Hi,

Sorry if anyone feels it's inappropriate to put all this in one thread. I just want to clarify some bugs / missing features / misunderstandings on my part, in gem (0.90 winXP)


1. Is it currently possible to set light direction, beam width and attenuation rate properties?

2. There appears to be a bug with disabling lights (either by sending a 'zero' message to the gemhead, or physically deleting a connection in the gemlist by hand); they continue to affect the lighting of the scene, in a fairly similar way to if the gemhead render order value was negative (hope that is clear).

3. pix_video with my phillips webcam crashes the program.... I did have a version of this that worked (from a CVS build a while ago, ca. 0.87? 0.84?) on an old(er) machine. I may be able to retrieve it, the harddisk it was on crashed. I will post again if I have any luck with this.

I think that's all for now (and there's plenty I can be getting along with with GEM as it is - nice piece of work). Thanks in advance,

Peter

Yes, this was discussed on the mailing list a bit, and there is a new version of GEM (0.90.1 or something) which fixes it for me and other people. I think it's the version on the main GEM IEM page now, not sure.

With a video capture card

I'd like to be corrected on this one.

It's good to get a chance to be the one doing the helping .

I can remember being a bit confused about this at first, too.

You're may be better off putting compiled externals in the directory 'extra' (assuming it exists, otherwise creating it). Then start pd with something like

c:\pd\bin\pd -path c:\pd\extra -lib mjlib

You will want to make yourself a .bat file with all of this and any other command line arguments (audio and midi config, any other paths (for your abstractions) etc etc) so that you don't have to type all this every time.

If you add %1 to the end of the command line in the bat file, then you can associate it with .pd files and they will open up (unfortunately in a new instance of pd each time) from explorer or wherever.

While I'm here, I might as well add that if your pd install starts getting a bit bloated (which, as half the libraries seem to depend on other libraries, is liable to happen), it might be benificial to not keep everything on one line in the bat file. You can do this by setting and appending / accessing variables something like this:

set pd_path=c:\pd\extra
set pd_path=%pd_path%;c:\pd\my_abs
set pd_libs=mjlib
set pd_libs=%pd_libs%;anotherlib

c:\pd\bin\pd -path %pd_path% -lib %pd_lib% %1

That makes it easier to add and remove things, and check what libs you are depending on, I think.

Hope that helps.

OK, I looked back at the tuorial patches and realised lights can be controlled with 1/0 messages to the light object itself (I guess disabling the gemhead too will cut out some unnecessary calculations).