Implementation Details

The program created is called "plantsim" and is written in C. It consists of three main modules:

1. The main function which is responsible for initialization and reading in the object files.

2. The plant growing module.

3. The collision detection module.

The main module parses the command line arguments, and reads in the object files. The object files are Wavefront's Advanced Visualizer .obj files (refer to [PRR92] for file format details). Then it reads in the plant growth configuration file (refer to appendix for format), before calling the plant growing module.

The command line arguments plantsim accepts are:

-h

help: prints out help on using the program

-q

quiet: doesn't produce any error or progress messages

-s

write output in a format readable by the Showpoly program

-w

write output in the .obj file format

-v

verbose: produce verbose progress messages

-fs fn

frame start: start output at frame fn

-fe fn

frame end: end output (and simulation) at frame fn

-fi fi

frame increment: the next frame to produce output is fn frames away from the current one.

-i in

input: the file in is read as the plant growing configuration file

-o out

output: output is written to the file out

-x s

script: the name of the script s to be called after the current frame is output (when outputting in .obj format only). The script processes the contents of the output file, leaving it ready to be overwritten by the next frame

• Collision Detection Module
  • Collision Interest Matrix
  • Bounding Box Intersection
  • Voxel Interference
  • Interference Between Polygons
• Plant Growing Module