Chrisoft::Blog(r#"Some rants on SMELT, QMidiPlayer and Virtools")

-Well, I have to admit that creating a new blog post but not writing the -actual content until more than a month later is bullshit. I've -almost forgotten what I was thinking about when I created the post... -

-But as you can tell from my recent activity, development of QMidiPlayer -seemed to be stalled. No new features has been added since the rewrite -of the MIDI mapper. However the rewrite is actually for the next planned -major feature: an OPL3 emulator plugin and probably a VST host plugin. -I spent one third of my winter break on reading the specs of the YMF262 -chip but made no real progress, which is a real shame. -

-As for SMELT, I ported it to OpenGL 3.3+ but this is definitely not in -my original schedule. The initial port has a whole bunch of bugs and -quirks, also its performance was poor. Most of these were fixed later on -with the help of apitrace. -However currently the new port still makes way more OpenGL calls than -expected. -

-Planned features for SMELT include vertex array switching, material, -lighting and custom shaders. Adding these features will likely make the -older version deprecated though. Plus there's no strong demand for these -features. Therefore they may not be added any time soon. -

-The Virtools part is an entirely accident. 2jjy and I suddenly got excited -with the Virtools SDK and decided to find out what can it achieve. Before -long 2jjy managed to analyze the internal structure of a Virtools -behavior. These data determines how the behavior graph is presented -in the schemetic interface. Checking 'hide script representation in -schemetic' while saving simply discards these data, effectively obfuscating -the script. The final tool we made public reconstructs the base of this -structure using the logic of the script and tries to arrange behavior -building blocks in a more human-readable way. It definitely helps future -analysis of our old pal (Ballance), but not so much in my opinion. Porting -the custom DLLs used by Ballance to a "newer" Virtools verion might be way -more important. -

-The tool has been -made public. -As the job it does falls into a "grey zone", we don't know whether it is -legally acceptable to use it. Use at your own risk! -