[Fluxus] thinking about fluxus

[gabor papp]

>> your examples are good, and there are lots... colors are a bit hard to
>> understand - are they vector3's or 4's? i can't seem to figure out how to
>> use alpha.
i think it would be nice if both could be used everywhere like glcolor3f/4f.

>> what's most difficult is finding a good scheme tutorial
>> that caters to time-based graphics programming - using counters,
>> persistent variables.
i haven't looked into this yet, but the new plt documentation looks 
quite good. they have a section on frtime at 
http://docs.plt-scheme.org/frtime/index.html

> I wonder if we can use vi as a library and just plug in the input and get
> the text buffer out?
this would be excellent. i miss smart indenting a bit. i think we really 
need to improve the scratchpad, because it sets back productivity during 
a live performance.

>> Something Processing does well is to translate to pixels and back,
processing was created for novice users, and it works very well for 
them, but i'm afraid this approach is not really ideal for more complex 
projects. it causes many problems in processing when you are dealing 
with matrices, frustums and cameras and the environment starts to behave 
very strange and differently in p3d and opengl mode for the same code.
so, i second dave's opinion.

i have been also thinking about improving the visual productivity of 
fluxus. for the first step i would need to move the rendering code to 
work in an opengl framebuffer object. i also suggest to separate the 
rendering of the visuals and the scratchpad. i think that blurring the 
scene should not blur the contents of the editor. moving the rendering 
into an fbo would solve this. furthermore, it would open a way to 
process the output in a lot of interesting ways. what do you think about 
this?

for the sake of completeness i bring up some other issues, which were 
mentioned before.
- one time source for everything, crucial for playing back recordings
- abstract event system to be able to replay the recorded events on 
various platforms (different platforms have different keycodes).
- following the previous issue, it would be nice to solve exporting all 
kinds of input events (osc, midi) not just keys, mouse events
- more complete support of the osc protocol

i would be more than happy to help out with any of these issues.

gabor