Dilate - Open Source Visualization Plugin

[yathosho]

the open-source project Dilate (https://sourceforge.net/projects/dilate/ ) is now registered. i'm not involved in the project, but i thought people might be interested in contributing. as far as i understood this, it's going to be a visualization plugin with toolkit (similiar to nullsoft avs), just for various players and platforms.

[Rovastar]

Not exactly high on detail is it. :)

[moltarx]

Well, not currently... I'm not necessarily one for words when it comes to descriptions on projects :)

[Rovastar]

What sort of visualizations will it most related too currently available?

What sort of devolpment enviornment do you intend to use?

[moltarx]

I'm trying to develop it as an opensource alternative to the AVS. This way, we could port it over to different platforms, and be able to share presets more. The whole thing came up when I wanted to be able to make AVS presets, but didn't boot into windows anymore :) One thing that will be different is that there will be no interface for designing presets as in the AVS. Instead, it will be a scripted language, where you just overload particular functions to get desired effects.

Currently Im using a gcc development environment to do all my coding, thats why the description says winamp/xmms. I'm currently developing on a linux platform, hoping that someone with the necessary windows build tools will be able to help out by getting it goin on winamp :)

[yathosho]

i think the interface was one of the reasons, that made avs so popular

[moltarx]

Well, there's nothing to stop someone from building an interface on top of the language that im writing, and thats what im goin for - flexibility. You could even get rid of the language completely, and design some new interface that just builds straight bytecode for the virtual machine, just like the AVS. But I really wanted to be able to write a flat script, which is why I am taking it in that direction initially, plus I saw it on the AVS wishlist a while back :)

[yathosho]

i guess the interface would in fact be the least amount of work. but i also thought of a list of presets for some effect (like for movements in avs). would be nice to have some standard dynmovs (rotation, shift etc.) in a similiar list.

[wellREDman]

the configure /interface is definitely the strong point of avs for me cos i cant code

what would be nice would be a swirly maker like avs that worked as a freeframe plugin

[moltarx]

Well, one thing that would definitly be done is to write a standard library of commonly used functions, and also have sort of interfaces for things like dynmoves. If you have ever programmed C, it would probably end up like writing a module of sorts. Like I said before, this is definitly a flexible thing, as I was coding a virtual machine for the whole setup. Currently an interface is the least of my worries. The first few presets will unfortunately be written in vm assembly :eek:

Another idea I was working on was the ability of users to code modules of code in the scripting language, or C/C++, and load them dynamicly into their presets. The reasoning behind this being that all the base functions would be from the standard library like I stated above, and anything extra would be a module. I think that this will make it much easier for people less familiar with C/C++ to code plugins to the system.

[wellREDman]

all that codebabble has gone completely over my head (as usual)

but what i was saying is that it would be good for you to look into making your swirly generator freeframe compliant, because having a the ability to input premade swirlies into all of the main VJ applications would be make it usable by most vj's

see www.freeframe.org for more details

[sleepytom]

freeframe supports "source effects"- ie genarative visual synths - resolume have made a few diffrent ones that are quite simple but the potential is ther for much more complex stuff to be done

[hyperdimensional]

I'm with Red, it would make more sense to put your efforts into an already existing (and successful) project.

Later versions of Freeframe will include audio, MIDI, OpenGL, 'synthesizer' style plugins (both for video and audio) and possibly even 'instrument' style plugins. We will be keen to investigate these areas much more fully before commiting to further developments - for the moment we are focused on video effects and visual synthesisers.

:biggrin:

[moltarx]

So, the impression that I'm getting from reading that site is that freeframe is just the portion of the plugin that does the display of the effects? Am I right in thinking this, and if so, I would happily integrate it into my plugin. However, you would still need a scripting language/virtual machine to be able to script the actions of the particular plugin.

[sleepytom]

read the freeframe spec here (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/freeframe/docs/specification.txt?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup)