[PD] Ergates game-like audiovisual instrument

[Chris McCormick]

On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 09:13:39AM +0200, alberto.zin at poste.it wrote:
> - get the -> last <- s-abstraction pack (I didn't
> have sx/shadow..)
> - on XP, like Frank said, I had to disable the loadbang
> feature (otherwise PD crashes immediately). So I load the
> patch by starting PD with -noloadbang

Which version of Pd is this? I am going to see if I can reproduce the
crash tonight. I will also see if I can run it on a friend's Windows box
as I've never tried that.

> - press the messages activated by loadbang by hand (at least
> the one I was able to find)

I think you can just send Pd a message "loadbang" to emulate this
behaviour:

[;                    (
[pd-main.pd loadbang; (

Of course that won't send one to all loadbangs in all subpatches etc.

> - for some reason I had to make the font arial.ttf
>  visible to GEM (it wasn't, maybe my setup of GEM is
> not optimal...)

The fonts are in a different directory I think. Maybe they didn't check
out from CVS correctly or something? Can you verify that the fonts/
directory exists and has .ttf files in it? If they are there can you
look at the Gem help patches in Gem/05.text and see if they work ok for
you? Maybe try substituting different fonts.

> At this point I can see the GEM window more or less
> like in your screenshots, with the geos floating, but still
> I got a lot of error messages from GEM:
> 
> GL: value not valid
> error: inlet: expected '' but got 'gem_state'

That is a weird one. It sounds like something is connected to a gem
object expecting a gemhead but getting something else. What does it show
you if you do "find last error" from the menu?

> Any hints ?
> 
> In any case no sound.

Hmmm. I wonder if I have screwed something up in a commit of
s-abstractions. I will try doing a fresh checkout of everything using
pd-0.40 tonight.

> Hopefully this weekend I'll try to make a in-depth
> look at it, also on Linux. Indeed it would be very nice if
> you can get the joypad working with [hid] instead of python..

That's my aim but I need to investigate how stable [hid] is, how easy it
is to compile and use etc. I just want to use whatever is easiest for the
user to install and the most widely distributed cross platform solution.

> A question:
> How do you switch between the patterns you show in
> your screenshots?

According to the instructions page you use the left and right shoulder
buttons to navigate between instruments.

I really need to make the 'help overlay' button work. Which means for
each instrument you will be able to press that button and it will grey
out the background and bring up a line drawing of a gamepad in the
foreground with the buttons labelled with their function. From the
screenshots I think that fijuu has something like this. At the moment
it's a bit of a mystery for the user what all the buttons do in Ergates.

Thanks for the bug report!

Chris.

-------------------
chris at mccormick.cx
http://mccormick.cx