what's new in Snowflake...

[MyCo]

Hi,

What a weird name for a part of software, that's that huge

I thought I demonstrate some of the new improvements and features. Let's start with the good news for all previous S|M users. The Devs improved the oscillators, the difference on SSE2 machines like most audio geeks have, is huge. Take a look here:

Saw oscillator

saw.jpg (60.6 KiB) Viewed 28261 times

Wave table oscillator

wavetable.jpg (61.68 KiB) Viewed 28261 times

Sine oscillator

sine.jpg (60.61 KiB) Viewed 28261 times

Basically, that are ~33% less in most of them.

[MyCo]

The next new thing is in the redraw method inside Ruby. Now you can pass a rectangle as parameter to it, so you can do partial redraws now. That's very good for big GUI components!
But actually it's not possible to know inside the draw method, if you should do a full redraw or a partial redraw. Malc said, that this won't change, because of the internal structure of FS. I think, we can live with it.

Here is a simple Demo:

Area redraw demo (MyCo).fsm

(1.94 KiB) Downloaded 1137 times

[MyCo]

The last new thing, that I'll show: There are some new functions for GraphicsPath. With those new functions, you can do hit testing on any path, no matter if it's flatt or curved. I've attached a demo that demonstrates the functions "isOutlineVisible" and "isVisible". BTW: It also shows Pen.getWidth, but that's kind of trivial.

[MyCo]

Just to complete the first post. Here are the benchmark schematics, that I've used for the oscillator CPU measurement.

[trogluddite]

Top stuff, MyCo, thanks for all those funky examples.

Snowflake -
Hmmm, I can see where that came from - here in the UK we had our first snow of the year this week, and "down south" got it the worst - where better to look for 'poetic inspiration' than just outside the window!
This is a strange thing about the UK - all of the media is based in the south, so if they get one flake of snow in London, they get crazy about how it is going to be "the worst winter for a zillion years". Up here in the North , it can snow as much as it likes, and they take no notice at all!

[Jay]

Lol yeh it is funny how the south of England reacts to the snow! one snowflake and the motorways grind to a halt and the supermarkets run out of all the essentials because of panic buying!
Down your neck of the woods ppl are made of hardier stuff trogg! In fact you Yorkshire folks are pretty damn near as Scottish as you are English IMHO!

In fact the ppl of Doncaster are defo Scottish lol http://uk.news.yahoo.com/doncaster--is- ... light.html

last week when it snowed up here, I was doing some shopping in Glasgow and all the young folks were wandering around in tee shirts,short skirts etc! It was minus 2deg according to my car temp readout! lol


Oh and before i forget my reason for posting, Myco did you user modules still keep their tags and position within the toolbox? mines never! they were all there but mixed into the preset toolbox sections/categories!

[Walter Sommerfeld]

My User Tags are gone... = Reset ?

btw: Robotics always missing

[tester]

I have not tested yet, but simple question to sine oscillator (and I guess others too).

If you create exact 100 seconds long (=0.01Hz accuracy) sound sample on sine osc - does it loops without a glitch? In SM I've noticed, that buit-in oscillators were not accurate (zero crosing), thus it was not possible to create loopable sound samples. There was some work done (SM forum) on alternative sine osc with proper frequency handling, but it had a problem with accurate phase offsets, plus for some reason - not always worked (activated) in multi-design.

The speed improvement is a good news; my little big old project was reaching CPU peak very quickly

[Nubeat7]

thanks myco for your documentation!
oh yes its the same at mine ... all my own tools are somewhere, i think its because all the user categories were deleted after the update... but i uninstalled the old version before i installed the snowflake, so maybe it was my fault?

hmm, are the user tags saved with a project? because i often load modules in my toobox which created for the actual project ...

[support]

MyCo, this is a great post - thanks for taking the time to highlight this. Thanks also for your help in making these changes in the first place. You all may not be aware but MyCo was the catalyst for these changes and he also suggested the optimisations as well.

Yes, snowflake was a reference to the time of year and the change in weather. Yes Jay, you're right, we're never prepared for snow down here in the South These names have been introduced to give the releases a bit more character. Sometimes they will reference what's in the update and other times (like this) the link will be a bit more tenuous.

Re. the toolbox tags - has something gone wrong? Really sorry if we broke something. We forgot to mention in the release notes that we changed how the module tags work because it was causing problems for people bringing .hom files from SM or when there were duplicate names. All module tags are now stored with the module only and not in the tag files. Before Snowflake they were stored in both. So the only change we made is that software no longer looks in the tag files for module tags - only in the module.

What's happened? Have you lost tags?