clandininlab/flystim

Visual stimulus generator for neuroscience experiments

flystim's Issues

refactor all uses of built in `id`

There are several places where the built in id is overloaded. For instance, screen's id attribute.

These should all be renamed.

Simplify package structure

All __init__.py files should be empty, follow standard import convention.

For instance, the objects in flystim.shapes are currently accessible at flystim. Which is confusing and unnecessary.

Add aperture/masks to stimuli

Add the ability to apply an aperture or mask to a stimulus to restrict it to a specified region in the visual field. Useful aperture/mask shapes would be circular patch and rectangular patch

define supported python versions

What's the lowest version of Python we need to support (as currently written)? What's holding us back?

We should specify this as the python_requires kwarg in setup.py.

Would nice to be able to use format strings.

Fix Screen serialization

Screen.serialize does not serialize the azimuth (previously rotation) and offset attributes which are required for reconstruction.

Curiously, those same attributes where not even stored as attributes until recently.

I believe the previous strategy was to represent the same information via tri-list. To me it feels more natural to serialize the more fundamental parameters of azimuth and offset and make tri-list a property

Performance improvements

Performance improvements are needed for layered, multi-component stims. Issue can cause frame drops and loss of timing accuracy for complex stimuli.

Performance issues seem to be especially obvious when calling multiple, distinct shaders. Maybe share a shader for non-textured objects and pass all vertices as concatenated list - e.g. add_stim method or similar to add stimuli to a shared shader that is only spun up once. Harder to see how to get around this with multiple textured stims

Textured cylinder height correction

Apply a correction to the height of textures painted onto textured cylinder stimuli to ensure that features subtend equivalent degrees of elevation regardless of how far off the equator they appear.

See, e.g RandomGrid in stimuli, and other stims that can set cylindrical_height_correction to True. Applied in base.get_fragment_shader(), the current solution does not appear to be correct

Adopt standard camera coordinate conventions

By convention, the camera looks down the -z axis.

Currently flystim uses the convention that the camera looks down the +x axis.

A not-comprehensive list of changes that need to happen:

• update flystim.screen coordinates
• add support for a z component to fly trajectory
• update coordinate conventions for all stimuli