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.

Here we go!

We have a candidate for our upcoming release:

This is going to be the first stable release including the huge shiny new 3d rendering library we created based on the Stride Engine!

For more details of what's new, please consult the Change Log.

So please test and report your findings. If we don't find any complete show-stoppers within the next days, this is going to be it!

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

In a quest to get more basic things working out of the box with VL (ie. using vvvv beta>=40 or the all-new vvvv gamma), we took on to support your favorite depth cameras. Most of the cameras and their APIs share basically the same features as a baseline and then some of them have a few extra features. This means that using them in vvvv works mostly the same for all of them.

You have the main device node that you connect ColorImage, DepthImage, PointCloud, Skeleton,... nodes to, to get the desired info out of them. See the help patches coming with the packs for details.

Here is a list and comparison of all available depth cameras with links to the respective packs on nuget.org. To learn how to use nuget packs with vvvv please watch HowTo use Nugets.

Kinect

The original Microsoft Kinect or the XBOX 360 that was released a bit later.
Get the VL pack on nuget.org.
Created with support by chaupow.

Kinect v2

The second version of the Microsoft Kinect.
Get the VL pack on nuget.org.
Created with support by ravazquez.

Azure Kinect

The third version. AzureKinect.
Get the VL pack on nuget.org.
Get the VL pack for skeleton tracking on nuget.org.

Orbbec Astra

Orbbec Astra.
Get the VL pack on nuget.org.

Intel RealSense

Intel RealSense.
Get the VL pack on nuget.org.

Nuitrack API

Nuitrack is a piece software that works with all of the above cameras and provides skeleton, hand and face tracking.
Get the VL pack on nuget.org.
Created with support by ravazquez.

Leap Motion Controller

The Leap Motion Controller device provides hand and finger tracking.
Get the VL pack on nuget.org.

Please help us improve this list of pros and cons. Know any other or disagree with some mentioned, please add them in the comments! This could eventually grow into a page of the gray book.