On the project we are working on, things are slowly coming together and for that we have also created a VUO plugin that does quite a few things one of them is creating and aditional window that will serve as a sort of simplified custom looking interface.
The problem that we are facing now is that when the plugin is loaded in VUO it will occasionaly not load correctly and some of the elements in the VUO created window won’t load properly (they are all tied to “Fire at display refresh”, but most frustratingly the VUO file freezezes VDMX even an empty project and just stalls the program.
I have tried to isolate pieces of the plugin, we had a partial version working fine with a window and just few elemnents there, but this version or just parts of it just doesn’t won’t to work. I have identified that “make a text layer” and “make a text image” and those rendered into a window crash VDMX when loaded as a plugin. Funny enough the same “make a text layer” and render that into an image and fed that way into a VDMX layer works OK. But even after removing that the plugin didn’t won’t to work.
I will investigate further and try to pinpoint if the problem is part of the composition. But at this point I wonder if there are some known issues or known problems that I might be missing. The VUO plugin I created does have quie a few things going on. Could it be to big for VDMX? It works fine when run just through VUO.
Any help, insight appriciated
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Do you feel like sharing the VUO plugin for others to test it? Also, what are your system specifications? What does activity monitor say when you run this plugin and VDMX. Does the VUO plugin need Rosetta 2 to run? Is VDMX running under Rosetta 2?
Lots of questions, missing all the details.
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Loads of things indeed. I’ll try to clarify as much as possible. Unfortunatley I can’t share the project at the moment and in this light I have made progres and been able to indentify some of the issues and resolve them.
I’ll start with the computer specifications. This plugin with the coresponding VDMX project has been run and crashed both on a Macbook Pro M2 Pro 32GB of ram and a Macbook Pro M1 Max 32GB ram. I have confirmed now hat both the VUO plugin and VDMX run in natively and NOT trhough Rosetta.
The biggest hurdles seem to be anything that is “render to window”
(for this particular project we need a VUO window that will serve as a controller window and we also publish an image port that is then render through VDMX)
The things that will crash VDMX so far are:
- too many nodes tied to “refresh at display refresh”; after changing to “fire at start” for most nodes the stability improved
- allowing to resize the rendered window, VDMX will hand on a the resizing of the VUO window
- rendering text in window (either as a layer or an image)
- recieve to many OSC messages in the VUO plugin directly; a solution is to publish ports and have VDMX forward them to the VUO plugin
- have VDMX forward image layers into a VUO plugin and render that into the window (oddly enough using Syphon protocol directly in the VUO plugin works and VDMX doesn’t crash)
In the end it seems there are some limitations when a VUO plugin will render a separate window. What will crash it and what won’t seem rather unpredictable, but repeatable once indentified.
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