But what are your thoughts about it?

EDIT: Since it is now officially confirmed, just wanted to add that despite it takes a bit of free lunch from those familiar with Pd_Lua and those learning Ofelia were - let be honest - simply screwed Beside some particular cons/ pros which now does not have much sense to lament about, it is generally ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC massive leap forward and Imo biggest milestone in already breathtaking speed of Plugdata development.

I ve heard rumors on FB group from a pretty experienced guy in Ofelia, that Ofelia is stop being developed and will be replace in Plugdata by GEM

I tried to get into Ofelia back in the day, but... if you're writing code, you need documentation, and it just wasn't there.

60Hz made some beautiful abstractions for Ofelia. I tried to revise them to support shaders but failed (my updates broke something fundamental and I just ran out of time).

Ofelia rendering looks much better than GEM but I found it to be unapproachable.

hjh

From my side, it's not like I have a very strong preference for either one, I like both. But Gem turned out to be easier to include without having to resort to all kinds of hacks.

I find your attitude quite egocentric and offensive to Timothy and everyone involved in the great development of PlugData, they deserve much better respect and support.

You've been quite disrespectfully on facebook to the Pd community in general with your mentality and rage outburst for being "pissed" about the "discontinuity" of Ofelia (which wasn't discontinued as it was never oficial) and then saying you have abandoned PlugData now for good and are now using MAX4LIVE instead... you have managed your tone about it all here, maybe cause you don't want to get banned here as well, but this information is also found on your personal website and you have even mentioned how you are "rightly pissed" and attacked me there!

You have to be really politically ignorant to treat a comercial software like MAX and Pure Data as equals and rage about a free and open source project not offering what you want, as if you were a "customer" not getting you what you need, for free, when you're not engaged in that community at all. Why don't you try and fix and make Ofelia part of PlugData... why don't you support it financially since you are willing to pay for commercial software instead?

Well, I guess don't do that, go ahead and leave the community, if you do not outburst in rage again and just get banned as well. I guess Open source projects are not for spoiled and self centered people who just want to take and not give anything, and then badmouth the project when it is not "sufficient".

And for the record, [pdlua] has been officially supported and part of PlugData for over a year now and won't ever be discontinued. It's also getting awesome new features like graphics support and inline scripting (as Ofelia offered). But [pdlua] will now just be integrated into ELSE and maybe called something "else".

cheers

Afaik there are feature request github and discord forums/channels for plug data if you want to discuss the direction of the project (though I suppose this could also be an appropriate venue).

Imo your expectations for an announcement on arbitrary channels for a certain library version not being supported anymore are slightly unreasonable.. I would say that if you want to be informed of plug data or development about a certain version of ophelia there are places to follow in order to do so.

I also don't think it's productive to talk about how superior m4L is unless you're making specific feature suggestions for the project you want to use in a productive and collaborative way.

edit: also, a great thing about open source is that if you don't like the direction of a project you are free to make your own fork and add or remove whatever aspects you wish. The maintainers have a right to include or omit features and library for whatever reason though you are of course free to make criticisms or suggestions (though I have to say your tone did come across as somewhat entitled, rather than collaborative.. for instance you could enquire why something might not be maintained anymore before catastrophizing). But if you want a certain feature without doing the work to implement it that can come across as expecting free labor or agreement on aesthetics.

edit2: personally I disagree with alexandre's "everything in 1 lib" philosophy for else (personally I like using many different established libraries that already have equivalent objects) but he does work hard on it and those aspects have driven its adoption in plug data and many other projects. Also he probably (would have been) open to improvements for it in general if you considered them to be lacking and had made pull requests to improve it or at least given suggestions or feature requests instead of/before complaining..