Album Art

[Nitorami]

I sent it to the list ages ago but the guys seem to be totally absorbed by localisation issues... just enter

monitor = pow (x, y);

where x is smaller than but close to 1, and y is close to zero, into the per frame section, and see the result. The problem with this is that we use factors such as

decay = pow (0.96, 1/fps);

to make presets run fps independantly, but the error will cause this to become >1 on high fps machines and the preset will freak out and become unstable.

martin

[DrO]

well that backs up one of my previous points in that different people using Winamp in different ways want to have different things prioritised and most of the time at least someone is going to be annoyed / frustrated / upset that their most important feature is not being fixed / worked on.

for example, should i have spent time finishing off the Shift+F10 / Windows App key handling patch i've been sitting on for a while for the library? may be not by most people's views but as something i personally use then i thought it more worthwhile to speed up my means of using Winamp. yet i'm sure more people would never notice it and it'll just be deemed as a waste of time / bloat by others.


anyway, i've just given it a go (now that i know how to view the values - didn't really know about the 'N' option) and can confirm the issue. though quite why ns-eel2 is mis-handling things seems very strange... will see what i can try to find out what i can / see if i can fix it. is that the only one that is causing issues or are other functions doing the same sort of thing as well?

[edit]
ergh, assembler code... might take me a bit longer as i'm extremely rusty on such things nowadays.

-daz

[Nitorami]

DrO

I am not attacking you, and I recognize there are priorities. I also recognize that for most users the viz is certainly not the most important feature of MD. But as I put my spare time into it and point out potentially critical flaws, I just do not like this to be ignored. If I am told to shut up because things won't be fixed anyway for whatever reason, fair enough, I can live with that. In which case I'll stop bothering. But to get no response from the list and see unresolved issues lingering for years is not too motivating.

I am also not requesting fancy features but bring to attention certain problems I consider critical. While the error of the pow() function will just make the vis unstable, the A key issue has the potential take your machine down, which I find rather unacceptable, particularly for users who have paid for the pro version. Benski has confirmed the problem (for XP) and looked into it two years ago but he could not solve it, so that is probably a difficult one.

If you'd like to try - run milkdrop under XP with any preset, press the A key for a mini-mashup, then terminate MD. On the next start of MD or after terminating winamp, you'll be likely to get an error message and in one of ten cases, winamp will then hang. If you should still manage to call up the task manager - takes a lot of patience - you'll see 99% processor load, the windows processing queue is virtually dead, and you should be so lucky to be able to kill the process. Using the A key definitely has a russian roulette feeling for me.

On the assembler: I thought MD was written after 2000 ? Who would still use assembler ? It may be worth pointing out that the issue was, to my recollection, NOT introduced with the ns-eel language extensions a while ago. Unlike loops, megabufs etc., the pow() function existed in older versions already and it always had the error.

I am not aware of errors in other functions, and even the pow() function works ok in most cases, just NOT when the first argument is close to 1. Strange, I would have expected that MD would just pass the arguments on to the numerical coprocessor but apparently this is not the case.

Cheers
Martin

[DrO]

i know what you're doing and it's the same as the people sending things to the list about localisation issue.

i can no longer properly attempt to look at the 'A' issue since i don't have a true XP install anymore and doing it via a limited XP VM is not something i really want to do. i did try to look into it as well when i had a real XP machine and was _never_ able to reproduce it.

On the assembler: I thought MD was written after 2000 ? Who would still use assembler ? It may be worth pointing out that the issue was, to my recollection, NOT introduced with the ns-eel language extensions a while ago. Unlike loops, megabufs etc., the pow() function existed in older versions already and it always had the error.

most of the plug-in is c/c++ but as ns-eel uses assembler to do certain aspects in an attempt to do things faster or something like that - it's just how it's implemented. things still are written in assembler if trying to achieve a certain type of performance, etc so just because of where we are, doesn't mean assembler is not relevant - it's just i'm somewhat rusty on such things and i'd prefer to fix the implementation used without having to try to change everything else in ns-eel2 (as that's far far outside of the remit of what i can warrant doing off my own back considering the list of things i actually need to work on).

it does seem to be it's only with < 1 values where things are being incorrectly rounded (have spent more time messing around looking at it instead of working on what i should really have been doing) though i need to properly see what is / isn't being passed through the internal function to work out the cause of the issue (which my gut makes me think it's how rounding of the values is handled).

-daz

[MadnessR]

So, now that MD2 is open-source, how long before you expert programmers out there get us some album artwork? :-)

[DrO]

you can get the code, so you can start on adding it...

[Prenso]

I think it will be at least a year or two before we start seeing any real progress towards a new version or Mod. Ive had so many ideas over the years i swept under the rug since it was not opensource. I am sure everyone has had some badass add-on ideas that they forgot about since it was not readily doable. Just a matter of time before milkdroppers, old and new, start breathing life into these old ideas.