Composition tool not picking up official api plugins?

Just tried out CompositionTool - very handy! But it failed to pick up my official-api plugin. Not sure if that applies to all official-api plugins or just mine, and no time to test properly unfortunately. It picked up the rest of the plugins, including some kineme ones.

Give me a shout if you need a copy of the plugin or anything (I really must get round to ironing out the bugs in it so it's releasable one of these days :)

cwright's picture
sort of?

I bet it picked it up, but it called it something funky, like QCPluginPatch (all official-api plugins are interfaced through this unofficial-api plugin). I noticed this too, so the next version does some more running around to find out what the official-api plugin is called and where it's located.

Sorry about that :/

[Also, on that note, the Safe Audio/Video/Midi/QCRehab plugins confuse this into thinking those patches are safe (kind of what they're designed to do, after all ;) -- should I hard-code these patches to fail the safety check, so it gives you correct "stock QC" behaviour?]

psonice's picture
Ah yes

You're right, it's there under QCPluginPatch. It's marked as Safe too, is that right?

Also, a minor request: some filtering on the patch list, to remove duplicates. There's not really much point showing every patch used, as the main use of the list is to scan for unsafe patches and plugins. Having the column titles clickable to sort would be a bonus, but not really essential.

cwright's picture
dilemma

I totally understand why you want unique entries only. I guess my only reason for not doing that is because sometimes you use a patch more than once, and not knowing the number of patches could make you search incompletely, leading to lots of "find the offending patch" iterations. Not a likely situation, or a big deal, but I don't know. Perhaps a checkbox to only show uniques, so people can have both.

I'm working on the sorting stuff -- it's surprisingly unsimple, unlike most of the Cocoa built-in UI stuff... might take a bit.

Also, do you think it would be helpful to have a patch's hierarchy, so it's easier to find? [i.e. it's inside a macro, in a macro, inside a 3D transformation...]

psonice's picture
Good point

I'd not thought of using it that way. With not really worrying about safe mode and such much, I'd just thought that knowing there's an unsafe patch or a plugin present was enough information - going through the composition to find unsafe patches could be a nightmare.

I'd guess the best option would be a hierarchy, with macro patches having extra info showing the number of unsafe patches + plugins present inside. Maybe something like the finder's columns view.

A quick but functional alternative would be to show only unique classes as I suggested before, but have an extra column showing the number used. That would be pretty good as a compromise I think.

psonice's picture
'safe' patches

Is it possible to pick up any of the 'safe' patches in the code without a hard-coded list? Just thinking that there's likely to be more 'safe' patches in future.

Not sure what they should get marked as though really - 'in theory' they're not safe, but in practice they are. Maybe mark them with something special? I'm not really the right person to ask on that though, as I have no real use for them in my line of work :)

cwright's picture
in-code

the current version uses the in-code method. unfortunately, as you've likely noticed, the safe-* plugins modify this at run-time to make them appear safe as well, so there's no practical way to handle this... the joys of self-modifying code :)