I was wondering if anyone knows a good library for tessellating a hyperbolic plane with polygons (my main interest lies in {8,3} tessellation). I found some applets here and there but the separation of logic from view is horrendous in all of them. It would be perfect if there’s a library that doesn’t deal with graphics at all (since I’m NOT planning on using Swing or creating my own applet), just takes in parameters: {p,q} and layer count, then returns an array of lines or points (or polygon objects). If worst comes to worst, I’ll have to implement my own library, so it might also be helpful if someone knows of some paper that describes in detail the algorithm for tessellation.
EDIT
By the way, I should’ve mentioned that I found a cool-looking hyperbolic tessellations applet by Don Hatch and got excited at first. Then I looked at what he claims to be the source code. Inside the JAR I discovered files with a .prejava extension and had absolutely no idea what I was looking at – it seemed to be some awful hybrid of Java and C code. Upon an attempt at a closer inspection I was immediately rewarded with a headache. Apparently he was trying to optimize the Java compiler… or at least that’s what I gathered from looking at the contents of javacpp. Needless to say, I’m extremely hesitant to spend my time on following his instructions in order to generate the Java source files using the C compiler, wow…
it might be a bit off topic, I’m also looking for a clean, loosely coupled implementaion of hyperbolic tesselations.
I found this straight-forward implementation of the poincaré disk model http://haishibai.blogspot.com/2010/07/draw-hyperbolic-geometry-poincare-disc.html
I also found this paper that has some pseudo code
http://www.d.umn.edu/cs/thesis/ajit_datar_ms.pdf
they talk about available source code: hyperart http://sourceforge.net/projects/hyperart/ but it’s a compiled exe with no source.