OK. So another semester has passed, and I'm still stuck with the same dilemma about graphics in Pd.

Gem:

• Pro: Features (image analysis, tons of pix_es).
• Pro: Long history.
• Pro: Design fits well into the Pd paradigm.
• Con: Some students on Mac couldn't use it.
• Con: Some students in Windows couldn't use it.
• Con: How is it 2021 and it doesn't automatically enable antialiasing? (Part of me wants to apologize for being punchy about this, but... it is actually 2021. Anti-aliasing is standard. Because GEM has problems with it, it looks really REALLY out of date. Like, if Pd used eight-bit integer samples only. That kind of out of date. And no, [polygon_smooth] does exactly nothing on my system. I tried. No effect at all.)
• Con: Some more complex use cases were really difficult for me to figure out (e.g., unclear when [pix_buffer] is or isn't needed).

Ofelia:

• Pro: Examples look very slick and performant.
• Pro: Anti-aliasing (generally beautiful rendering).
• Pro: 60Hz's abstractions make it more approachable, for basic use cases.
• Con: Outside of the basic use cases, Lua will be very hard for the students in my class to approach.
• Con: No image analysis features. (Open Frameworks has ofxOpenCV as an add-on, but it isn't easy to use add-ons with Ofelia, especially if I have to provide binaries of my own Ofelia fork to students in both Mac and Windows.) So... "You know how in Gem or jitter, you can read the webcam and do stuff with the data? Yeah. You can't do that with Ofelia." (At which point, clever students would ask why I'm using it at all.) IMO this is a massive, huge, gaping hole in Ofelia's feature set.
• Con: 60Hz's abstractions have so far undergone limited testing.
• Con: I would have to redevelop/port various shaders, and still not approach the number of pixes in Gem.

Max/MSP/jitter:

• Pro: Well, it just works.
• Con: Make me boot into Windows several times a week to prepare course material. Grrrrrr.
• Con: Not FLOSS.

Rewrite the entire course using SC and Processing:

• Pro: Everything works.
• Con: Students here won't touch code.

Quit my job:

• Pro: Relax and make music.
• Con: Run out of money in a few years.

I don't know what to do, and I have about a week to make a decision. If I go with Ofelia, I will have to put off other projects because it's going to take a bunch of work to get a handful of shaders up and running. I don't really want to do that. But, last fall semester, there were a few student machines that just couldn't run Gem. One of them could hack [gemwin] but that kind of thing shakes confidence.

I would really like Ofelia to add ofxOpenCV. I would just about not hesitate to use it then.

hjh

Hi @ddw_music,

I agree every points you mentioned and have the same issues during classes.
I think what would be great is to allow addons to work in ofelia, so we might get help from @cuinjune maybe?

Also for the shaderFX object I think some from @Jona could be ported easily: https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/12152/ofelia-glsl-video-effects
But some people like me had GPU issues with many of the glsl: they might needs a bit of tweaking.

I am also thinking to simplify my abstractions and make them clother to Openframeworks behavior rather than duplicating Gem 3d viewport behavior by default (drawing at top left position, unless a camera object is added)...

@ddw_music Something happened on my MacBook pro running windows 7.
I had experimented running Pd 0.51.1 with wish 86....... to solve antialiasing problems with patch window rendering.
That worked...... but the patches are displayed within a wish 86 window that (at the time...... now unsure) could not be resized. The Gem window still created outside that window of course.... and I think that aliasing in Gem was "fixed".
I had also applied some rules for antialiasing from the graphics card control panel at the time so I am not sure.
Since then...... e.g. in Pd 0.49 with wish 85........ I have no (noticeable) aliasing in Gem 64-bit and don't need to set FSAA for [gemwin] or smoothing.

I cannot really help much as it was a while ago..... I can only give clues...... and I know that you have so many different platforms to deal with.
Good luck.
David.

In any case, after a bout of exhaustion this morning, I decided I need to stay with Gem for now. It's not a significant enough part of the curriculum that it's worth killing myself to rewrite all the lectures.

Fiddling with chroma-key in the other thread also showed me the reality of taking on the responsibility of maintaining a shader library for the 60Hz abstractions. I don't have the expertise to do it well, and no time or energy for it either. I'll publish what I have on github, should be a good starting point for someone else. But that rules it out for my course. I've been quite overworked for a few years now; it would be unwise to commit to both a significant course rewrite and a large development effort to prepare image processors.

hjh

"quit my job and make music" sounds perfect to me.