Friday, December 18, 2020

PixelTraverser

 I don't know if I should even be posting this program given how niche a function it was designed to serve. Basically, it moves your mouse cursor around within a specified rectangular region in the screen. The idea was to create as many pathline points within an area of interest on Google Earth as possible with the hope of exporting a .kmz file corresponding to the points, feeding which to www.gpsvisualizer.com would produce a .gpx file containing their relevant elevation info. This elevation info was then to be used to make an interpolated elevation surface, TIN/DEM, in QGIS which I had planned to make use of in HEC-RAS for my 2D rain-on-grid model. But turns out the DEM so generated is worthless, at least that is what I've found as of this writing.

So, that was the whole point of the program. I made it just so that I didn't have to manually drag around my mouse for hours to get what I had assumed would be a reasonable number of points. It did really help generate ~160,000 points over a catchment area of ~700 km2 fairly quickly but the DEM output was rather underwhelming, so I wasn't sure what actual purpose this program would serve, hence my hesitation to put it up here.

At least I installed Visual Studio 6 for Visual Basic 6 and wrote a meaningful(?) program in a long time. Certainly jogged old memories. Turns out, an installer for vb6/VS6 is very hard to come by on the internet now. It wasn't like this back in the day, ~10 or heck even 5 years ago. I guess people have moved on from vb6. But it still feels so snappy and lightweight for what it can still do very well, unlike the more mainstream feature-rich, often bloated IDEs of the day. Or maybe it's just my 6 year old laptop talking through me, I dunno. Here's a video of the thing in action for what it's worth:



Here's a screenshot of the program itself:


The project can be found at GitHub