First Post and Dev Update
Scintillator Development Blog
Welcome to the shiny new Scintillator development blog, powered by Hugo, a static site generator, and the Docsy theme. I’ll be using this site to post general updates about the state of Scintillator development as well as to announce point releases of the software.
As Scintillator is an open source project, developed on GitHub, it is my hope that increased communication and visibility will lead to increased engagement with the software. I genuinely want this software to be a benefit to the SuperCollider user and developer community.
As development continues I have the intention of posting an update here at least monthly, if not more frequently, about the state of development and progress towards the first alpha release of Scintillator.
Development Story To Date
The initial commit to the Scintillator Repository was 1 March 2019, so just over a year ago. To begin I followed the Vulkan Tutorial pretty closely, checking in progress periodically for a bit more than a month, until I got to a place where I was getting some graphical output from Scintillator but much of the graphics pipeline was still very much hard-coded. I could render single fragment shader on a triangle and that was about it.
Development stayed dormant for some time while I focused on other projects, but resumed mid-December 2019 after news that I had been accepted to speak at the SuperCollider Symposium at Wesleyan, scheduled for the last weekend in March 2020. I set a goal to have some kind of presentable demo for the symposium and started in on the mountain of work remaining to get to Alpha status.
Since resuming development some of the notable projects I’ve completed are:
- ScinthDef Pipeline Generation - moving the synth away from hard-coded graphics in favor of on-the-fly compilation of a graphics pipline as specified by the ScinthDef mechanism.
- Non-realtime Rendering Support - I made a separation between the realtime render use case, which is optimized to minimize latency, or the time from when an image frame is rendered and when it is shown the user, and non-realtime rendering, which is optimized for frame throughput, meaning that Scintillator will render frames for recording to still image or video as quickly as possible. This also adds support for SwiftShader rendering, allowing for offscreen rendering on devices with no GPU (or even windowing framework, like headless Linux boxes).
- Image Generation Integration Tests - On each commit the Travis Continuous Integration System will now build Scintillator and generate a series of test images, compare them to the reference images, and issue a report about if there are differences. This requires the non-realtime rendering support to render the screenshots offscreen and save them as images, and uses SwiftShader to minimize the chances of hardware differences between floating point implementations creating subtle differences between images on different machines.
- Preliminary MacOS Support - Getting the system to compile on MacOS, building an application bundle, and a followup PR that adds Travis build and test along with more fit and finish, bringing MacOS to comporable to the level of development that the Linux version has reached.
- Support for Image Buffers and Sampling - Analogous to the Buffer class in SuperCollider, the ImageBuffer class allows for reading of a wide variety of image formats, and then rendering those images as part of a Scinth.
Alpha Status
Issues and feature requests are tracked on GitHub. The overall project status right now is that Scintillator is in a pre-alpha state, meaning that it is not yet suitable for release even as an experimental alpha. The purpose of an alpha release, however, is to gather early feedback and identify major issues with the software. So it is not advisable generally to delay an alpha release indefinitely, but rather only until enough of the software is in a usable enough state to respect people’s time in evaluating and providing feedback.
There is a project on GitHub tracking the work remaining for an initial alpha release. In brief, getting this website up and running, adding more documentation on the SuperCollider classes as well as [building scinsynth from source](expand and complete scinsynth building instructions), completing the code signing work on MacOS, and finalizing the Quark setup are all that remains between now and alpha-1, the first release of Scintillator.
Once the binaries are published on GitHub and available for download, at least for MacOS, my plan is to publish the Quark to the master Quark list and send an email to sc-dev and sc-users announcing the general availability of the Quark, setting expectations about the experimental nature and alpha status of the software, and soliciting feedback. And then we’re off to the races!
Overall Roadmap
This is a little bit fuzzy for now, my thinking in general is that I’ll gather some feedback from a few rounds of alpha and then try to assess distance to a public beta.
The difference between alpha and beta to my thinking is around API stability. In alpha software things are still very much subject to change from release to release. Specifically, sclang and/or C++ synth classes are likely to be moved, renamed, deleted, or added. It would not be advisable to plan a major piece or performance around Scintillator at this time, as the entire software is subject to change without notice.
A beta, however, comes with it more of an expectation around stability and support. A beta can be considered a candidate for a full production release, and so, barring bugfixes, major changes to the software are less likely, as a big change is more likely to be planned for a subsequent release of the software.
By that thinking, it’s hard to predict when the software will be ready for transition to Beta. I think there are a few substantial features I would like to have in place before considering a Beta, most notably finalizing the initial concepts around render groups, adding audio input and output, video encoding and decoding, and lastly Microsoft Windows support. These issues are currently tracked in the Beta Release Project, and updates will happen there, with periodic summation here on the dev blog.
Next Steps
If you’ve read this far thanks for your interest in Scintillator! I’m working hard to finalize the alpha release and hope to have that up by mid-April at the latest. Check back here or watch the SuperCollider mailing lists for a release announcement, when the time comes.