Some questions about luna

[tmp]

Hi!
I have some questions about luna

ecosystem questions:

• will there be a package/plugin management
• will there be a version management

questions with regard to audiovisual and creative purposes:

• will there be rendering pipelines? (like dx11, vulkan)
• will it be possible to change the interface of luna in luna itself? (fe. to write a custom gui)
• will there be timelines?

I am looking forward to your answers!

[KyleHerndon]

Ecosystem:

• Both package management and version management are planned.

Creative:

• I’m not sure, but I would expect this is something that a user would have to make and the devs would provide help with, but probably not write themselves. I could be wrong though.
• It is my understanding that it is currently possible to create a new type of data visualization right now. There is however no documentation on the subject, so I am not entirely sure how. I do know it just requires html/javascript, though. If you want to make an entirely new dev environment, separate from Luna Studio or other major changes, see above. Themes (and maybe minor GUI options) are also planned, if that’s what you’re referring to.
• I’m not sure what you’re asking about, sorry.

[tmp]

ok. in my opinion luna should also put a big focus on how to present data (and not only in processing it).

I think a working rendering pipeline ( shaders, materials, geometry, buffermanagement,…) is crucial for the success of luna since you write it is also a “visualization environment” in your mission statement.

With “timelines” i meant a tool for modifying all the input values over time in an efficient way.

[marcin.kostrzewa]

I think this is the right time to summon @wdanilo He’s the graphics fanatic around here and I think will be delighted to talk about this

[tmp]

he seems to be very busy…

[wdanilo]

Poooooooof! I’ve been summoned and traveled seven mountains and seven seas to answer this question! Ok, but honestly, I’m sorry @tmp for a little late reply – we try as hard as we can to not only reply to all the requests but also do not freeze the development. After the recent release I’ve been hardly sleeping to keep everything up to date, still you should have get your answer earlier

Answering your questions:

1. We are working on package management (including versioning). It will be available in the next major release, but maybe it will appear earlier than that. If you are interested in helping us make it happen as soon as possible, any help is more than welcome here!
2. Rendering pipelines. This is more interesting topic, because it can be answered from many different perspectives:

• Displaying Luna nodes - Luna nodes are displayed using web technologies. Currently it is React with HTML, we are also testing a new WebGL rendering backend here. So if we include it, you will be able to inject your code into nodes rendering pipeline if you would like to add fancy node effects.

• Changing Luna interface is already possible - you can write Atom plugin which changes how nodes look like. Is it what you are looking for?

• Timelines - are you asking about GUI timelines? If so, I definitely see the need for them when processing graphics and animation. They can be implemented just as an Atom plugin currently. The idea is very simple - if you change the current frame, you just send to Luna the value of that frame. Luna stores it in a variable, which can be accessed by animation libraries in Luna. We were talking about it couple months ago. It should be even pretty straigthforward to create so called “time monad”, which basically will give you nodes like “time shift” (see Houdini’s time shift for reference). We have no strict plans however when timelines will appear. We are focusing on building Luna core and want to contribute with community to create domain specific solutions.

• Presenting data / rendering pipelines - We put a big focus on how to present AND manipulate data too. We are right now working on improving visualisation engine. Anyway, the idea behind visualisations is simple - you can write any HTML/js code to display data and you can tell Luna what kind of data it is. You are able to create a WebGL data visualiser right now and tell Luna that it is useful when displaying list of numbers for example! So in fact you can set any rendering pipeline when writing custom visualisers. Every visualisation that is available right now is just a small plugin in HTML/js!

• The future of visualisations - we are working right now on improving how visualisations will behave. Here are two topics - first we will allow visualisations to ask Luna backend only for the necessary data (right now visualisations get just all data from node), so you could have “lazy visualisations behavior”. Second, we are also working on making WebGL data visualisation layer, so you could build your own visualisations directly using nodes (some ind of AST is built under the hood, which is translated to WebGL representation). Any help on these is also welcome!

Did I answer your question?