Hi
The last two months I've been working on management system for a preset
system based on SenseWorld's quark ParameterSpace class* and on the ixi
quark ParaSpace gui. The objective is to make it easy to assign Synth's
arguments to a particular preset in a 2D space.
The logical organizataion is through Collections. Each Collection is a 2D
space where presets can be saved. At setup time a group of synths is
connected to the system, the arguments of the synths can then be assigned to
any of the collections, and new collections can be created and deleted
through the gui. The position of the preset in the 2D space and of the
cursor can be changed by dragging in the Gui.
There is also a system to make movements through the space. These can be of
3 types, a recorded movement (using ParaPath, which is a copy from the
trajectory class of the WFS system, thanks Wouter !!), a movement defined by
a math equation (e.g. (x,y) = (cos(2pift),sin(2pift) ) or a movement defined
by a differential equation.
I created a Solver class for solving systems of ordinary differential
equations of any order. The solving method can be choosen, altough I default
on Runge-Kutta order 4 since it's the most widelly used and recommended in
the literature. This class is quite independent of everything else to it can
be used for anything really (simulate springs, pendulums, chaotic systems,
etc)
Although the lib is basically working, I'm having lots of problems with
performance/cpu issues. Since I have been basically stuck for the moment I
decided to release the code here, even if there is probably one or two bugs
still, in the hope that someone can figure out what I can do to solve this.
Basically I'm getting huge cpu usage whenever the number of synths and
parameters tracked increases. this comes from 3 places, the gui refresh,
the physical simulation calculations and the interpolation calculations.
About the screen refresh there's not much that can be done inside sc, and
that is more a less under control (10% - 15%). the other two cpu sources
easilly get out of control. With something like 20 synths, with 20
parameters each sc just blows up with 100% cpu usage. The calculations don't
seem complicated to me, and I'm sure they are tiny compared to what is going
inside a synth in the server. So my question is, what is causing this cpu
usage ?
1 - My code is not well written and is not optimized.
2 - I have hit the limit of what the sc language environment can do in
terms of heavy calculation stuff.
The solutions I can see are not very nice. One would be to rewrite
everything in c++, for example with OpenFrameworks for nice visuals and
contact with sc via osc. I could also write everything as language plugin,
using the new system released recently. finally I though of implementing the
calculations with a synth running in the server at control rate with a lot
of outputs (one per parameter per synth) and then connecting those outputs
to the correct synth.
the first two options are not really options for me, because I'm very
amateur at writing c++ code, I can compare code and change this or that, but
I can't really write something like this from scratch. So this leaves me
with the third option. Any other suggestions ?
pic: http://www.friendlyvirus.org/files/Imagem%203.png
code: http://www.friendlyvirus.org/files/MultiParameterSpaceEditor.zip
there's an rtf file with an example.
cheers,
--
Miguel Negrão // ZLB
http://www.friendlyvirus.org/artists/zlb/
* Basically I copied the entire class and adapted it such that everything is
an array, so that it becomes easy to track several synths at the same time.
This lib uses adapts code from SenseWorld's ParametricSpace class, from the
ParaSpace gui from ixi Quarks and from the WFS library WFSPath class from
Wouter Snoei. Thanks !!
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