Previously on vvvv: vvvvhat happened in April 2021

What's on and going?
I can tell you that:

We've just released a 2021.3.3 bugfix release including a killer feature: console export. think about it...

Then if you're brave enough to test drive the 2021.4 previews you'll now see the promised speed improvements while patching when working on larger projects. We're still aware of some hoops there, so please be gentle and report all your findings with this.

Coming up next: We're still working on smoothing out issues with TextureFX, building a UI for the settings and improving the NuGet integration for the coming release. Plus, if we're lucky there'll be some surprise goodies ready in time...

Meetup

In case you missed it, you really missed some things. Here are the chapters from the last meetup for you to rewatch:

• Fynn: about the MMODG VVVVarkle he implemented in his 6 week internship with us
• robotanton advertising his (then) upcoming webinar
• lasal showing the multitrack midi composer he's working on
• gegenlicht about his reseach into ShaderFX
• sebl demoing the use of his latest nuget: VL.OpenAI

Contributions

New:

• VL.OpenAI by sebl
• VL.SmallestCircle by sebl
• VL.IO.PLY by joreg

Update your nugets for the following:

• VL.Video.MediaFoundation
• VL.IO.M2MQTT
• VL.HapPlayer

And as always have a look at the forums Work-In-Progress section for some more recent goodies...

Gallery

Jobs

• Always keep an eye on the vvvv job board
• There are often some more on dasauge.de
• If you need a vvvv specialist or are one yourself, check out this listing of vvvv specialists available for hire

That was it for May. Anything to add? Please do so in the comments!

This is the big one!

vvvv has been in development for around 20 years by now. In recent years we were working on a complete re-write. We call it "vvvv gamma" and it saw its first official release in April 2020. Today we're adding a fully-fledged 3d library based on the open-source Stride 3d engine. You can dive right into it:

Then follow this tutorial:

What you get with this release is only the beginning: For now we've focused on a high-level scene graph based workflow. So expect the following:

• Primitives: Plane, Box, Sphere, Cylinder, Cone, Capsule, Donut and Teapot
• Instancing: Via spread of transforms, other entities or buffers
• Lights: Ambient, Directional, Point, Spot, Projector, Skybox
• Shadows: On by default, configurable in quality/resource-consumption
• Materials: Highly configurable PBR workflow through a large set of nodes, incl. easy normalmapping, displacements,...
• Textures: From file, video, Spout, Skia, HTML or renderer
• Texture Feedback: Yes, please!
• Texture Readback: Absolutely, think pipet,...
• PostFX: Highly configurable via a set of nodes, think: depth-of-field, bloom, ambient-occlusion, ...
• Dynamic Meshes: Generate meshes using vertex- and indexbuffers on CPU
• Shaders: Pixel, Vertex, Geometry, Compute. Write your own using full syntax highlighting in VisualStudio with hot-reload
• Assets from file: Load textures and models directly from file
• Assets from Stride Game Studio: Prepare assets and complete scenes in game studio
• Windowing: Easy handling of multiple windows (and cameras)
• Misc: Render Skia and HTML content directly onto the screen (ie. no texture-pass needed)

Experimental

Also available already, but still marked as experimental, ie they still need another round of review:

• Keyboard, Mouse, Touch Input handling
• TextureFX: Basic selection available, more to come
• Physics: Nodes for 3d physics simulation
• VR: Effortless output to VR devices
• Buffers: Nodes to configure gpu buffers
• ShaderFX: Nodes to patch shaders visually

Still to come

And to give you a heads-up, here are a few things you might expect already but are yet to come:

• Loading models does not bring all their materials and animations in yet. To get a model's materials showing automatically, you need to load them as an AssetModel via an extra Stride project. Animations are for now only supported when loading Prefabs
• Simple Text Rendering: for now best done via Skia or HTMLRenderers
• Things you'd do with the most popular vvvv beta contributions InstanceNoodles, DX11.Particles and FieldTrip are currently worked on by the FUSE team

There is more info on that in this dedicated blog post.

Open Source

You read that right: The whole 3d library is entirely open source. This means, should you encounter a critical bug with one of your projects you don't have to wait for a new release but can potentially fix things right on your end.

Further changes

Apart from the addition of VL.Stride this release also features the following notable changes:

• Completely reworked OSC and TUIO nodes
• Image tooltips
• A simple HTTPGet node
• Touch support for the Skia renderer
• MainLoop has incremental mode
• Convenient ways to create Toggle, Bang & Press IOBoxes

Want to know all the details? Check the changelog.

Licensing

As you recall, vvvv has the best software licensing model in the world:

• Free for non-commercial use
• No copy-protection
• No feature limitations
• No mandatory registration

You simply buy a license the moment you start working on a commercial project. We also have monthly options!

End of the earlybird discount

We're happy to announce that we will get rid of the 20% earlybird discount that has applied to all vvvv gamma licenses so far. Starting this April 1st you can finally pay the full price that vvvv gamma is worth. So if you're a pro, you get the vvvv gamma developer licenses for you and your team before that date and save a bunch. Not often it is so easy to make a good decision.

Once again massive thanks to everyone who participated in the early-access program and for all the feedback that helps us enormously to bring vvvv forward.

Good patch!

Hi all!

For the 10 people still using VPM these days, today VPDB (or vvvvpm.github.io) the frontend for installing packs via VPM will probably stop working as Github stops supporting the application authentication method that site was using. Unfortunately I don't have time nor incentive to maintain that site anymore. VPM doesn't require this site to work, however it was a key part of installing packs with it. Direct links using the vpm:// or vpms:// URI schemes still work, for example on contribution pages. vpack files uploaded to VPDB are actually safe and sound at https://github.com/vvvvpm/vpdb repository.

In case you desperately need to install something from that repo, you can use the raw content URL of a file from the repo and just replace the http part with vpm. For example

    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vvvvpm/vpdb/master/devvvvs/vvvv/latestalpha_auto.vpack

becomes

    vpms://raw.githubusercontent.com/vvvvpm/vpdb/master/devvvvs/vvvv/latestalpha_auto.vpack

Or you can clone that repo and just use VPM file associations on .vpack files.
Sorry for the inconveniences and god-speed!

Who sebescudie
When Fri, Apr 30th 2021 - 14:00 until Fri, Apr 30th 2021 - 17:00
Where Online, Germany

Hurray. Another one:

This workshop is for interaction designers who work with vvvv. The online workshop by vvvvamous sebescudie will introduce you to tools enabling you to leverage machine learning capabilities in your own vvvv patches.

As the name of the webinar suggests, we’ll talk about machine learning through the prism of interactive installations. We won’t go into much details inside the math behind it. This is actually the whole point of this webinar: there are some tools out there that can help us leverage the capabilities of machine learning without having to know too much about what’s under the hood.

Through a series of practical examples (and a tiny bit of theory!), we’ll try to understand what machine learning is, and how using it can help us in our everyday patching life, and allow us to do things that would be very tedious to do without it.

You will learn how to:

• What are machine learning and deep learning
• Use RunwayML trained model in your vvvv patches
• Talk to the Wekinator
• Train your own models with Microsoft Lobe

Webinar: https://thenodeinstitute.org/event/machine-learning-for-interaction-designers/