Forget "fast". People are quite accepting the speed of Skeinforge in Cura, and are more ticked off by the fact that it doesn't support 64bit on Windows and runs out of memory then that it slices slow. If you are 3-5x faster then Skeinforge, then you are golden.
With my C++ code (Which is called "SteamEngine" for now, but might be called "Carpaccio" later on, we haven't really decided on the name yet), I'm not aiming for speed. But code simplicity. If it's easy to see what the code is doing, it's easy to adept and try different things.
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the biggest problem (and I think Daid is going to hit this too) is that you must use a thickness function, not an offset/scale function.
consider the case of a figure 8 in 3D. you don't want to scale about the centerpoint of the 8, you want each circle to scale about the center of its circle.
this requires deciding multiple centers and which polygon belongs to which.. and this is where it starts to get slow.
the correct way to solve the problem came to me at about 3pm after thinking for many hours, only to discover someone else had already thought about it and written a very good paper on the subject.
alas no free source code, and the suggestion was that it's still slow.
there's a solution in opengl-land, because you can fix the XY-plane part of this problem by using some bresenham - but traversing large texture arrays = slow. which defeats the purpose of the exercise.
it seems to suggest speed and robustness are mutually exclusive - you can either take the fast but 'keel over and die when you find the tiniest fault in the model' approach that k'slicer takes.. or the 'works on every model under the sun even the horribly degenerate corner cases, but takes hours to generate the shell' approach which is the corner I seem to have painted myself into.
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