Contributions in subfolders (the nth)

Hello vvvv people,

sorry for creathing yet another thread about such a “simple” question but i*m struggling with it since my first vvvv encounters.

if i place downloaded modules in one “contributions” folder outside of the project structure, vvvv cant find it, despite beeing linked via root.v4p

yes i tried doing it with root,
yes i restarted vvvv,
yes i created subfolder structure with “effects, modules, plugins”
i am running win10

but let the screenshots speak,

i know (most) other users are doing what i try, but i am failing at some point.
can u point me where that is?

Thanks in advance!

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in order for us to see the screenshots, please not only upload, but also insert them. you can edit your original post and press the insert buttons next to the uploaded images…

hm…you didn’t scale those screenshots down so that we can’t see anything, did you? probably that was the forum, though i thought we just had that fixed recently.
for now please upload in a .zip file again…

okok, i get it.

first off: it is not your fault, it must be indeed confusing if you’re not into all the details. a similar question was asked recently: https://discourse.vvvv.org/t/13764 and not quite satisfyingly answered…

first, here is how it works in your case:
put the files that come with the animator contribution in this directory:
\TheContributions\plugins\Animator

then in Root reference:
\TheContributions

now how should you know? the idea here was that everyone knows:

  • files ending in .fx are effects and therefore go into \effects
  • files ending in .dll are plugins and therefore go into \plugins
  • files ending in .v4p are modules and therefore go into \modules

then of course there may be contributions that come with both .dlls and modules and this already gets weird. thats what we introduced Packs for, which can include that structure internally and the user doesn’t need to know about internals… drawback here: packs need to go in the \packs directory in the vvvv root directory.

i hope this explains a bit of the situation and helps you get going.

wow. thanks joreg!

just as i was walking home from work i wondered “what if it belongs to plugins”

well. tested, works. thanks!

my method is using symbolic links for packs I’m developing and vpm vpm for deployment. I’d suggest keeping the pack structure even if you only have plugins or modules so vvvv won’t go crazy.
Other thing I notice here though that nodebrowser apparently will skip any node from packs folder not in direct neighbourhood of the working v4p, not starting with an upper-case latin letter (1st world problem, just sayin’)

@joreg is there an appropriate wiki page for all that to go on? I’d think it good to add the DX11 shader extensions too. I don’t think it’s really documented at all atm, and which means even experienced users don’t necessarily know: https://discourse.vvvv.org/t/14049

definitely. it should all go to using-addons#Contributions. feel free to add info you find missing. we might then go over it a bit stylingwise…but please never hesitate to add infos!

Cool, added a note there

supa, thanks.