[PD-dev] Inconsistency in behaviour using Gem... my fault?

[Nick Bailey]

Hi pd community. I have a suspected bug but before I raise it with  
the Mac developers, I thought I'd ask some experts to make sure it  
isn't my fault.

Using pd 0.39-2 on Linux (Debian Sid) to do my development, but  
wanting to deploy on my Mac Powerbook using "Pd-extended" 0.39-2  
beta4 from http://at.or.at/hans/pd/installers.html on the Mac  
(there's a 5th beta release on that site, but it won't even start for  
me).

Problem involves a Gem patch. We want to divide a photograph up into  
tiles, so each can individually cross-fade between one photo and the  
next. I made a first rough cut of a UI to do this called  
imageMixer.pd on my Linux box (it's at http://markov.music.gla.ac.uk/ 
boston.tar.bz2 - 465K). After playing with it for a while, I attemted  
to transfer it to my PowerBook, and it sort of worked, but when  
rendering was switched on, I got a continuous message:

	separator : state->numTexCoords 4 != m_state.numTexCoords 0

repeated over and over again. The separator in question turns out to  
be in [pd tile] which is in [pd tile_array] (at the bottom right of  
the patch).

Playing around a bit more, I came up with imageMixer-mac39.pd. This
gets rid of the separator in [pd tile] and just has a gemhead feeding  
both pix_image. This works fine on the Mac (though I was led to  
believe you had to use a [separator] here... why not? Should it not  
work?) but on the linux box it doesn't fade between two different  
images, it fades between image and black.

The final attempt (imageMixer-2.1.pd) simply moves the gemhead  
outside of [pd tile] and back into [pd tile_array]; this works on  
both machines.

Now, this is my first ever pd patch (except for a very simple one I  
wrote to demonstrate writing an LPC pd plugin to my students), and  
certainly my first outing with Gem, so it's very likely I've just  
missed the plot with the semantics of gemheads, separators etc. It  
does look to me like there might be a bug in separator on Pd-extended  
for the Mac though. It is after all a test release. Consequently any  
comments directed to me regarding RPI (removal of pig-ignorance) or  
style criticisms would be very well received. If people think it's a  
bug, I'll file a report with the Mac packager (or maybe s/he's  
already reading this?)

One last question. pd/Gem was certainly a rapid development tool for  
the concert which is going to be in Boston MA in a few days' time,  
but apart from the judicial use of [print] and numbers, staring at  
the code, and bleating for help from my postgraduates, are there any  
better ways of debugging patches? You'll have guessed from my email  
address that I'm from a different programming background, and use gdb  
and the like much more frequently. I've certainly learned to be very  
strict about versioning. Messing around for an hour or so with a  
patch, then not being able to use diff to see what one's ended up  
changing makes one take particular care in that direction!

Thanks in advance for your helpful advice and comments,

Nick/.