through console interface: manually trigger GC?

Convenience

  • progress bar for loading traces (simple HTML element)
  • store/load configuration (filters and weights)
    • as URL parameters?
  • landing page?
  • drag-and-drop of entities: honor camera perspective (current implementation uses event coordinates of viewport)
  • smooth zooming (through mouse wheel?)
  • world-in-hand navigation (e.g., rotateAroundCursor - currently not supported by OrbitControls)
  • player: control speed, hierarchical navigation (step over button/ctrl + right, ...)?, reset layout?, display key bindings?
  • fix mobile support: resizable timeline (or small expand/collapse button/handle), entity dragging, stop simulation on touch, ...
  • horizontal/vertical zooming in flamegraph?
  • search for objects/fields/messages
  • hovercard/side panel for object details?

Visual Mapping

  • color-code objects by groups (classes, clusters, ...)? how to combine with activation color?
  • hovering:
    • when hovering field, highlight of ingoing references to object is confusing
    • during hovering, make unrelated objects translucent or hide other arrows?
  • fields:
    • fix layout of object side labels (unnecessary large, wrong scaling)
    • improve density of fields (50% of space is wasted)
    • for fields with arrows, hide field value?
    • linebreaks in fields? (strategy: diy inspired by three.js dynamic texture)
    • emphasize label names?
  • vertical positioning of nodes (hill structure based on graph density/force field?)
  • display method plates in object blocks (see behaviors and context, navigate to their activations)

Technical Debt

  • frontend/graph: source of truth not always clear (width/height/depth vs constructor, implement real setters?)