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written by: john

Yes, it's all the wire routing information and the Agent positionioning that's missing. As far as the setup running you're in good shape. We have thought about adding the ability to put the positioning and routing into Belcanto as this would be useful for scripting, but I have gone off the idea recently as it really wouldn't add anything useful - it's pretty much impossible to do a nice layout programatically (think of how time consuming and bit fiddling GUI programming is without a tool to help) in any sensible amount of time and it is a reasonable amount of work to add.

John

written by: 0beron

Tue, 4 Dec 2012 13:31:09 +0000 GMT

In one of the recent threads I read something that John wrote in response to questions about workbench. So as not to hijack the thread, I'm starting this one.

John stated that workbench cannot reliably edit a setup that someone has been hacking at with belcanto, and it made me wonder - what is the difference between a setup that I've been fiddling with in eigencommander, and say a setup to which I've added talkers (in workbench), which fire belcanto phrases (which I've typed into the workbench gui dialogs). If I then use those talkers, doesn't the setup potentially go into the same state of mismatch between WB and belcanto?

I'm interested in what is missing from WB that it can't display - it seems pretty comprehensive. If I create agents in the commander I expect to see them pop up in WB. Their positioning on the canvas won't be terrific by default but I can untangle that if I need to.


written by: john

Tue, 4 Dec 2012 14:33:48 +0000 GMT

It's not that you can't edit a setup that's been hacked at with Belcanto using Workbench, you can, if you are determined enough, do that. From experience though, once you have enough (and it doesn't take much) in the way of wiring changes or Agent creation/deletion it's really hard and very time consuming to sort it out. If you create one Agent and connect a couple of wires then you'll be able to tidy it up in Workbench, but much more than that rapidly gets unmanageable. In general, using belcanto to configure an Agent (like a Talker) is trouble free, it's when you need signal routing and new Agents it all goes to pot.

I really, really don't want to end up with setups kicking around that can't be usefully or easily opened in Workbench. While it is currently possible to make that happen it's potentially a real problem for the community and Eigenlabs. As I've said before, modifying setups in Belcanto is not something we want to remove but it is severely discouraged and if it started to become common then we probably would have to remove the ability to do that before it totally broke our world. We really don't want to do that - it's handy to be able to do the odd routing thing (and as you point out, fix it later using Workbench) in Belcanto. It's not in any way essential though an I'd rather not have it than have two classes of setups begin to exist, those that can be usefully opened in Workbench and those that can't.

I know that there are people who would like to not spend the hundred pounds or so extra it costs to get Pro and hence Workbench but still want to modify and configure their setups beyond what is possible using Stage. This is understandable, but Belcanto is not a solution for this beyond the smallest changes.

John


written by: 0beron

Tue, 4 Dec 2012 15:02:43 +0000 GMT

I have workbench, and I use it for almost all configuration now, I was just worried that something fundamental would be broken if I for example made a talker that created agents on the fly (no idea why I might want to but it might be useful for something!)

So the mismatch is purely the X-Y position and cable routing ? If so then that's reassuring in that the workbench view of the world is otherwise complete. I can see though that a scrambled setup would be a royal pain to disentangle.


written by: john

Tue, 4 Dec 2012 15:42:16 +0000 GMT

Yes, it's all the wire routing information and the Agent positionioning that's missing. As far as the setup running you're in good shape. We have thought about adding the ability to put the positioning and routing into Belcanto as this would be useful for scripting, but I have gone off the idea recently as it really wouldn't add anything useful - it's pretty much impossible to do a nice layout programatically (think of how time consuming and bit fiddling GUI programming is without a tool to help) in any sensible amount of time and it is a reasonable amount of work to add.

John



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