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QC Liger Being a short-time mac user, this coming week is one of wonder and awe. The documented changes alone are fascinating :) With that said, it's somewhat understandable why kineme has gone a bit quieter lately. The calm before the storm and all that. So, what are everyone's plans regarding Leopard? Who's upgrading, who isn't? I'll probably be keeping Tiger around for the sake of backporting and testing, but maybe that's a crazy idea. Furthermore, how useful would it be to everyone to backport leopard-standard QC features? In some cases, these efforts might increase compatibility, but in others it probably will not. What are people's objectives when it comes to portable compositions and application support across platforms? Just a few questions to help focus our efforts over the near future :) |
Good questions.
Last week I finally decided to install the ADC preview seed of Leopard on my main workstation (I'd done some minor software development and testing with Leopard on an auxiliary machine, but hadn't really dug into it until recently).
So, I've been using it intensely for a week.. and so far I've experienced no significant problems. I'm predicting a slickly successful launch this friday.
Anyway, we have a lot to discuss starting at that time (upon being freed of NDA).
Personnaly, i'll switch to L as soon as it is officially out in the wild. If some of your patches won't need to be ported (like GlobalMidi) as they are part of the new features set, some others will definetly need to be (like the wiimote). To be honest, i'm just curious about Leo and how Coreanimation will be implemented into QC, as, apart from the custom curve tools (timeline like) mentionned in the release notes, there doesn't seem to be any intersesting node for CoreA. Smokris, did you test the plugin SDK already ?
Yes --- I've been experimenting with the new SDK. Got some notes ready to publish this Friday.
Hey, before upgrading to Leopard, i would just like to know if the Kineme plugins (esp. the Wiimote plugin) will still work once 10.5ed ?
I've actually done some testing with this patch in leopard, figuring it was the most unique of our set :)
The positive: it works (with a couple tweaks to get QC-Leopard's UI to show it to you)
The negative: it looks like Leopard's Bluetooth stack or process scheduler are a lot more aggressive, so it crashes on disconnect way more frequently. I'm trying to clean up the code some to guard against this, but it's not quite there yet. I'll hopefully toss a beta up sometime soon (segue the Beta Releases section... ;)
.... i've got one "show" that relies almost entirely on the Wiimote patch....
--- btw--- access is denied in the beta section, even when logged in.
Franz -
Go to your "Account Edit" page (near the bottom of the menu on the left is the "My account" link --- click this, then click the "Edit" tab).
On the "Edit" page there is a "Beta Tester" checkbox. Select this checkbox and save, and you should then have access to the beta section (and a link on the top of the menu to the beta section).
Let me know whether this works for you.
Found my 2nd QC bug (not induced by us). For the record, I've already submitted this to apple, so don't flood them with duplicates, please.
To trigger it: Create a billboard. Create a Math Expression patch. for the expression, make it "atan(y/x)"
Attach the output of the expression to the billboard.
If you have anything unsaved at this point, do so now :)
Edit the expression, and make it "atan2(y/x)". Hit enter, and tada - QCLeopard dies :)
(first bug was in QCTiger, where typing "while(1);" in a javascript patch kills it while pegging the CPU (infinite loop) -- which still exists in QC Leopard :) [To Apple's credit, it's technically impossible to know if a function will finish or not (in CompSci, this is called the Halting Problem). One possible solution would be to have the UI on a separate thread that can allow you to cancel/delete the node while it's grinding away endlessly]
I won't go into details on how this can be used maliciously.
yep, it's workin' thx
i've been quiet of late as i've been on the road after an intensive development splurge in late august/early september. writing a nice thank you update email with various thoughts has been on the to-do list... eek, here we are.
the only thing that is stopping me installing tiger on release was a) i was out of the country and b) i have a gig on saturday and no time inbetween to test the setup in leopard first. after that it will be straight away. i've been running a developer preview so that i can start teaching qc to www.name-site.com the moment it comes out - we've been waiting long enough.... that and being nosy and feeling a fair stake in how well it pans out for my livelihood =]
i personally wouldn't spend a single minute back-porting anything, now there is an editor that doesn't suck, built-in patches that give a good base and an official api so things are supported going forward it is all about the glorious future... jokes about kool-aid aside. so perhaps i'm biased, but for the uses of qc i need, there's no reason to have tiger compatibility at all, and its all about making the current version the best it can be.
I don't think a whole lot of time will be spent backporting (now that I've worked on Leopard for a few days, I really don't like going back). We'll probably maintain it for a while, and do some updates, but that's about it, unless someone compels us to do otherwise.
As for the official API, it's a bit too limited for our tastes (I guess we just keep pushing to frontier or something) -- No custom port types, only 1 patch per plugin, No distinguishing category, etc. They've made a really good first step, but there is still some room that we hope they'll expand into in the near future (10.6? :) "Official-API" plugins get a kind of second-rate treatment in the file format too: there's no backwards compatibility, so all old compositions using our Tiger plugins would need to be recreated. We're still doing "unofficial-api" dev, so that's not the case now, but it'll be an interesting future to say the least.
Thanks for popping back up over the radar :) Any frankfurt motor show videos? :)
good to hear audio data type is on the cards, this is probably the biggest "non-trivial" thing in qc leopard for me. i do wonder how it will work, as i assume it will have to command the audio working in a separate runloop/thread/something to divorce itself from qc's slow (from a sample rate point of view) and unpredictable frame rate.
the big thing about frankfurt was that whereas in geneva there were small bits of qc in the greater framework of vdmx, now vdmx is more a wrapper for two huge qc patches doing the compositing and dynamic content respectively.
i intended to make a monster frankfurt movie this time focusing on the setup side, ie plunging through quartz composer patches, flashing up "kineme.net", but i haven't had the chance yet and in hindsight that may not be exactly the video i need to make... so watch this space, with the caveat that whatever exact slant of video gets made, it now can't be started until christmas.
i do have some test movies of some qc stuff in development, maybe i can post them up somewhere if you're interested.
toby
please post !