previously on vvvv: vvvvhat happened in April 2019

the results are in!

of the 2019 survvvvey. bottom line: you're all the same, you haven't changed a bit. comforting..

if you still haven't gotten anything better to do in summer, like me, meet your patcher friends at LINK, this time organized by longtime patch-head StiX. sign-up here: link-summercamp-application-extension. verymuch looking forward to this!

and still vvvv-gamma-2019.1-preview is going strong. none of the bigger missing parts are in yet, but we're constantly releasing bug-fix releases. every report is verymuch appreciated! new tooltips and exe-export are still in the works and they'll be coming as promised.

Contributions

and a teaser: artnet-polling

but really too much to list here is happening in the forums work-in-progress section. be sure not to miss those!

Gallery

and some more:

• Fantasie#1_OrganTelescopeAI by Quadrature
• DesignHoldingWall by DotDotDot
• Life Cycles live take by DIDIF
• Realtime Graphic Composition 2018 Part 1 by cloneproduction
• Weaving for violin solo by Yuta Inada

Jobs

and as always if you're looking for a vvvv job or even have one to announce, remember these:

• https://discourse.vvvv.org/c/jobs
• https://dasauge.de/sta/Vvvv/
• https://interactivejobs.io/?category=all&search=vvvv

that was it for may. anything to add? please do so in the comments!

Thanks everyone,

for filling out this years survvvvey! Judging from the responses it looks like some of you even did twice or thrice! What can we say... Anyway, since we've done this before this time we can compare to the previous results and in general we can say you're pretty stable. As you'll see, answers are in most cases roughly the same as last time, which i think adds to the credibility of the numbers overall. So here are your results with added attempts of interpretation and a few comments.

Who you are

Most likely you're a german speaking male, living in germany, in your early thirties and labeling yourself an artist, rather than a developer or designer. You're considering yourself an intermediate user and are using vvvv every week.

Even though you do have a username on vvvv.org, when it comes to the forum, you mostly read it silently. Which seems to be enough for you as you say the forum was your second favorite learning-resource after the help-patches and before the girlpowers. Also you've attended at least one edition of the NODE festival

You found out about vvvv by searching on the internet and have more likely taught vvvv to others than having learned it in an educational institution. When we ask you how you prefer to get your vvvv news, curiously there was a little spike in your request for email. In this day and age where the so-called social-media is showing its true face, we appreciate this request and are planning to offer a newsletter in the future.

Using vvvv

We asked you what your favorite user contributions are and here are your top ten:

With 3 hits in the charts everyoneishappy clearly bombs it. Chapeau! And this list also clearly shows us what you'll be missing in vvvv gamma from the start. The foundations are built, we're on it...

How nerdy are you?

Your biggest challenges

Then we asked about the biggest challenges you have with vvvv. And your answers can be summed up, in this particular order of occurence:
1) Learning
You name a lack of tutorials and documentation that make it hard to learn basic principles. In particular you struggle with the concept of spreads and vl and figuring out when to use what node to solve a specific problem. Point taken. We also see great potential in improving this situation.

2) Keeping patches organized
This is not only your complaint but one of the biggest critizisms of visual programming in general. And it is one of the reasons we started to work on vl, where we provide different options to help you structure your projects. Obviously this comes at the cost that you'll have to understand how to use those, but once you do, you should find it much easier to build and maintain more complex applications than you were used to in vvvv beta. But we understand that this still needs better documentation.

3) Keeping track of contributions
As a direct response to this, we've created this new site: User Contribution Staff Picks where we collect, sorted by categories, the most useful contributions.

4) Missing features
Apart from everyone missing their own favorite feature there is a more general bottom line: Many features expected as standard come "only" as user contributions, in varying quality and states of completeness. Creating, organizing and maintaining a vast library of standard nodes is a beast of its own and over the years vvvv immensely profited by the incredible amount of high-quality user contributions. While for vvvv beta we only added a plugin-interface at a later point, for vvvv gamma it is one of our top priorities to provide the most simple way we can think of, to extend it with more nodes. See Using .NET Libraries. This not only makes it easier for user contributions but also for ourselves to provide and maintain a much larger node-base than we could handle for vvvv beta. In the next survvvvey this point should not be up this high anymore!

5) It is windows only
See the roadmap for vvvv gamma

6) It cannot export executables
See the roadmap for vvvv gamma

7) Missing installer
Already solved for vvvv gamma

8) Difficult debugging of complex programs
We see that and would argue this is already much improved in vvvv gamma but also know that we will have to do much better in the future

9) Performance issues
This is a tricky one since there is the inherent performance of vvvv and then there are ways to patch things that run faster or slower. Therefore this will always be hard to solve in general. But certainly vvvv gamma improves over this by offering new features like reactive programming and async regions that allow you to better balance the load of your patches.

Your favorite tag-lines

Next we've asked you to choose your favorite tag-lines that best describe the vvvv you want to use. Here are the results in order of popularity:

If you were uncertain, in particular in regards to vvvv gamma, who we make it for and what it aspires to be, this listing gives a good answer. This is where vvvv comes from and it is also where we see its future!

We'd argue that today vvvv gamma improves over beta in points 10 and 7 and also points 1, 2, 3 and 8 are covered for use-cases that do not require 3d graphics. 4, 5 and 6 are waiting for the announced integration of the Xenko 3d-engine and nr. 9 is "only" short of some better integration of tooling like timeline and automata which is well underway... Overall it gives us great convidence that your wishes seem to be very much aligned with our plans.

Your favorite vvvv companions

Also we were interested in your favorite companions for vvvv and reasons when to prefer those over vvvv.

About vl

Here are some of the 15% other answers you gave:

What is gamma?

Here are some of the 32% other answers you gave:

Business

In this section your answers where particularly close to your answers in 2015. Here is what we asked and your answers:

Are you aware of the fact that when using vvvv for a commercial project you need to buy a license?
95% say yes.

Do you use vvvv in any professional / income-generating work?
50% yes, 50% no. What a healthy balance to have in a community, don't you think?

Have you worked on a commercial project where for some reason no license was bought?
70% yes, 30% no. Amen!

And finally, look how this one has pleasently changed:

If you have any idea what we could improve for the next survvvvey, please let us know in the comments.

Who you
When Tue, May 21st 2019 - 19:30 until Tue, May 21st 2019 - 23:00
Where Retune Studio, Glogauer Str. 21, 2nd Backyard, Berlin, Germany

Sir Prise,

vvvv berlin meetup #9 is ante portas: Again the fine people of Retune Studio will be hosting us.

This time we'll have a special surpise guest who came from very far and is here in berlin now to stay for a while... so evvvveryone please come plenty to give a warm welcome!

Still as always, feel free to bring your project/notebook/questions or whatever you want to share with the community. We have space and time for spontaneous discussions and presentations!

If you feel like, please rsvp on our Getogether page!

Who Davide Di Franco
When Sat, May 11th 2019 - 19:30 until Sat, May 11th 2019 - 21:00
Where XM24, via Aristotele Fioravanti 24, Bologna, Italy

Hi all,

next Saturday I will be performing a generative work entirely done in vvvv, during an experimental electronic festival in Bolognahttp://www.ecn.org/xm24/evento/bologna-elettrica-2019/?instance_id=37718

The midi patches to external synths have been created with midi patches created in VL.
The video part is created with the great Instance Noodles pack, playing with sprites and lines @60fps.

After the improvisation there will be an open discussion on the software vvvv.
It would be great if one of you guys will be there to join the discussion.
In total I have got 90 min for the live show and open talk.

Drop me a message if you happen to pass by! ddf
ciao