Probably,

the biggest NODE so far, in terms of reach. At least if you want to believe the viewing numbers on the videos of the daily streams. This time the whole world was able to participate and not only a handful of privileged being able to come to Frankfurt. What an undertaking to run a pop-up TV station for 7 days next to a 2 track, 9h a day workshop program...

On behalf of the whole team that made this edition possible, vvvv wants to thank david and Jeanne Charlotte Vogt, directors of NODE20 - Second Nature, for pulling the strings. Once again very well done, chapeau!

The team was huge and a lot of different things happened over the course of this week, too numerous to recap here. So in this blogpost I want to particularly summarize the vvvv focused parts and highlight the members of the vvvv community who helped make NODE20 possible.

TV Shows

You should watch them all: 7 days of quality panels and discussions around this years topic "Second Nature". But then, as promised, the following is a listing of the more vvvv related shows for your viewing pleasure:

• The Emergency Broadcast Studio - Behind the Scenes, where readme talks about how he and bjoern took on the brave task of running the AR studio on VL.Stride, which was still very much in the works when they started...Must watch to get an impression of the effort of what was behind the studio setup. Credits also go to kopffarben who helped running the actual shows in the end!

• Ocean Of Air - Hear from the team behind the first vvvv + stride based multiuser VR experience.
• Distributed Imagination - Meet Refik Anadol, Simon Weckert, Luna Nane, lasal and Noir
• The Node Institute - About the idea of the institute
• vvvv Keynode - From the devvvvelopers diary
• Patcher Spotlight - ravazquez in talks with artist collective VOLNA, ain, Jan Henrik Hansen and seltzdesign and artist duo F3Studio
• The Golden Nuget Show - Insights into latest developments with sebescudie, Rayment, elektromeier, lasal and dottore
• Patcher Spotlight: Japan Edition - ravazquez, mino and Takuma in talks with Yuta Inada, Yusuke Murata, skillgacha and Yuta Torii

Workshops

Massive thanks go to the whole team of The NODE Institute who ran the workshop and streaming operations on the ground together with: ravel, sebescudie, Rayment, katzenfresser and Ben Schiek.

And of course to every single one of the 26 workshop hosts and co-host who took the time to bring their knowledge to all of us: andresc4, Anna Meik, antokhio, baxtan, domj, dottore, elias, everyoneishappy, gregsn, Gene Kogan, hayden, idwyr, joreg, jule, kleinkariert, lasal, Maria Heine, Marian Dziubiak, motzi, ravazquez, sebl, sunep, Takuma, tonfilm, untone, vux.

Support

NODE is a community effort. Everyone is chipping in what they can. So finally I want to list a few companies without whose continued support in the form of material or human resources, NODE20 would not have been possible:

• Copyright Communications GmbH
• Hergarten Interactive
• kling klang klong
• MESO Digital Interiors GmbH
• m box bewegtbild GmbH
• NSYNK Gesellschaft für Kunst und Technik mbH
• SATIS & FY
• Stage Precision
• Studio Brüll
• Timo Bittner
• wirmachenbunt

vvvv takes a deep bow in front of everyone mentioned. I sincerely hope I didn't forget anyones contribution but am well aware that this is not unlikely. So in case I missed someone, please someone let me know so I can add the info here!

After NODE is before the next NODE.
Back to work!

The long wait is over!

vvvv gamma 2020.3 public previews now include VL.Stride, the new 3d rendering library, based on the opensource Stride 3d engine. You be the judge, but spoiler: this is rather huge!

Massive thanks go out to all early accessors who helped us uncover and fix countless buggers that you no longer have to run into. So this is also on your behalf. You're welcome!

Status

All of the basics are now in place. Find your favorite among these:

• 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
• TextureFX: Basic selection available, more to come
• Texture Feedback: Yes please!
• Texture Readback: Absolutely, think pipet,...
• ShaderFX: Experimental nodes to patch shaders visually
• PostFX: Highly configurable via 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)

To give you an idea, here is a random collection of screenshots of what earlyaccessors have created with this already.

Still missing

To give you a heads-up, here are 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 models materials showing automatically, you need to load them as an AssetModel via an extra Stride project. Animations are not yet supported.
• Simple Text Rendering: for now best done via Skia or HTMLRenderers
• Physics nodes are available in the Experimental section, meaning you can use them but still we want to give them one more round of refinement
• VR support is still to come. Stride supports it, we just haven't exposed it yet properly
• Things you'd do with the most popular contributions InstanceNoodles, DX11.Particles and FieldTrip are still missing a corresponding functionality

And then some more, but the above should be the most obvious ones you'll stumble upon.

How to get started?

Open the Helpbrowser (F1) and check out the explanations, howtos and examples. Remember the preview status, ie. those are not yet in their best shape. But they should help you find your way.

And if you really got nothing better to do in the week of October 2nd to 8th, then consider joining us for NODE20 where we have the following series of workshops dedicated to getting you started with VL.Stride:

• Introduction to vvvv, VideoFX & Compositing by Maria Heine
• Realtime graphics with Stride 3D – The Fundamentals by joreg
• Patching Materials by robotanton
• Beyond Sound and Visual by dottore
• VL.Stride Deepdive by tonfilm
• A preview to ShaderFX by tonfilm
• Working with the Stride GameStudio by Marian Dziubiak

A tickets costs 50€ and gives you full access to all of the above and so many more workshops and their recordings.

Thanks

A couple of people believed in the development of VL.Stride from the beginning and substantially supported its development. We bow before you:

• Marshmellow Laser Feast
• schnellebuntebilder
• m box
• Refik Anadol
• Jarrad Hope

Hello everyone,

Introduction

I'd like to give you an update on the toolkit front, that vvvv has always been. While vvvv beta can be described as a dynamic system, mutating while you mold your patches, vvvv gamma and its workhorse VL are of a different kind. With VL we embraced features like

• static typing with its ability to detect errors early,
• .Net DLL import opening a universe of possibilities,
• user-defined data types that interplay with those defined by others,
• compilation with its ability to export an app as an executable...

In short, we embraced robust software developing strategies that at first seem to contradict the idea of a playful development toolkit that allows you to mold your app. We went for compiled patches, running, and hot-swapping them while you are building them.

But we envisioned vvvv to be both

• the playful toolkit you fell in love with
• combined with the promises of a compiled language

While my last blog post was about the language, let's focus on the toolkit this time.

Toolkit

Let's have a look at some features that allow you to interact with the VL runtime, the system that runs your patch while it allows you to edit it. The features here empower you to enrich the patching experience. We understand that these improvements need to "trickle up" into the libraries and only thereafter will have an effect for all users.

So the following is probably mostly interesting for advanced user and library developers.

Tracking Selection within the Patch Editor

You now can react to a selection within the patch editor. The more libraries do this the more playful the environment gets. We still have to figure out all the use cases, but here is a list of what's possible already

• separate the core functionality from its Editor UI. Imagine a TimeLine node that is decoupled from the timeline editor.
• an Inspector for nodes or pads
• a Preview like this:

• even the help browser itself uses the feature to provide help for the selected node.

And there is more:
You can get a Live Element for a certain Pin or Pad.

• Copy the permanent identity of the element into the clipboard by CTRL-SHIFT-I (I stands for Identity).
• GetLiveDataHubForSerializedID hands you the pin or pad.

useful for the cases where you want to always inspect a specific pin or pad of some patch. This can be helpful for debugging.

Let the Patch Editor navigate to a Patch

When a Skia Renderer is your active window, Ctrl-^ let's you jump to the patch in which it is used. This is handy when you opened a bunch of help patches and you want to see the help patch that is responsible for the output.

You can use the node ShowPatchOfNode to do the same trick.

Tooltips for your own data type

Here you can see a custom tooltip for a user patched type "Person".

You now can patch your own tooltip with RegisterViewer. This way the patching experience will be so much more fun. We're in the process of adding more and more viewers for our types.

Runtime Warnings

Up to now, we had

• Red elements: Static errors. (E.g. a node that can't be found) These errors make the compiler ignore certain parts in your program as they are currently in development. The rest still runs. (Something what C# and others just can't)
• Orange socks on links: Static warnings, potential problems. Something to look at when searching for a bug.
• Pink nodes: Runtime Errors. A problem that only got detected during runtime and which is such a big problem suddenly that the system can't work as planned. Some patches don't run as planned. There are different ways how to handle these, pointing you at problems at runtime, but they can be painful.

And now we introduce to you:

• Orange nodes, Runtime Warnings: They show you a problem at runtime. But it doesn't harm your system as pink nodes do. Orange nodes are runtime warnings. Library developers can put warnings on their nodes in order to communicate to the user that something is slightly off.

You can try it yourself by using the Warn or the Warn (Reactive) node.

The warning will not only show up on the Warn node, but also on the applications of your patch.

S&R nodes

Sometimes it's just convenient to be able to send data from one patch to another without the need of feeding the data via pins. We now have send and receive nodes, like known from beta.
Features:

• The channel can be anything. It doesn't have to be a string.
• They have several warnings. E.g. for when none or many senders are on a channel that a receiver is listening to.

Descriptive Tree patching

Some libraries focus on a simple idea:
Let the user build an object graph that describes what he wants in a declarative manner and the library will do the hard work to follow that description.

Examples for this approach are

• VL.Stride
• VL.Elementa
• to some extend VL.Skia

VL.Stride and VL.Elementa have in common that they focus on a very certain type of object graph: A tree made out of entities and components.
Libraries like these can now talk to the user and enforce the user to not build any kind of graph, but a tree-shaped graph (where one child doesn't have many parents).

VL.Stride uses TreeNodeParentManagers, Warn nodes and S&R nodes internally to the deliver this feature:

You'll very soon be able to inspect those patches.

Help patches to all those topics will show up in the CoreLib API section (at the bottom of the listing).

We hope you'll enjoy these ways of integrating with the development env.
Thank you and we'll see you soon!

yours devvvvs

Did you ever wonder what the first things were, that the cool kids in the VL.Stride EarlyAccess program created with the new 3d rendering engine for vvvv gamma?

It's been only a few weeks, but stunning pixel combinations got posted into our early access chat room.

And we collected them in a gallery for you:

A big THANK YOU to everyone involved!

We can't wait to see what you will create with it. And don't miss the workshops at NODE20 if you want to learn how to use it.

We are looking forward to the public release as much as you do,
yours devvvvs