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!