Friday, November 6, 2009

GT L3 Redux

I have changed the default opening parameters some, and fixed a bug with file info when loading external/internal qtz fx.
Posted by George Toledo at 11:50 AM

2 comments:

Lee Grosbauer said...

Not sure how the changes affect this Redux version, but it's every bit as sweet as the original. I would urge users to take the time to fully observe and manipulate the FX and by all means to apply audio. Impressive responsiveness. Very versatile.

November 6, 2009 9:46 PM
George Toledo said...

Thanks Lee. I'm really stoked by the wide variety of looks that this thing can generate. I have a similar concept knocking around in my head of "painting" whole city sides or nature scenes in strokes, by having image structures, but I keep reaching an impasse on conceptualization. The idea would be for the "points" to have differing imagery as they go by, instead of each line having a repeating texture. I know it's possible, but I can't feed an image structure to a GL renderer, so I have to try to figure out a different approach.

The programming of the visual generator is untouched. It's just that I made a small miscalculation when I was setting up the "info" element that will print the name of a qtz effect that is loaded, and fps.

Long story short, I was semi-abusing value type conversion, using number values to control boolean true/false of whether or not the file info would be able to turn on in different environments. I had thought that if I hit an enable port with a -1, it would be the same as shutting it off with a 0 value. I'm basically doing some math off of the demultiplexer that chooses sources, to make a kind of fake conditional.

I was kind of surprised about the fact that a negative number doesn't convert to a "false", since any positive number registers as "true". For instance, if you send a 2, 3, 4 or so on to a sprite enable port, it will turn it on the same as a 1 does. I thought it stood to reason that all negative numbers would follow suit, and be the same as a 0 value. I know better than that, and it was a pretty airhead mistake.

I originally had a range patch in there to make things work how I wanted, but took it out because I like to use as few patches as possible, and "trim the fat" when I do the finishing touches on something. I should have double checked that the functionality of the info option hadn't changed after trimming the range patch out.

Practically speaking, in the old version, this meant that when one had the "info" checked to "off" in the QC FX environment, that when one would flip to normal environments, one would see the FX path (which isn't being applied on any of those environments).

Now with the fix, when you check off info in "regular" environments, all you get is the FPS counter, and when you check it off in FX environment, you get the FPS counter, a file path, total amount of files in the folder, and the current file number that has been chosen.

November 8, 2009 10:01 PM

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