Hi everyone,

Gem was a perfect tool for small workshops: easy to understand for a beginner and fun.
It's now very outdated and have many consistencies problems on various plateforms (fullscreen, key codes pb, camera, media etc...).

So I need a good visual tool for my next pd workshop and Ofelia is the perfect library... but it's also a bit difficult for beginners because :

• Too many objects for fast prototyping
• Sometimes long object names with uppercases etc
• help files lead to OpenFrameworks documentation

So I made a few abstractions in order to think of a kind of "Gem" replacement.
Main ideas are:

• Modular single blocs primitives like Gem, with many methods and arguments + their help file.
• Allows to draw and see something on screen even with unfilled arguments (and expandable default arguments)
• Remove all dependencies but Ofelia (no need for more dependencies with this lib)

Here is a first test... I am learning Lua at the same time so it's a bit experimental.
Somebody have good hints to share? Best lua / Openframeworks practise?

https://github.com/60-hz/Ofelia-Fast-Prototyping

(of course the only lib needed is Ofelia)
Cheers!

@cipp0 Hi, that is not possible with Ofelia because you can create only one global OF window per Pd instance. Ofelia is not designed to be used for creating multiple windows applications.

hi @cuinjune, thanks for the reply! I imagined it, launching two instances of PD and making them talk in OSC I managed to do what I meant thanks also to the abstractions of 60hz.
On the one hand the GUI and on the other the manipulation of the visuals. With ofxOfelia would it be possible to create a single standalone with two windows instead? sorry for the ignorance but I have no experience of OpenFrameworks

I was imagining a diy software for audiovisual
2instance slider.mov

@cipp0 You can do multiple windows if you really need it using pd~ object with ofelia, I tried it without problem. Then you can share data between two pd instance using network or share_mem (shmem in deken) external.

@cipp0 It should be technically possible to create multiple windows in a standalone OF app with ofxOfelia addon by using OF's multi-window trick: https://blog.openframeworks.cc/post/133404337264/openframeworks-090-multi-window-and-ofmainloop But I imagine it won't be an easy task. I think implementing the GUIs in OF and C++ (without Ofelia) for the second window would be easier.

If you really want to do this, you can also consider drawing the GUIs using Tcl/TK, or using an external that allows you draw images on a Pd canvas to mimic the knob.

An iterative spiral, with an image, shader and texture mapping, without touching Lua code directly:

21-0210-iteration-recoded.mp4

hjh

Very nice @ddw_music

without touching Lua code directly:

I am curious about the progression, do you think it could be added to the list of abstractions soon?
I am curious about the needed changes required if it is the case?

Cheers!

I have updated many abstractions, and changed a bit the way some works...
It was ok for my last workshop, but still thinking about a way to make it better.

I'm definitely very late to this discussion but want to see if Gem is still considered a good enough tool for visual programming? I have tried to install it on Linux over the past few weeks and in a lot of cases it just doesn't work. But even when it does, it is not able to playback video well, which means I have to now get inside the video backend stuff and maybe compile the library myself....
So now I am seriously wondering if going through this trouble is even worth it if the library is not being maintained or people are moving away from it.

There are still fantastic things being created with Gem. See Artiom Constantinov on youtube.