notes from the bigfug

It?s an increasingly frequent situation where, having just added some new feature to PatchBox (in this case vector text rendering), it becomes plugged in to a wide range of existing functionality that opens up such a huge amount of possibilities I have to go and sit in a dark room for about an hour.
Well, not [...]

It?s well overdue, but am finally getting around to adding font support to PatchBox.  Rather than using bitmap based fonts, I thought it would be fun to use the font outlines and create proper 3D models.  Here?s how it went:
 
Having extracted the glyph outline using FreeType2, let?s draw it with GL_LINES? ah?

GL_LINE_STRIP isn?t correct either?

Ah, [...]

Some eye candy from the last week?s developments!
     

I?ve been working on the AudioBox analysis engine for quite a few years now!
It?s taken a long time to figure out how to get the type of tempo detection I was after.  Most existing systems seem to work on the bass frequencies, which is fine for music with drums, but I was looking for [...]

PatchBox is becoming quite the powerful tool for architectural video mapping but sometimes even I miss a certain sense of immediacy that I’ve grown accustomed to from my years of VJ’ing.
It was with much delight then that I received a link from my old chum (and favourite Stylophone player) Tom Hume last week pointing me [...]

Unexpected moment of Google Comedy

Am just ironing out a few minor niggles in PatchBox and creating a few extra scripts and shaders before we pack up for the event tomorrow.
The Eye-Sphere image is absolutely nothing to do with it, but it’s kind of strange…
The latter shows a cheap shadow shader effect I came up with that draws an offset [...]

While testing PatchBox with multiple monitors turned on, the CPU usage suddenly shot up to 95% for absolutely no reason at all.
Disabling the second monitor brought it down to less than 1% (where it should be!)
Using ProcessExplorer I saw that two threads were taking up all the time with very similar stacks:
ntkrnlpa.exe!KiUnexpectedInterrupt+0×121
ntkrnlpa.exe!ZwYieldExecution+0×1c8e
hal.dll+0×2ef2
nvoglnt.dll+0×25d20b
I remembered reading that [...]

PatchBox r281 with Relief Mapping
I’ve now replaced all the fixed-function rendering in PatchBox with CGFX shaders!? This means that every pixel drawn to screen is now configurable – even in edit mode.
Also did some more work on my CGFX shader implementation, adding support for more semantics, and calculating bi-normals and tangents for the quads, which [...]