If you're the happy owner of one or even more vvvv gamma licenses, please read on.
(Otherwise, please join the club first)

Remember: If you update your vvvv gamma license before it runs out, we thank you for your loyalty with a 20% discount. Updating a license means keeping it active and allowing you to use all the latest releases for your commercial projects.

Just a few clicks

When logged into the vvvv store you can get an overview of all your vvvv gamma licenses by choosing the "Licenses" section. It could look something like this:

Grayed-out licenses are inactive and can no longer be updated. Active licenses can be updated anytime which will always add one year to their current end-date. You can also update multiple licenses at once to have them all on one invoice. Convenient.

Note that you can change who's paying for the license: This will mostly make sense for people who started out with an "Individual" license but start feeling more pro and now want to pay as a "Freelancer, SME,...". But there are also reports of pro's feeling lucky and turning into a big fish. You will not be judged!

Email notification

You're all busy people, so in order to help you find a good moment to update you'll receive 3 email notifications:

• 4 weeks
• 2 weeks
• 1 day

before a license end-date to remind you of the possibility to update earning the discount.

That's already it. Shouldn't take you more than two minutes to update your licenses once a year. For the benefit of not having to worry about which version you're eligible to use and the peace of mind of properly feeding your workhorse...

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!

Previously on vvvv: vvvvhat happened in February 2021

On the road again!

This time towards vvvv gamma 2021.4. Nothing much in the public previews yet, but a few things probably dropping there in the next few weeks. In particular, we've been working on the patching performance issue, TextureFX, the Buffer nodes and the Settings UI. So expect these things to show up in previews first. And if you haven't yet, please review what happened recently in VL.Stride land.

The last meetup was a blast again. Many thanks to host ravazquez and everyone who presented:

• maxss: Everything is Growing Everything Is Math
• domj: Schema's repo on github is now open. See: scnq-schema
• ravel: An AR tool for online presentations
• dottore: State of the FUSE project
• remony: I Want You... to be a bot

Learning

• Check out our latest tutorial: Generating a Recursive Broccoli
• Watch the Timeline your data using VL.Kairos webinar by dottore
• Follow the vvvv gamma Learn Log by takuma

Contributions

Some new:

• Point Sprites VL.Stride by catweasel
• DDS cubemap Stride Assets by AKa-visuals
• VL.GnerativeGestaltung by phlegma

And update your nugets for the following:

• VL.OpenCV
• VL.Kairos
• VL.Elementa
• VL.Syslog

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 March. Anything to add? Please do so in the comments!

Since the first public preview release in summer 2020, we've made steady progress and released many updates based on feedback and bug reports. In case you didn't follow the daily changes, this blog post highlights additions you might have missed and are worth checking out.

Help and Example Patches

First and foremost, we added loads of new help and example patches. It is already a nicely browsable list in the help browser, with more in development:

Model, Mesh, Material and Texture Tooltips

A core feature of vvvv is to have a live preview of your data. And since you can patch your own tooltips to do exactly that, we patched previews for Materials, Models, Meshes, and Textures. More to come!

Material Cleanup

A Material describes the rendering pipeline. This is very fundamental and after working with the first iteration for a while we found some improvements:

We reduced the number of base nodes and added easier building blocks to customize a material. There are help patches for most of these, check the help browser and the material category in the node browser. It basically mirrors the Stride documentation.

Simpler Data Input

The parameters of a material are GPU values, either float or color. For the GPU a color is just a vector with 4 components, so we now have inputs of type GPU<Float32> and GPU<Vector4>. We simplified the node-set in a way that you can use a single value, a texture, or any dynamic GPU value. There are also nodes to input different values per instance. The reworked nodes are internally built with ShaderFX. If you are interested, have a look inside the new nodes to get an idea of how you can build your own.

Async Compilation and Caching

Compiling complex materials takes a while because there are often several shader stages involved. Stride has a mechanism to compile a material in the background and cache the compiled shaders on disc. So the next time the same material is used, it loads almost instantly. So when you see a geometry blinking green, it means that the material is compiling in the background and will be saved to disc. If it is blinking red, the material has an error.

In practice, this means a patch loads much faster the next time you open it.

Virtual Reality

Rendering any scene into a VR headset is now straightforward, just have a look at the new help patch.

Aspect Ratio and Units

When you build on-screen displays you often need pixel or device-independent units (DIP). And if images are involved, they should keep the same aspect as they are stored. For these tasks, we now have new nodes that calculate these spaces for you. And the QuadRenderer got aspect ratio modes that depend on the connected texture:

Perspective Look at Rectangle

Simulating a perspective that behaves like looking through a window is an important tool. It allows you to create cameras for interesting things like virtual productions and head tracking. There is also a help patch to get you started.

Spout and Shared Texture

You can now share textures with other software using Spout or shared textures. Spout 2 support is also planned for the next release.

Patch Script

This workflow is for advanced users. It allows you to attach a patch as a sync script to an entity. That's a common workflow in ECS-based game engines and you can find many tutorials on youtube that use this design pattern.

In some cases, this has an advantage over just placing an entity node in a patch and building logic around it. For example, you can retrieve your attached script-patch from the entity somewhere else and call operations on it. You can check out a use case in the forum thread How can I modify a material without changing the original node?. There is a help patch as well.

Light Shafts

Thanks to the efforts of TremensS we got help patches that explain how to use LightShafts:

Video Tutorials

So far, we released two video tutorials:

Other Bits and Pieces

Move to Official Stride

After we’ve done many pull requests that fix bugs and add features that we need, we switched to the official Stride release nuget packages. This allows for an easy workflow when you load a Stride project since the version now matches to what the Stride installer downloads by default.

Fullscreen

Got some fixes, however, there is one known bug. In a multiscreen setup, when the window is too far on the right on one screen, it goes fullscreen on the next screen to the right. We’ll try to fix this in the upcoming releases, of course.

TextureWriter

Easy node to write textures to disc. You can use this in combination with the incremental main loop mode to export animations.

General Advice

Most high-level nodes, like Sphere, DirectionalLight, and so on, are simple patches made from more fundamental building blocks. A good way to think about them is to see them as a "default setup" and not a finished black box.

So if you miss a feature, or a node does too much, look inside and copy parts of it, or the whole definition into your personal library document to customize it.

We also try to stay as close as possible to the Stride documentation. So if you are looking for more info on a certain feature, it is always worth peeking into it.

Contributing

If you have a useful addition or you want to contribute in any other way, you are welcome to fork VL.Stride on GitHub and make a pull request. We are always happy about new help and example patches.

What's Next?

As a first step we want to improve:

• Input event handling (Mouse, Keyboard, Touch, Gestures)
• TextureFX
• GPU resources handling, aka buffers and textures

We'll also add these features:

• Entity picking
• Load Model Animations
• Load Model Materials

And we are also working together with the FUSE team on more advanced rendering node libraries built on top of VL.Stride.

Looking forward to seeing what you will create with it! -> Latest download is always here.

yours,
devvvvs

P.S.: The gallery of VL.Stride impressions also got some new additions.