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Dear All.
We and the 25 participants can't wait for LINK, here are some information for everybody on what we're gonna do there.
We went through all applications and clustered the topics the participants want to work on and tried to sort all wishes and tagged them into 6 main topics/areas.
1) Timeline
What we've mostly understood by now is that different use-cases have different timeline or cueing needs. Can we identify recurring scenarios and work towards a modular set of nodes to build custom timelines quickly?
2) 3D Engine
Direct3d, OpenGL or Vulkan, all possible with VL but what does a library of nodes look like for the things we want to do. What's the basics, what's needed, what's a bonus?
3) Integrating Libraries
VL makes it particularly simple to integrate basically any .Net library. There are tons of libraries available. What are common patterns, best practices when importing and wrapping third-party libraries for use in a visual-programming language.
4) Machine Learning
Being the buzz of 2018, ML can be beautifully integrated with visual programming concepts. Libraries exist that can be used, ideas are needed regarding what to use them for.
5) Authoring Environment
vvvv is a multipurpose toolkit, VL is even much more general. Too general for some. What future target groups can be identified, what are their specific needs, how to best work towards those.
6) Realizing Projects
This is a group where everyone works on their personal projects but is interested in sharing ideas and best patching practices, brainstorming concepts and helping each other out.
Please add your thoughts/ideas/interests regarding each of these topics in the forum.
hurray!
Who wisp
When Mon, Sep 10th 2018 until Sun, Sep 16th 2018
Where Kontor80, Torgauer Straße 80, Leipzig, Germany
Open Call | Wisp Laboratory ‘18
We’re pleased to announce the international Open Call for the second edition of Wisp Laboratory at Kontor80 in Leipzig, which will happen from 10th to 16th of September.
After last year’s successful week of building a 3D speaker setup and realising a 360° visualisation setup together with the participants, Wisp Laboratory is back for its second year.
We welcome audio and video artists from across the globe to apply for this unique lab. The Laboratory is limited up to 20 participants. The aim is to encourage and increase meeting points and the interaction between people. Together we will reconstruct architecturally the audiovisual phenomenon through concerts & performances with collaborative real-time systems.
From 10th to 14th of September the participants will set-up a 3D Audio and 360° projection environment together with the lab hosts and have time to prepare their shows for the final presentation. In the nights of the 15th and 16th of September the results will be presented to an audience in a public event.
Lab Hosts
The lab will be facilitated by Felix Deufel (Audio Host) and Paul Schengber (Video Host) and David Simmons (Video & Audio Host) of Wisp Collective.
Location
The location of the lab days and performance nights will be Kontor80, Torgauer Straße 80, Leipzig.
Deadline for Applications is the 31st of July!
APPLY NOW!
Please download and fill out the Application Form:https://drive.google.com/open?id=1eRVMQ1Ku9IwMwMe9M52RsHUNYSb5L42Y
Once you have completed your application, please ensure it is accompanied by the following:
Portfolio (maximum of ten works) – JPEG, PDF or Word Docs, links to videos, sound files
Please send your application electronically along with the above information to the following email address: info@wisp-kollektiv.de
If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us!
Your Wisp-Team
Dear patcher,
as an avid vl user by now you've understood that in vl there are different kinds of patches. While colloquially we just call them all patches for simplicity and because they all allow you to patch in them, we can easily distinguish two main types of patches:
- Datatype Patches: patches defining a process node and/or datatype
- Structural Patches: patches that only help you structure your programs
While datatype patches more resemble what we had in vvvv, structural patches are new in vl. We just reworked this part a litte and ended up with 3 structural patches which make things much more clear:
- Group
- Category
- FullCategory
But before we go on let's make sure we are on par regarding the term "Category":
Obviously. (Yeah, just wanted to make sure)
What we had so far was a not so clear mix of all three. Let's see what we have in latest alpha:
Group
Group patches simply allow you to create more space in a patch by opening a new canvas. The groups name is merely used for human readability, vl doesn't care about it at all. Create a group by typing "group" in the nodebrowser. Groups is what you will be mostly using in your daily project-patching work.
 Inside a group patch
|
 Group patch from the outside
|
Category
A Category patch looks quite similar to the group, only its name has a meaning: The name appends itself to the category of its parent patch. That way you can build up any category hierarchy, that you then see in the NodeBrowser. Multiple category levels are allowed with dot notation. e.g. MyCat1.MyCat2.
 Inside a category patch
|
 Category patch from the outside
|
Full Category
A Full Category patch is similar to the Category patch, only that it doesn't add its category to the parent. By that you can place nodes in any category, regardless of the parent patch. It's considered bad practice to do that, but is useful to add nodes to an existing category like Collections.Spread, for example. Multiple category levels are allowed with dot notation. e.g. MyParentCat.MySubCat.
 Inside a full category patch
|
 Full category patch from the outside
|
Each vl document can directly start a category, which you can define in the angular brackets in the top left corner of the document patch.
Changing the Patch Type
You can easily convert a group patch into a category patch and vice versa by the patch type enum. Note how the label changes and represents the actual category structure:
Setting Categories on Node-Definitions
As if the above didn't offer enough options already there is one more way to specify a category for an operation or a datatype definition:
Happy node sorting!
Who Alexandra Pirici, Andrei Dinu, Ion Cotenescu, Jared Marks, Maria Mora
When Thu, Jul 5th 2018 - 19:30 until Fri, Jul 6th 2018 - 19:30
Where Roskilde Festival Art Tent, Roskilde, Denmark
Adda Kaleh is a musical project of first league performance artist Alexandra Pirici.
Come have a brake from the beers at the Art Tent on thursday and/or friday at 19:30 for a show made both by woman and robot. Or something inbetween.
If you are from hhhhere, don’t hesitate to say hi, ggml will be scriptkid for the night.
previously on vvvv: vvvvhat happened in May 2018
hola,
que patcha? we did it. as announced here last time, we've finally finished our cleanup of the VL.Corelib. further we've released improved File IO nodes and a little new feature to frame your patches. we've also reworked how groups and categories work which we'll introduce in a blogpost soon. these then were the biggest chunks that we had planned for the coming release. so we're now soon reaching everyones favorite: release-candidate time!
and on july 10th, the second berlin meetup is happening, organized by a_a_a_a and sebl, horray!
Contributions
| again some amazing new stuff: | and some fine updates to existing contributions: |
Gallery
- ENSO Exponat by Tanja Lückner
- works by udo2013: one, two, three
- Convención Banco Santander 2018, Caja Màgica - Madrid by colorsound
- HUSTLE Light Box by Jeff Zhu
- Digital Wool by Vision Nocturne
and if you have a moment checkout the latest additions to vimeo already with some fine documentations by latest works of NSNK
that was it for june. anything to add? please do so in the comments!
Who a a a a, sebl, you
When Tue, Jul 10th 2018 - 19:30 until Tue, Jul 10th 2018 - 23:00
Where Spektrum Berlin, Bürknerstraße 12, 12047 Berlin, Germany
Berlin Patchers.
Our first meetup was a blast. See the protocol if you missed it.
Lets keep it up.
Here is the second one.
This time we will have lasal (seehttp://aristidesgarcia-blog.tumblr.com/) exposing some insights of his latest project. Hopefully this gets us inspired, so that we can have spontaneous discussions/talks/showcases following.
So, feel free to bring your project/notebook/questions or whatever you want to share with the community.
There will be a bar serving us drinks.
There will also be other people around as well.
Thanks go to Lieke and Alfredo who are running the fantastic spacehttps://spektrumberlin.de.
Thank you Lieke & Alfredo.
RSVP & more info here.
Update:
Find out about what happened in the Protocol.
Some things take a while longer...
Planned since vvvv pre-beta1 we're happy to finally bring you:
Frames
Patches tend to do different things all at once and when looking at them it is often not clear at first sight which part of a patch does what. We have comments to add a few words at certain spots but those fail when we'd like to point at a group of nodes that do a certain thing. So the idea is to have a visual element we can place in a patch to frame a group of nodes and mark them with a color and label. This will help us to better structure and document large patches.
Frames are always in the very back of everything. They don't contain any other elements and they cannot be contained in other regions. They are mere visual elements and don't interfere with the functionality of a patch in any way.
To show/hide all frames in a patch at once, press CTRL+ALT+F.
To frame a bunch of selected nodes, press ALT+F.
Screenshots
Besides being structural elements, frames also allow you to take screenshots easily and repeatably. We're using this e.g. to automate generating screenshots for our documentation...
Here is how:
- Press the Printer button to make a screenshot, then rightclick it to see the captured file in explorer
- Alternatively press CTRL+2 to take a shot of the selected frame
- Press CTRL+5 to take screenshots of all frames in a document at once
To create a quick screenshot of an area without even creating a frame, simply press S while making a selection. This will copy the screenshot to the clipboard (so you can simply paste it into the chat or a forum reply) and also place a .png next to the current .vl document.
Recordings
Apart from single screenshots you can also record an animated gif of the area of a frame, here is how:
- Press the Record button to start a recording, the same button again or ESC to stop it
- Alternatively toggle CTRL+4 to start/stop recording the selected frame
Note that the resulting .gifs are quite large. This is a known problem that shall be fixed at some point.
Screenspace Frame
One more: In case you want to make a recording that includes panning or zooming in the patch you can create a frame in screenspace:
Here is to inform you about an update to general File input/output in VL available for testing in latest alphas today. Introduced 1.5years ago we've now completely reworked this from the ground up with the things we've learned so far.
Blocking
We noticed that even though obviously you'll often want file io to be non-blocking, there are cases where blocking makes sense. So we now give you the following:
These are the most simple to use, very close to the comparable vvvv versions, only without error reporting, which we explain below.
Non-Blocking
In the case we want to have our file io non-blocking we learned that most likely we don't only want to load the file but often also do some kind of "transformation" to the data before it is used further in the patch. Most likely this transformation should also be non-blocking and we only want to be informed when that part is done as well. Introducing:
Instead of returning the actual data of a file, those readers return an Observable<Data> which allows you to do some further processing to the data before you get access to it in the patch using a HoldLatest node. For more information on working with observables see the chapter Reactive.
The writers in turn also take an Observable<Data> and write whenever new data is pushed through the observable. Like this you can e.g. write data received from an input via an observable directly to a file without ever touching the mainloop:
Naming Convention
While in vvvv we had different names for file accessing nodes, like: Reader (Raw), FileTexture (EX9.Texture), XFile (EX9.Geometry Load), MP3Parser (File), ... we decided on a new naming scheme for VL:
- all readers end on "Reader"
- all writers end on "Writer"
- the node is prefixed with a hint at the file-format it handles, like XMLReader, JSONReader
- more generic readers that don't read a specific format are called more generically, like FileReader, ImageReader, ..
Like this, typing "reader" or "writer" in the nodebrowser, you'll be guaranteed to find all available readers and writers.
Error Handling
Reading or writing files can go wrong for different reasons and the system needs a way to inform you about this. Previously, error handling of reader/writer nodes was inconsistent. Some ignored errors, others reported "Success" or returned an "Error Message". Having realized error-handling has to be supported on a higher-level than individually on every node, we have now removed all error handling from those nodes.
Now what? Right, so the first thing you need to know: If an error occurs at runtime it will be catched by vl and the node will go pink, informing you of the problem. Often this is enough.
In case you want to react to an error in your patch we again have to differentiate between the blocking and non-blocking case:
Blocking
The solution for the blocking case involves using the experimental Try [Control] region and looks like this:
Non-Blocking
In a non-blocking scenario you can use the HoldLatestError [Reactive] node like this:
Who david, joreg, sebl, a a a a
When Tue, Jun 12th 2018 - 19:30 until Tue, Jun 12th 2018 - 23:00
Where Spektrum Berlin, Bürknerstraße 12, 12047 Berlin, Germany
Berliners and non berliners.
We thought it's time for a first VVVV Meetup in Berlin, which will hopefully turn into a series of patcher kucha style evenings.
The meetup is for vvvv and VL interested open minds in Berlin. It is a place to meet and exchange ideas and experiences. It is open to anyone who wants to join, no matter if you are a vvvv expert or beginner, a famous or breadless artist, a designhead or technologist, a piano player or techno musician.
Thankfully we will be hosted by Lieke and Alfredo who are running the fantastic spacehttps://spektrumberlin.de. It's a nice exhibition, performance and community building space. There will be a bar serving us drinks and some people around. Thank you Lieke & Alfredo.
Next steps:
- Drop us a mail, comment or forum post if you like to show something. We will announce some line-up soon.
- If you like: make yourself a member of our brand new meetup group on meetup.comhttps://www.meetup.com/VVVV-Meetup-Berlin
- And check yourself in for the first meetuphttps://www.meetup.com/de-DE/VVVV-Meetup-Berlin/events/251273271
Looking forward to meet you!
Ann-Katrin & David
Update:
We are happy to announce our first talks:
- dennis of NSYNK will introduce us to his great new contribution of an ambient occlusion algorithm for vvvv.
- princemio, art director at Waltz Binaire, is joining us to present undocumented super secret stuff for your brains to explode.
Update 2:
Find out about what happened in the Protocol
Growing a consistent library of nodes and presenting it in a clear way in the NodeBrowser is one of the great challenges we are facing. For the upcoming release we made this our focus: Clean up the core library vl offers and add new features to the NodeBrowser for easier browsing. So here is what you get:
Filtering by Aspects
The NodeBrowser got a couple of new toggle buttons that let you filter for different aspects. Aspects include "Advanced", "Experimental", "Obsolete"...
Button layout: Time goes from left to right (Obsolete -> Experimental), high level to low level from up to down (Basic -> Advanced).
By default you see all normal nodes, ie. those without any aspect. This is what we consider the 80% most important nodes for the casual user. Browsing the categories with this setting should give you a good, not too overwhelming overview of what functionality is available. For example it excludes all nodes using types we consider advanced, like Float64, Integer64,... mutable collections (like Array, ..) and often nodes that we hope you'd not have to use every day.
Advanced
If you're looking for a node and it doesn't show up you can enable the "Advanced" aspect. This will include many more nodes. Obviously the distinction between normal and advanced is very subjective and will vary widely for different users and use-cases. So we are aware that there is room for debate and nodes may be moved between normal and advanced in future versions. The good thing about this is that such a move between aspects never breaks any patches!
You can toggle this filter button with the TAB key.
Experimental
Includes nodes that we haven't yet fully committed to. Use those at your own risk. We don't guarantee that they'll still work the same in future versions
Obsolete
Includes nodes that we only still ship to not break existing patches. Don't use them in new patches. Most likely there is a better version of the node available already.
Internal
Nodes can have the "Internal" aspect set, meaning they are only visible within their .vl document but don't get exposed. So if another document references the first one, it will only see nodes that are not Internal. Using the toggle you can hide those internal nodes from the NodeBrowser to have a view on the node set that other documents would see.
Defaults
The default setting for the filter buttons for Advanced, Experimental and External on startup of VL can be adjusted in the settings.xml file. If you are working a lot with .dlls from c# projects and you need to restart often, you probably want to enable the 'External' button by default.
Assign Aspects to Nodes
For information about assigning nodes to aspects, see this gray book section and feel free to open a thread in the forums for specific questions.
Filter externals
When referencing an external .dll it often leads to a very large number of extra nodes in the NodeBrowser. Using the "External" toggle you can decide whether to see those in the NodeBrowser or not. Also the NodeBrowser is faster when it doesn't have to deal with those.
You can toggle this filter button with the SHIFT+TAB keyboard shortcut.
Stateful Nodes
Aka process nodes got merged with their stateless siblings with the same name. If there is a process node and a stateless node with the same name you get a "..." icon in the NodeBrowser and after clicking on it you have to choose which one you want.
More Collections
This category got the most rework so it's worth to mention its specific changes here.
VL encourages the use of immutable collections because they work very well together with the data flow paradigm. But when working with .NET libraries you often have to deal with mutable collections, so we now provide all commonly used collections of the .NET framework!
In general we try to do as little renaming as possible when importing data types. But for the collections we took the liberty to do the following renamings from the original ones:
- ImmutableArray -> Array
- ImmutableDictionary -> Dictionary
- ...
- Array -> MutableArray
- Dictionary -> MutableDictionary
- ...
All interfaces for collections moved into the Interfaces sub-category and we introduced a Common category that contains data types and nodes that are used together with collections like KeyValuePair or CustomEqualityComparer.
Rectangle Improvements
The nodes to create rectangles are much more flexible now. You can specify the size of the rectangle and an anchor position. Depending on the enum input Anchor, the position gets interpreted as any one of the significant points in a rectangle, like TopLeft, Center, BottomRight, ... Also the split node got this enum to specify which point of the rectangle the output position should be.
Additionally there is a node to create a rectangle spanned by two points and one to create a rectangle by the coordinate values of it's edges.
We also added Inflate and Scale nodes. Inflate can offset the rectangle edges in each direction by specific amount and Scale multiplies the size of the Rectangle in each direction. Both nodes come with version Centered and Uniform which assign the same value to the horizontal and vertical direction or the same value for all directions.
Easier switch from Adaptive to specific
Some nodes (like the +,..) that you place in a patch are not tied to a specific type (like Float32) unless you make a connection to them. This is a very useful feature in vl and works 99% of times. Sometimes though you are smarter than the compiler and you want to specify to use a concrete implementation. In this case, after placing the node you now simply have to double click it to get all available options and chose one of those.
Destroy is now Dispose
In general we're planning to stick as close as possible to the naming in the .NET world. This will make VL more inviting for external developers to join and also makes documentation more easy to find. Therefore we decided to rename "Disposable" back to "IDisposable" and "Destroy" back to "Dispose".
As always, head over to the alpha builds and report your findings.
Enjoy the new order and happy patching!
yours,
devvvvs
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