Question

My computer graphics homework is to implement OpenGL algorithms using only the ability to draw points.

So obviously I need to get drawLine() to work before I can draw anything else. drawLine() has to be done using integers only. No floating point.

This is what I was taught. Basically, lines can be broken up into 4 different categories, positive steep, positive shallow, negative steep and negative shallow. This is the picture I am supposed to draw:

and this is the picture my program is drawing:

The colors are done for us. We are given vertices and we need to use Bresenham’s Line algorithm to draw the lines based on the start and end points.

This is what I have so far:

int dx = end.x - start.x;
int dy = end.y - start.y;

//initialize varibales
int d;
int dL;
int dU;

if (dy > 0){
        if (dy > dx){
                //+steep
                d = dy - 2*dx;
                dL = -2*dx;
                dU = 2*dy - 2*dx;

                for (int x = start.x, y = start.y; y <= end.y; y++){
                        Vertex v(x,y);
                        drawPoint(v);

                        if (d >= 1){
                                d += dL;
                        }else{
                                x++;
                                d += dU;
                        }
                }              
        } else {
                //+shallow
                d = 2*dy - dx;
                dL = 2*dy;
                dU = 2*dy - 2*dx;

                for (int x = start.x, y = start.y; x <= end.x; x++) {
                        Vertex v(x,y);
                        drawPoint(v);

                        // if choosing L, next y will stay the same, we only need
                        // to update d by dL
                        if (d <= 0) {
                                d += dL;
                        // otherwise choose U, y moves up 1
                        } else {
                                y++;
                                d += dU;
                        }
                }
        }
} else {
        if (-dy > dx){
                cout << "-steep\n";
                //-steep
                d = dy - 2*dx;
                //south
                dL = 2*dx;
                //southeast
                dU = 2*dy - 2*dx;

                for (int x = start.x, y = start.y; y >= end.y; --y){
                        Vertex v(x,y);
                        drawPoint(v);

                        //if choosing L, next x will stay the same, we only need
                        //to update d
                        if (d >= 1){
                                d -= dL;
                        } else {
                                x++;
                                d -= dU;
                        }
                }

        } else {
                cout << "-shallow\n";
                //-shallow
                d = 2*dy - dx;
                dL = 2*dy;
                dU = 2*dy - 2*dx;

                for (int x = start.x, y = start.y; x <= end.x; x++){
                        Vertex v(x,y);
                        drawPoint(v);

                        if (d >= 0){
                                d += dL;
                        } else {
                                --y;
                                d -= dU;
                        }
                }
        }
}

I know my error is going to be something silly, but I honestly cannot figure out what I am doing wrong. Why are some of the lines drawn incorrectly as shown above?

Answer 1

In case anyone was wondering what the problem was, I still don’t know what it was. What I ended up doing was re-factored my code so that the -shallow and -steep used the same algorithm as +shallow and +steep, respectively. After adjusting the x,y coordinates (negating the x or y coordinate), when I went to plot them I negated my original negation so that it plotted in the right spot.