[PD] data structures......

Sat Nov 29 02:49:22 CET 2014

Hi Joao,Those features won't be available in Pd-extended-- the GUI part depends on a library called tkpath which Pd-extended doesn't use.
The tentative plan is to port Pd-l2ork's GUI to Qt, leveraging QGraphicsview or QML.  The features I've added should be common to any modern 2d API that does "managed" graphics.  That includes Qt, SVG, probably GTK as well, but unfortunately not Tk.
-Jonathan

     On Friday, November 28, 2014 5:28 PM, João Pais <jmmmpais at googlemail.com> wrote:

 #yiv8787092339 body {font-size:13px;}Hello,
I haven't been using Pd regularly for a while now. But as I remember, the biggest disadvantage of data structures isn't really that they're "buggy" (i.e. have some issues that usually don't happen in other pd objects, as Jonathan listed), but that there are very few possibleoperations. Any patching requires lots of work to do things that on other parts of Pd happen very easily. Looking at the ftm library, could be a way of a goal of what could be done using data structues (not even to mention the audio part).
Also, because of the gui issues, data structures can't really be relied upon for non-slow (i.e. medium and fast) graphics. It just takes lots of cpu (at least it does on my windows machines).

There is also the steep learning curve, but I've seen gradually more people working with them, so that generates a positive loop. I don't know if my tutorial helped much (based on the ones of F Barknecht and G Karman), but every step counts.One can also have a look at my abstractions in extra/jmmmp, several of them are made with data structures - including [matrixctrl], quite useful as a gui for [iemmatrix/mtx_mul~].(btw, I was just trying to upload my tutorial to puredata.info, but the website gave an error. I'll keep trying)
Jonathan, when will your new features be available in Pd Extended? I could try to update my tutorial with them. I'm not using linux anymore, so I won't be working with pdl2ork.
Best,
Joao

 On 11/23/2014 11:26 PM, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote:

 don't even remember cause I stopped messing with it because of them, but I did discuss about them sometime ago here on the list, with joão pais, the bottom line is that they were indeed buggy like that and that you had to cope with it. 

 Well, there are a few areas I can think of:
 1) changing contents of [struct] when you have scalars in a canvas.  Pd goes through and conforms the scalars to the new [struct] definition, but the old definition sticks around, too.  This seems to cause problems in some cases, and possibly crashes when you have array fields inside the [struct]-- especially if you make changes to the [struct] for that array.
 2) scalars inside a gop.  These are prone to all kinds of weirdness, though it's unclear what constitutes a bug here:
 * there's a red gop rectangle for putting objects which you want to show up on the parent, but scalars get scaled and displaced as a function of subpatch's window dimensions and x/y ranges/sizes.  This makes it difficult to tell where the scalar will appear inside the gop, as well as blasting the scalar off into the nether regions of the subpatch if you decide to turn on gop.
 * iemguis outside of the gop rectangle won't show up, but scalars will
 * while the gop rectangle does not affect the appearance of a scalar, it _does_ affect the scalar's widgetbehavior.  Thus you can click a scalar only if it's within the gop boundaries.  You can drag a scalar outside of the boundaries, but once you release the button you can't drag it back.  (Same with a "Put" menu array.)
 * text appearance is limited by tk canvas implementation.  So the x/y units setting of a gop canvas will affect polygon appearance, but the text itself won't rescale at all.
 * canvas "clear" method clears out the gop settings (at least I think it does).  The "coords" and "donecanvasdialog" methods take an enormous list of positional arguments that are impossible to remember
 * x/y margins apparently have no effect on scalars, although Pd lets you set them

 It's difficult to figure out how to make that scalar behavior in gops more sensible.  It's tricky because gop currently acts like a "viewport" somewhat in the svg or opengl sense, yet it doesn't clip or even respect the "size" attributes if the subpatch is open.  "Put" menu array sizing and [table] widgetbehavior are affected by this, so if scalar gop appearance were simplified then garrays would have to be decoupled from that behavior.

 -Jonathan

  cheers  
 2014-11-17 2:50 GMT-02:00 Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika at yahoo.com>:

  On 11/16/2014 10:55 PM, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote:

 my two cents is that the data structures are still a bit buggy to work on. Just hoped they'd be more stable, other than that, can't  relate to the commotion, cheers 

 What kinds of bugs are you running into?

 -Jonathan  

 2014-11-13 13:45 GMT-02:00 Jonathan Wilkes via Pd-list <pd-list at lists.iem.at>:

   It's certainly possible.  There's a Pd-l2ork script for creating a "vanilla" tarball with the l2ork changes in it, so I guess you could try dropping the src and extra from that into libpd's pure-data directory  and see what happens. 
  But I don't know much about libpd.

  -Jonathan

       On Thursday, November 13, 2014 4:38 AM, i go bananas <hard.off at gmail.com> wrote:

    in relation to Pd-l2ork, 
  guys, what's the status of having a 'libpd' for l2ork???  is that possible?   
  sorry for going off topic...but it is  something i have wanted to ask for ages.    
  On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 6:33 PM, i go bananas <hard.off at gmail.com> wrote:

 IOhannes,  
  that's kinda what i thought.... 
  but really, come on...pd's interface is  it's weakest point.  When miller started working on the  data structures, libpd and all  that didn't even exist.  But now, we can just farm  out that sort of stuff to other  programs.  

 Compared to the amount of  effort it takes to learn them, and how  effective they actually are,  data structures are just too  un-economical.  
  in nearly 15 years of their  existence, i think i can still count on  both hands how many good  implementations of them i have seen.

 look, i LOVE pd and  couldn't live without it....but it  just seems like any minute spent on data structures is  a minute that could be way better spent on other stuff. 

   On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 3:54 AM,  IOhannes m zmölnig <zmoelnig at iem.at> wrote:

  On 11/12/2014 03:33 PM, i go  bananas wrote:
 >
 > couldn't that work be put to better  use?
 >

 depends on your definition of  "better".

 if i understand  correctly, "data structures"  have been _the_ motivation
 for writing Pd (as opposed to  continue with max), so i think we owe  them :-)

 gfmrdsa
 IOhannes

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