Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Creating a simple TileServer with .NET Core 1.0 (Part 2 - Drawing Lines)

Part 1. Setting up the the project
Part 2. Improving drawing logic

On my last post I've setup an asp.net core project which outputs simple maps tiles dynamically generated using the ImageProcessor library (which now supports .NET Core).

As I've mentioned that lib doesn't yet include drawing functionality, so on this post I'll try to address that as a pre-requisite to being able to draw proper map tiles. For now I'll focus on drawing lines, including support for variable width and anti-aliasing, doing some benchmarking along the way to make sure that the performance is adequate.

By-the-way, since my first post the proper 1.0 release has been launched, so I'm also updating the code to reflect the latest bits :)

Lots of stuff to do so let's get started:

1. Drawing simple lines

For drawing lines I've used Bresenham's line algorithm. It's really simple to implement and provides accurate and fast results. The implementation (for all 4 quadrants) is:
void DrawLine(Image image, int x1, int y1, int x2, int y2, Color color)
{
    int w = x2 - x1;
    int h = y2 - y1;
    int dx1 = 0, dy1 = 0, dx2 = 0, dy2 = 0;
    if (w < 0) dx1 = -1; else if (w > 0) dx1 = 1;
    if (h < 0) dy1 = -1; else if (h > 0) dy1 = 1;
    if (w < 0) dx2 = -1; else if (w > 0) dx2 = 1;
    int longest = Math.Abs(w);
    int shortest = Math.Abs(h);
    if (!(longest > shortest))
    {
        longest = Math.Abs(h);
        shortest = Math.Abs(w);
        if (h < 0) dy2 = -1; else if (h > 0) dy2 = 1;
        dx2 = 0;
    }
    int numerator = longest >> 1;
    for (int i = 0; i <= longest; i++)
    {
        image.SetPixel(x1, y1, color);

        numerator += shortest;
        if (!(numerator < longest))
        {
            numerator -= longest;
            x1 += dx1;
            y1 += dy1;
        }
        else
        {
            x1 += dx2;
            y1 += dy2;
        }
    }
}
I'm drawing the following lines with it:

_lineDrawing.DrawLine(image, 0, 0, 255, 255, Color.Red);
_lineDrawing.DrawLine(image, 0, 255, 255, 0, Color.Red);
_lineDrawing.DrawLine(image, 0, 63, 255, 191, Color.Red);
_lineDrawing.DrawLine(image, 0, 191, 255, 63, Color.Red);
_lineDrawing.DrawLine(image, 0, 127, 255, 127, Color.Red);
_lineDrawing.DrawLine(image, 127, 0, 127, 255, Color.Red);
_lineDrawing.DrawLine(image, 63, 0, 191, 255, Color.Red);
_lineDrawing.DrawLine(image, 191, 0, 63, 255, Color.Red);
The end-result is this:
Regarding performance, on my laptop (a pretty standard machine) it takes in average 15 ms to render this particular tile. The actual drawing logic for these 8 lines takes less than 0.5 ms and outputting the png around 12 ms.

2. Adding thickness to the line

This was actually trickier than I had anticipated. I had two different approaches to this:

First approach:
  • Drawing a regular simple line
  • For each point create 2 perpendicular lines (one for each direction) a draw it up to a certain distance
Second approach:
  • Calculate the perpendicular points at the start and end of the line
  • Draw various parallel lines to the main one, until achieving a certain width.
Both approaches apparently worked, although I was obtaining consistently better performance with the second approach.

Unfortunately there was a problem I hadn't anticipated. When drawing parallel lines it's possible that you end up with spaces between them if the perpendicular (normal) points represent both an horizontal and vertical step.


To solve this I've changed the drawing logic to pick the points on the normal without doing any diagonals. I've actually used a modified Bresenham's algorithm for this. The end-result is conceptually like this:

Applying this logic to the previous star pattern with a width of 5:
Regarding performance, adding the thickness to the drawing algorithm was not noticeable in the overall time, and the full drawing logic still takes less than 1 ms.

Unfortunately, when zooming in we can see it's quite pixelated (aliased).
Original (zoomed)

3. Adding anti-aliasing support

I also have two different approaches to solve this problems:

First approach:
  • When drawing the parallel lines use a different algorithm to draw the ones on both edges with a line algorithm that supports anti-aliasing, such as Xiaolin Wu's

Second approach:
  • Draw everything on an higher resolution and then scale the image down. 

Went with approach two (scale down) and this is the end-result:

Downscalling (zoomed)
I was pretty happy with the result. Unfortunately from a performance point-of-view it's far from ideal and the tile rendering time more than doubled.

So, back to the drawing board (ah!) to try the other approach: supporting anti-aliasing on the line drawing algorithm itself, using Xiaolin Wu's line algorithm:

Bresenham's line (zoomed)
Xiaolin Wu's line (zoomed)

The implementation is slightly more complex than Bresenham, but its performance is pretty reasonable.

For the full implementation please check my github repo.




On the top images you can see how it compares with Bresenham algorithm, providing a subtle anti-aliasing.

So, to support anti-aliased lines with variable widths I'm going to:
  • Use the first strategy I've shown do draw multiple parallel lines to achieve a thick line
  • Drawing the lines furthest away from the main line using Xiaolin Wu's line algorithm
  • Drawing all the other lines with Bresenham's line algorithm
The end-result is (zooming in):

Mixing Bresenham and Xiaolin Wu (zoomed)
The anti-aliasing is not as strong as the downscaled version but its performance is much better. Also, on a non-zoomed view the aliasing is mostly negligible:
Mixing Bresenham and Xiaolin Wu (original size)

Also, in order to properly support transparent pixels I had to include a proper color blending routine. Otherwise, when setting a semi-transparent pixel on top of an existing color it would replace it altogether.

Thus, in these cases I've just added the following code:
public static Color BlendColor(Color bg, Color fg)
{
    var r = new Color();
    
    r.A = 1 - (1 - fg.A) * (1 - bg.A);
    if (r.A < 1.0e-6) return r; // Fully transparent -- R,G,B not important
    r.R = fg.R * fg.A / r.A + bg.R * bg.A * (1 - fg.A) / r.A;
    r.G = fg.G * fg.A / r.A + bg.G * bg.A * (1 - fg.A) / r.A;
    r.B = fg.B * fg.A / r.A + bg.B * bg.A * (1 - fg.A) / r.A;

    return r;
}

This tile gives an actual funky effect on top of a map


4. Drawing hexagons

Now that I've got a reasonable toolset I'm able to create the hexagon tiles layer to overlay on the map. I'm not going to post all the relevant code here so feel free the take a look at the source-code on the corresponding github repo.

The end-result is far from astonishing but shows the effect I was going for.

zoom level 6
zoom level 8
This was a fun experiment but I expect it to get obsolete in the short-term, particularly as soon as Microsoft includes proper drawing methods in System.Drawing. Thus I'm not planning in taking it any further. Regardless, I might reuse some of these bits on other stuff.

The complete code can be viewed at: https://github.com/pmcxs/CoreTiles

9 comments:

  1. Cool ! E estás a gostar do .NET Core, ou ainda sentes falta de muita coisa que já havia no "original" ?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Na linguagem em si faltam algumas coisas mas nada que me faça perder o sono. O problema é o ecossistema, onde grande parte das libs que me interessam ainda não foram migradas.

      Para já vou esperar até fazer algo mais sério com isto

      Delete
    2. Pedro'S Tech Mumblings: Creating A Simple Tileserver With .Net Core 1.0 (Part 2 - Drawing Lines) >>>>> Download Now

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      Pedro'S Tech Mumblings: Creating A Simple Tileserver With .Net Core 1.0 (Part 2 - Drawing Lines) >>>>> Download LINK

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      Delete
  2. You and I should talk :)

    I'm dying to add the drawing bits to ImageProcessor but I'm swamped getting the rest of the code up and running. How about we collaborate?

    As far as I'm aware (I've chatted to a few people on the inside) MS are not planning on porting System.Drawing any time soon so as it stands ImageProcessor is the only library close to what developers need.

    I can see a few ways to speed up your code too. For example with SetPixel() really you should lock the image and set all the pixels inside the lock since then you avoid pinning/unpinning the pixel array each time. The method would be best on the PixelAccessor class but I find the indexer clear enough so haven't added it.

    Cheers

    James

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi James,

      Actually my plan was initially to send a pull request to ImageProcessor, particularly as I was aware of your "call for help" on that regard. At the time I didn't do it for 3 reasons :)

      - The code I did lacks some "love", and was mostly done as a proof of concept
      - I didn't go with the extension method approach of the other features you have
      - I was assuming that sooner or later MS would implement the System.Drawing missing features, rendering this code obsolete.

      Regardless, if you feel it could be an interesting addition, happy to create a proper pull request. We can obviously discuss some details on the actual PR, but what things would you mostly change?

      Delete
    2. Hi Pedro,

      Your reason are perfectly sound. :) I'm aware that many developers are assuming something will come from MS on the graphics front. It's actually troubled me greatly over the past year that my work will be suddenly obsolete. However, I had a brief chat with leading members of the .NET team on Friday and nothing is coming any time soon from them. They would be happy if there was something they could adopt and support.

      Regarding a PR. There was work done a while ago by a fellow developer on working with paths. Sadly their code appears to have disappeared. The API looked pretty good also. You can see it here.

      https://github.com/JimBobSquarePants/ImageProcessor/issues/264#issuecomment-221734943

      I'd love to put something together similar. I like the concept of brushes and path chains and your line work would be great help to reaching that goal.

      Regarding things I'd change: I'd place line drawing in a base Brush class and pass an PixelAccessor<TColor, TPacked> rather than an Image to the method to prevent repetitive pinning. I'd also use TColor rather than Color in all the methods also.

      https://github.com/pmcxs/CoreTiles/blob/master/src/CoreTiles.Drawing/XiaolinWuLineAlgorithm.cs#L33

      Does all that make sense? It's early moring here so I haven't quite woken up yet.

      Cheers

      James

      P.S I have a Gitter channel if you fancy chatting there. https://gitter.im/JimBobSquarePants/ImageProcessor

      Delete
  3. Great post Pedro.
    Few things that might help.
    First, Microsoft has not in her plans to develop a System.Drawing class yet.
    Second, ImageProcessor has many disadvantages

    In my opinion, you could use DotNet Core with Microsoft.AspNetCore.NodeServices and use node libraries like sharp (https://github.com/lovell/sharp ) for the rendering.

    Second solution, with DotNet Core is to use ImageFlow (https://github.com/imazen/imageflow)and the C# bindings for that. The performance of that solution when the project will finish would be way faster that any other solution...

    Keep up the good work!!!
    And great post again!

    Christos

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for the info Χρήστος. Will definitely take a look at those two options

    ReplyDelete
  5. Pedro'S Tech Mumblings: Creating A Simple Tileserver With .Net Core 1.0 (Part 2 - Drawing Lines) >>>>> Download Now

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    Pedro'S Tech Mumblings: Creating A Simple Tileserver With .Net Core 1.0 (Part 2 - Drawing Lines) >>>>> Download LINK

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    Pedro'S Tech Mumblings: Creating A Simple Tileserver With .Net Core 1.0 (Part 2 - Drawing Lines) >>>>> Download Full

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    ReplyDelete