This is a problem that is being around since a while with contributors, that in my opinion (and many others think in the same way) could be solved creating a Foundation around VVVV, where the users can decide where to put the money on.
Look at Blender example, it was a niche tool and now is the industry standard.
I propose that one day a month we all get together and talk about how VVVV has changed our lives. We will declare our love for the developer, admire his talent and describe our favourite solutions.
In general, I guilty of criticising some of the solutions used sometimes. But I would like to say that I love VVVV and everyone involved in it with all my heart. I believe and hope that the developers understand that my goal and purpose is to help develop, not to criticise. I try very hard to strike the right tone. I’m sorry if I don’t.
Perhaps we should start our comments with this kind of disclaimer.
@yar if I responded to that I would be criticising your criticism of my criticism about Lasals criticism. I think everyones heart is in the right place and all this discussion is valuable.
Yep! I understand
I wrote rather in agreement with you.
Regarding default format in IO Boxes:
Floats and vectors should have higher resolution, just 2 digits is not enough for the 90% of the cases.
Maybe the motivation was to have a much lighter UI, but right now the UI looks lighter enough to display more digits.
I would say that 4 or 5 digits by default would reduce the users level of frustration.
Ok here’s my thoughts on vvvv development at the start of 2024.
It’s an essay rather than answering the questions.
I want to start by acknowledging that I think vvvv gamma and vl is a huge achievement.
IMO it’s the worlds first working visual programming language that gets beyond ‘wires’ to actually being able to describe programming paradigms with the same complexity as professional textual coding languages. I cannot stress enough how big of a deal that is.
If you look at media art tools of similar vintage as vvvv (Eg TouchDesigner, Resolume, Reaktor, Ableton Live, Arkaos), to their credit those tools are all still around but I don’t think any of them achieved such a huge evolution as vvvv over the last 10 years.
To me vvvv is the clear leader in real-time visual programming today.
In that same time some frameworks have seen the value of visual coding and implemented their own node based solutions (Resolume, Unity, Unreal) and new tools have appeared (Bitwig, Cables.GL) but these visual environments are at most using vvvv beta type concepts.
VVVV gamma is literally a decade ahead.
I also want to acknowledge that vvvv group is a small business, not a huge corporation or an overhyped start-up. And a small business that has prospered for over 20 years and achieved more with much less resources than corporations and start-ups, also with an incredibly generous licensing model and many hours spent on near real-time community engagement and support.
vvvv has had absolutely breakneck feature development over the last 10 years. Check it out:
https://thegraybook.vvvv.org/roadmap/past.html
This feature development has made vvvv capable of general software development, which as I say I think is amazing. But there has been a cost.
IMO The cost of such a tight focus on shipping features and expanding general programming functionality is that documentation, UX and media arts specific features are not where the community expects them to be for a media arts tool.
I think a good example is the Reactive functionality.
Reactive provides an incredibly flexible and robust way to deal with all IO.
And crazy IO is close to the heart of interactive media arts, MIDI, OSC, LED protocols, Key/Mouse, MQTT etc.
Reactive enables message based programming where all of this IO can be reacted on with different timings to the mainloop rendering.
It’s a complicated paradigm but was necessary to implement to really unlock the full potential of these protocols without restriction.
I would say Reactive is an example of a general programming concept that brings great benefit to the media arts specific Iusers.
YET IMO Reactive is relatively poorly documented and poorly understood by the media arts users that it is there to benefit. The learning curve actually got steeper to use protocols you thought you understood from vvvv beta.
What I’m trying to illustrate is that the huge investment in general programming functionality over the last 10 years with vvvv gamma is not always able to be accessed by all media arts users.
(Personally I am planning a simplified reactive tutorial video, hoping to improve this particular situation)
Now that vvvv has a strong backbone of general programming functionality, what next? Because although it’s niche at the moment the potential is huge. You can write almost any kind of app with vvvv if you wanted to.
In my opinion it makes sense to focus again on features that improve the experience, capability and commercial viability of media arts users.
Consolidate all the incredible general programming capabilities of the last years by making them better documented and easier to use for media arts users.
Two reasons
-Media arts users are still the core users of vvvv, and as other posts in this thread discuss if you pick up vvvv gamma today some things are harder than they should be. Serving these users better and helping them thrive helps vvvv thrive in the short and medium term. Media arts is a good niche and vvvv is well positioned as the language that lets you really take control of what a machine does. I think serving these users better will grow these users.
-Long term I think the more that general programming can become like media arts programming (Eg fun, inspiring, creative, real-time) this is how vvvv gets closer to conquering the world.
I think we are already going in this direction, features like Global Channels and recent UX improvements are a great start.
I am also advocating for a user survey, I would revise this list on seeing the survey results.
But as a first hunch I think there are four areas of action:
Issue is still a huge learning curve coming to vvvv gamma. Now you have to think like both a Media Artist and a Software Developer.
Because I’m not a beginner it’s hard for me to appreciate their perspective.
I would suggest
-Interviews with students and teachers to find out what blocks them and improve it.
-Improve the F1 functionality further, both with better coverage of factory libs and maybe putting the ‘this node also used in’ patches directly in the tooltip.
-Improve visual communication options on a helppatch so they can be better tutorials. Could be improved formatting of links (Hidden links…), images, videos embedded on the patch etc.
-Help library developers improve the F1 coverage in their libraries, perhaps a tool to see which nodes don’t have F1 links. Incentives or prizes for best helppatches?
-I like @Thomas_Helzle suggestion of more short intermediate videos that try and break open a complex concept for everyone to understand.
I think the other posts in this thread already point to a number of improvements that can be made for these users. Its looking like quite a big backlog of small and big things.
Not all of this is responsibility of vvvv group, some of it is Fuse and Kairos and other library developers and thought needs to be put into how to ensure everyone feels good about their contributions when those are perceived as essential to vvvv as a media arts tool.
Long term in this area I would look towards innovations in the VL language and gamma editor that make complicated programming concepts easier to use. Like @sebescudie suggestion of visualisation in reactive links when a message passes through.
On the community side I would like to see more sharing of working media arts patches. The helppatches are a great start but imagine a kind of shadertoy vibe where people frequently share working ‘toys’ as inspiration. Also the amazing initatives we have had in the past to show how the generative gestaltung processing examples could be achieved in vvvv. Maybe some way to incentivise this kind of share-out of media arts practice? Cables.GL has a good setup of monthly featured patches, maybe something like that in help browser?
As I said I think general programming features should be a lower priority for a little while, but not completely zero. I think it’s always worth doing some work here because it’s the groundwork that enables the community to help itself and empower vvvv further.
-Upcoming work on attributes looks exciting, will enable more auto GUI and better auto serialisation.
-More tutorials that enable people to wrap .net libraries and become library developers themselves. Or improve the standard lib to eg get more out of stride.
Incredible innovation is still at the heart of vvvv, and still gets us ahead.
Still got to have a moonshot going on in the background, eg
-vvvv on macOS
-vvvv in the browser
-vvvv export for other platforms
-vvvv editor as a product that can be implemented in vvvv applications for end-user scripting, or to make ‘mods’ of vvvv applications.
-realtime collaborative programming (boygrouping)
-What is the role of a visual language in a future where lots of the ‘interior’ bits of code will be AI generated? It’s easy to tell ChatGPT to solve programming problems “write code for rectangle intersects rectangle” but it’s not easy to tell ChatGPT to solve design problems “Write me an app for playing music, it should have a sign up screen, then a terms and conditions screen with different t&cs for each language, and then a home screen like this, and then a play screen like that and then and then and then”.
I think describing a quality experience will always involve a visual language. (Like current development practice where you show a real developer a figma file)
That’s my thoughts on vvvv development.
Looking forward to using it for another 15 years.
Well, PureData and Reaktor were already there since the 90’s.
I didn’t mention PureData/MaxMSP because I would say it truly is in an earlier generation. But also something vvvv beta improved upon vs their ‘everything is a bang’ paradigm.
Reaktor I would say is comparable with vvvv, just a few years before.
Nevermind…
Nevermind…
Well said @tobyk also regarding
On the community side I would like to see more sharing of working media arts patches
People need to post patches instead of screenshots more. It was fundamental to early beta, that people shared patches, so you could see how thing go wrong, and then have patches that fix them. Its all very well looking at a picture, but inspection the patch is super useful for understanding behind the scenes, the thinks you don’t know (that many older users might just take for granted) I’ve have said a few times in element chat, I think forums beat web2.0 chat, structured threads with titles work better than 1 chat with branches. Not that chat isn’t useful too, but it has meant that instead of a lot of people having an eye on the forums to help out, its all mushed up in the chat, even if the website does keep giving the devs grief! :D
Nevermind…
I would like to see how many people has changed their minds in 10 years.
Obviously quite interesting and still super relevant thread.
+10000 making everything have a cool help patch
I guess its mainly about resources, how many people can write tutorials etc.
Core tech in vvvv is better than TD, but TD is faster to make cool preset things.
To compare it to notch houdini etc youre missing a bunch of users that only do DMX for example. 14 years ago most of the media arts tasks were championed in performance by 4v, now that performance is not an issue, focus should be to make it super easy for new people to start using it.
I’m not saying that’s not happening, just saying thats the most important thing.
2.4 What do you think VVVV has lost along the way from Beta to Gamma?
It has lost the improvisational feeling of connect anything everywhere and see what happens. Now with datatypes surrounds, F9, etc. You have to think more.
RE: The pro economics
I’ve lost many/most clients to unreal now, and I think that needs thinking about. My thoughts then are much as they are now, we need to help and share more each with other, otherwise it will just become even more niche. vvvv has gone from 90% of my work, to a hobby/ mostly personal projects and that saddens me.
@catweasel Sorry to hear that, i think this is a common feeling right now in the community.
I totally agree on helping each others, and an essential way to do this is to offer designer oriented tools and libraries to the community and eficient ways to teach & learn, in order to be more competitive in our work against similar platforms.
Right now this part has been made mostly by very kind contributors and companies, and I really hope the next steps in vvvv group development go in this direction, not just relying on private contributors.
Other important part here in order to get more jobs, is the visibility in social media (sorry but Mastodon doesn’t count here), this has been done mostly by motivated vvvv artists and designers.
The more artists involved, the more visible vvvv will be, and more companies will be interested…
I’m suffering the migration to Unreal and Unity aswell, this is why i’m trying to focus my current work more on non screen based projects and software development for artists and designers.
Nevermind…
Tooll presented at, I think, NODE15 festival. In my experience, the vvvv community has always been quite open to other tools.
The main thing that draws me to vvvv, and have since 2006, the ability to interface to more or less anything.
while vvvv is quite capable of creating wonderful 3D graphics, it is for me and my use case not the main attraction.
Of course I have areas I would like to see improved, mainly audio and video handling, as the creeps up in my work more and more.
For that a robust non-Realtime way of working with video and audio would be nice.
I do know that I am moving at the edge of what vvvv is designed to do, but I think it would open up for doing more interesting stuff.
So while I am all for and love seeing FUSE and more fancy 3D is evolving beautifully, I also think having the AV integrator or whatever you can call that, in mind is important.
oh, I forgot, the most important thing about vvvv, is the community!