Cinder is fantastic. I spent the start of last year fixing an old iPad app that was built with it called Planetary. It’s free on the App Store if anyone is interested.
Hey, that's stunning. What a stellar experience Planetary was to play with when it came out. The collaboration between Robert Hodgin and Andrew Bell was quite something.
It's always fun to watch Robert talk about the Planetary app in his Eyeo 2012 talk [1] (begins around the 30 minute mark).
Is the updated/fixed code for Planetary available for reference anywhere?
Thanks for the video I’ve not seen that one before. There should be a PR up on GitHub somewhere with my fixes (search kemalenver) and you should find it. We had some issues getting it merged. The work Robert and Tom did with it while at bloom was very cool.
Wow, you actually fixed it! Thanks!
I remember learning about it from one of Roberts videos and being disappointed that it was not maintained/working at that time.
Was a joy to do it while I was in lockdown. It’s a bit buggy but generally works if you have an Apple Music library with some albums added. If you have any issues just kill it and start again!
I just spent 20 minutes on imgui, as well as retained-mode and immediate-mode, and boy do people love to reinvent the wheel.
My guess: they're going to gloat over immediate-mode for a decade or two, then some folks are going to develop retained-mode code (library/framework/whatever) on top of imgui, and then they're going to gloat over that for another decade. And they'd reach a point where we are today. Fantastic.
The guy in the famous 40-minute video, the beginning of which explains RM vs IM, appears to make claims that he's too busy and doesn't have time writing research papers. Wow. He discovered IM on his own probably, and reached the conclusion that he's discovered something no one else has discovered and should be writing a research paper. Jeez.
Who in their right mind would implement retained mode on top of imgui? I'm really struggling to see the thought process that would lead someone to go down that path. It's not like there's a dearth of retained mode GUI frameworks.
Really, the reason people get excited about dear-imgui is the fantastic ease with which it allows you to create debug/dev GUI stuff. This is primarily of benefit in game development, which is where imgui arose and where the vast majority of dear-imgui users work. Once you have it set up, you can place code to create GUI elements anywhere within your application, allowing you to place widgets that let you tune values while your code is running in shockingly little time.
It's not really a good fit for standard application development, though. Primarily this is because it is "bring-your-own-rendering-pipeline." If you know how to set up a simple opengl context this isn't all that difficult, but it's not a route that most app devs are going to want to follow (especially because it kind of assumes you are using a game-loop-type architecture based around a framerate). Some people do use it for user-facing UIs, but that's not where its strengths lie.
I'll be sure to look into Subsync - Much appreciate the link! I'm currently looking at NUSAutoLyrixAlign [1], and am integrating support for it in a pre-processing tool [2]. Ideally I'd like to support multiple sync'ing tools!
I tried Cinder and OF years ago, and then I tried to use Extempore[1] because I prefer Lisps for dynamic programming. I am now trying NAP[2], which was opensourced a few months ago, and Nannou[3] a Rust creative library.
I find the Nannou library to be very intuitive to use akin to when I first found Processing[4] in the early 2000's.
I am not a Rust programmer by any means, but the site and examples are very helpful.
C was the third language I learned starting in the 80s. Assembly and Basic in 1978, so I try to be language-agnostic and go with what works for me, but for creative coding, you need to find what allows your personal expression to flow.
Have used Cinder for the last 6-7yrs or so. Been a fantastic foundation to all of the creative engineering projects at HUSH and various other studios across NYC. Excited to see it receiving attention within the HN community -- definitely a notable C++ framework.
Is it still being actively developed? I used to follow their message board and it felt like it kinda lost steam a few years back. It never quite got the critical mass it needed. The community is tiny.. and other tools have improved substantially. I've seen people do crazy stuff in an afternoon with Touch Designer that would take ages in C++/Cider. There are of course usecases where you need to squeeze out every ounce of performance but that window has narrowed a ton
Can I ask what value Cinder has in a world of Unreal/Unity? I'm guessing you don't use Houdini either since it's not realtime.
But take Unreal for example: you have this absolutely massive world of presets/plugins/etc made by the community. You have Niagara particle systems. You have incredible post-processing / color correction / cinematic grading / etc. You have Blueprints, the ability to write code, etc. You have the entirety of Quixel's megascans, etc. It's almost completely effortless to make unbelievably gorgeous/immersive things, whether it's near-photorealistic environments/landscapes, abstract audio visualizations, full on games, etc.
I'm genuinely trying to understand why anyone who works in interactive/realtime 2D or 3D visualization would ever use Cinder or Processing these days. Thoughts?
I developed in Cinder about 10 years ago. The company I was working for was using openframeworks for a different project and I start looking at Cinder for new version with better features. I started building out a new framework on top of Cinder (https://github.com/Downstream/ds_cinder). It’s still actively developed today and has been used in making a lot of really cool interactive designs. It’s pretty cool to see this project still kicking.
i remember looking into this stuff circa 2014 and thinking cinder was well designed and had a nice interface and consistent interface philosophy, but was not as fleshed out functionality-wise as openframeworks...
openframeworks seemed to have almost everything, but just kind of felt like it had little organization or consistency and instead was just a repository for other libraries.
Is this something that can be used to build VST plugins? I saw that it can be used for audio projects but didn't see anything specifically mentioning VST.
OF is probably better supported by third party developers etc when it comes to plugins and so on from my experience with both. I personally opted for OpenFrameworks as my C++ library of choice after playing around with both for a couple of years.
To be honest though these days I think a lot of people have moved on to visual programming tools like TouchDesigner/VVVV/Notch as it's so much faster to get creative out the door with those and you still get glsl shaders and C++ integration with them.
Saying that with TouchDesigner and Notch youre paying (and in notch's case quite a lot), you can't distribute and files are heavy but when doing interactive installs and shows the benefits far outweigh the price and time saved so we use those tools far more than libraries these days.
Agreed. I haven't used Notch but I have played with TouchDesigner and VVVV and are quite intuitive once you get used to node based layout. I also had trouble installing OF on Windows so I started with Processing/p5.js which was a breeze to set up. I don't know whether that's a fair comparison or not though.
By pure chance I ended up getting in touch with the original developers and a couple of museum curators from Cooper Hewitt who helped acquire the original code as digital art work. https://sebchan.substack.com/p/48-on-planetary-in-2020-curat...
It’s been a lot of fun!