Quick Updates

[D56VillageNut]

Cas,

This is like trading in a Model T for a Ferrari.  Even my wife said WOW.  Truly looking forward to seeing this out there.  Awesome work.

Alan T

[Greg]

Cas,

Downloaded your latest video a few days ago, finally had a chance to watch it and Prancer is coming along nicely indeed!

I am really looking forward to seeing your project come to fruition, but, in the mean time, you're making it hard for me to sit down and fill in the grids for this year's show.   

Greg

[castortiu]

After you see the quick updates I’ll publish tomorrow you will feel even more depressed keep working with the grid…

FYI: I decided postpone my show for 2012 if I can’t get a primitive version working, so I’m more interested in make it work than anyone   <fp.

Cas.

[castortiu]

Quick Updates: 9-26-10

More than 60hs spent last week on Prancer, send more cofee please 

Videos now will be more explanatory, they are edited to show specifically the new functionality to make them as short as possible.

The video is about 15 minutes long but I think is worth it since a ton stuff was made, it shows the progress and I’d like to start hear more feedback, thinks are easy to change now than later, feedback also give incentive to show that I’m not making this only for 5 people between the 1300 users

New Terms:

Composite Devices: Devices which share physical channels, imagine two different C9 strings connected to the same channel. Composite devices can be merge/unmerged

Link Effect: This is a very powerful tool, explained in the video about minute 13; Link effect let you combine more than one effect in a single effect, very complex effects can be created using simple effects as foundation. Link effects can be linked/unlinked, multi-link supported (recursive linking) and resample affect all child effects in the link effect (must watch)

Cycle: Effects may be composed by many channel transitions, these transitions are split on cycles, a single effect can contain one or more cycles, and the time slice for every cycle in the effect can be adjusted individually.

New:

Composite Devices: (see above)

Link Effect: (see above)

Cycle: (see above)

Context Menus:

Start to appear the first context menus when the user rights click on Wave Area or Edit Area.

Accelerators:

A few accelerators were added
Ctrl-A: Select all devices
Esc: Deselect all devices
P: Pause/Resume playback
+: Zoom In
-: Zoom Out

Rendering quality:

Rendering quality settings are introduced, the scene can be render with different quality, a very high quality will render a stunning scene, but a powerful CPU/GPU is needed to run smoothly, on the other hand low spec machines can run with low quality and still produce a high frame rate.
Values:
  Bad: Devices are rendered with the minimum amount of triangles, specular lights are disabled.
  Poor: Devices shapes looks somewhat what like the devices created, specular lights are disabled.
  Fair: Devices shapes are very close to the real shapes, specular lights are enabled.
  Good: A good balance between performance and rendering quality, specular lights are enabled.
  Awesome: Stunning rendering and still running on medium profile video cards, specular lights are enabled, textures enabled (not supported yet).
  Insane: Every device is render with very high details, specular lights are enabled, textures enabled (not supported yet).

Visual effect preview:
Rendering effects on the wave area now show the effect, cycle time, intensity and color for each channel.

Copy/Paste:
Copy, Cut and Paste supported for effects, effects can be paste on any device, effect paste on multiple device are allowed as individual paste or combined paste (see video)

Effects selection:
Effects can be single or multi selected, they can be dragged and re-sampled, multi-selection drag all objects at the same time unless the Ctrl key is pressed which allow drag a single effect in a multi-selection

Bug fix:
Thousands plus fixed bug for ruler showing wrong timing.

Optimization:
There were several optimizations in the code to improve playback performance.

Next:
I think enough primitive tools to create a sequence, this will let me find out what is missing and possible implement that.

Cas.

[tennhillbilly]

Here's cheering you on with your development , I don't understand much of it but us old and slow beginners need something easier than what we now have. Thanks ,if we didn't have people like yourself ,RJ and others developing this affordable stuff people like myself wouldn't have blinky .

[KeithTarpley]

Greetings,,,

Watching this.  Think you'll get more feedback when you put out a version that people can try, even if it's not fully ready.  That's when people can see for themselves how things look and feel.

And if it save files, then you will have people trying it right now, I believe.

I do like the effects showing in the waveform, where they can easily be placed.

Keith

[trekster]

I bet you have more followers then you think.  I have been sitting quiet just watching every video you post.  I am very excited about Prancer.  I know it is easy for you because you are making it and know everything about it.  To me it looks kinda of hard compared to Vixen.  I know it is superior to it on the sequencing side and it is just for sequencing.  I just hope you make plenty of detailed "HOW TO" videos when you release it.  Don't be shy to just talk in your videos.  I know no one likes to hear themselves played back.  I think it would be better to simply explain what you are doing in your videos.   I know it is probably lame but the short "how to" videos for Vixen helped me get started.  They were short and simple.  The guy took a picture of Snoopy's dog house,  the peanuts theme and then showed how to set up some channels and some effects.  For me it helped a bunch.  I made a similar set up in Vixen and played it back and it worked.  I then made a bigger one.  Tried new things and was able to learn more and more.  This is my first year (2010) for computer controlled animation.  My show is not as big as others but I have 144 channels.  My first sequence took 50 hours!  I know your goal is to shortening that and make it easier without the grid.  I thank you so much for your time and updates.  And yes I agree with Keith.  As soon as you can release a even partial working copy for us to try out will be great!  You can leave out any export stuff so it would be just to try it out and get a feel of your software.

Is this software planned to be released for 2011 or what?  <pop..

Again.... THANK YOU!

Ron

[rrowan]

Hi Cas,

I have been following along hoping to get a chance to play with Prancer. Sequencing is the hardest part of doing a show for me. So any help with that would be wonderful

Today I took a bunch of pictures of my front yard in hopes of using it with Prancer.

Many thanks for all of your effort and time

Cheers

Rick R.

[castortiu]

I have a mistake in one of my previous post that I may postpone the show for 2012, when really I meant was postpone the show for 2011, the reason why I'm spending a lot of time on Prancer is because I want to produce a working prototype and create sequences for 2010, still there are 5 weeks more before November and give me 26 more days to create sequences.

Thank you for the feedback, I’ll try to come up with something where you can play with Prancer.

One big module still missing is the creation of the patterns, currently I developed the logic and parser to understand patterns, but currently they are created by hand, in a close future there will be a GUI that the user interacts and everything else happen under the hood.

If I make an alpha to play, the user must understand the pseudo language for create patters.

I’ll be creating a sheet with the pseudo language (very few commands available for now so will be piece a cake to understand, I think a huge list of commands will be available when finish with even mathematical functions to be used)

For example:
0:+:100:200 means on channel 0 produce a linear fade-in and start with intensity 100 and end on 200 for the duration of the cycle
10:* means the channel 10 is On to full intensity for the duration of the cycle.

And so on.

Cas.

[dmaccole]

For example:
0:+:100:200 means on channel 0 produce a linear fade-in and start with intensity 100 and end on 200 for the duration of the cycle
10:* means the channel 10 is On to full intensity for the duration of the cycle.

I was trying to figure out what you were doing in those dialog boxes ... now it makes sense (sort of).

Best of luck; don't kill yourself.

\dmc

[castortiu]

Quick Updates: 10-5-10

Well, there has been more than 10 days from the last update.

After the last quick update I decided to follow the advice from the fellows in the topic and focused the whole last week in an alpha version creation.

Has been a very busy week and now Prancer implements many things that are expected from a real application.

An alpha version was created and there were many requests to be in the Alpha testing group.

At the first round just 5 users were added to the Alpha testing group, (7 currently) and it has been a wild ride in the last days.

An installer was created and a couple hiccups prevented them from run Prancer properly, thanks to the reports those issues were resolved very quickly and now we have a stable installer.

I was expecting (hoping) some activity from them to help with the development, and oh boy… the activity is on fire, there are so many PMs back and forth about functionality/bug/requests and feedback that I can’t keep up .

I can’t tank enough to these guys.

I won’t publish the users unless they want to, they are free to add any comment in here about what is the initial experience, you guys rocks.

The topic is so hot that we have already a bugtracking system hosted by one of the guys. And there are 18 tickets already created.

Soon I’ll post a new video with what’s new.

Thanks,
Cas.

[trekster]

This is just so cool to hear about.  "I" thank all of you for the hard work.  I can't wait to watch the next video.

Ron

[castortiu]

Quick Updates: 10-5-10

There are many news, in fact there are so many new stuff that I’ll resume in a few lines.

Current Prancer version is starting to give some rewards.

Still there are many many things to be improved but the main modules are in place.

* Devices creation and location
* Effects creation
* Ability to Open/Save/Save As/New
* Map device channels to physical channels
* And finally export to Vixen is done.

I’m starting to create a real sequence to be used on my show and here is a small progress of it.

I’m uploading a video that has 3 phases, first phase I play the current sequence (carol of the bells) with the current progress. Second phase I show how effects are displayed on the Wave form windows (many effects are overlapped for others and can’t be appreciated), third phase is exporting the sequence to Vixen and playing it (and trying to figure out what is supposed to be happening on the grid  )

Also I'm uploading the draft document that ships with the Alpha.

I'm having troubles to upload the video with my slow connection, I'm uploading in parts, download the 4 zip files and uncompress, then execute carolsofthebells.part1.exe which will put everything togheter.

Thanks,
Cas.

[KeithTarpley]

Greetings,,,

Downloading and running the program to put the zip files together into one mp4 video file is worth it for those who wish to see how this is progressing.

It may be in the Alpha stage, but it's functional, and puts a sequence together that works in multiple versions of Vixen.

Keith

[rrowan]

Hi Cas

Very impresive

I can't wait to give it a try when ready

Cheers

Rick R.