I managed to compile the VST instrument for Windows. There were some odd differences between Linux and Windows in the main.cpp side of things, so at the end I just made a new main_windows.cpp and forgot about trying to wrap incompatible things with #ifdef/#endif pairs. I also had to add an esoteric .def file so that Renoise would recognise the .dll as a plug-in file…
All in all, I’m finding Visual 2008 superverbose, superboring and superslow to work with. I don’t know if I had just idolised VC6 but I don’t remember it being so cumbersome. For example, the autocompletion or “intellisense” thing doesn’t show me useful stuff most of the time… it usually shows me a list of low level Windows constants that I obviously don’t care about, instead of showing me classes from my project. Also, the keys for triggering autocompletion are super odd (ALT + right arrow) instead of the usual CTRL+Space. I haven’t found the option for automatically adding matching braces, so I have to do it manually. The options and general semantics are annoyingly microsoftive (e.g. “Solutions” actually means “a generated binary”), editing project properties is annoyingly slow, and etc, etc. Even the XCode configuration panels look nice compared to this!
What is also possible is that I have got accostumed to Makefiles and the whole idea of going through a series of tabs and trees and options and blablah just looks silly at this point. We’ll see if I end up liking it at the end…
End of the mini-rant and back to the demo: I got a new version where a simple representation of the left/right buffers is painted on each frame. That’s the most advanced graphical stuff I’ve done to date in this project, hehe. The sound is quite saturated in comparison with the output I get in Renoise for the same song. It’s probably due to the fact that in my code I’m not doing any clipping in the output of SorolletVoice and am adding all together in the mixer, but Renoise is probably clipping each voice internally when it gets the output of each VSTi instance. So I’ll add that tomorrow… otherwise as soon as more than one instrument is playing at a relatively loud volume, hardly anything can be distinguished!
iq
well, solution means “collection or projects”. Usually a projects in an executable, dll, or binary, and a solution contains one or many projects. For example, the demo, the vst dll, the rns/xml parser and other tools should all be projects and all belong to the same solution and see them all at the same time in VS. A project can be a lib too, so the synth could be a lib project and hang form the solution with the other projects, and the intro and vst projects could link to the synth lib. Etc, etc.
Not gonna start arguing about the usability of VS :) The battle is lost my friend!
iq
Think of “Solution” as “win the breakpoint” and the projects the individual dll/exe/libs/websites/docs you need to achieve that.
roy
Actually, a solution is not a generated binary. It’s your workspace. Your projects generate binaries.
sole
Heh, how fast you are pointing out the “solution” error. Yeah. I meant a different thing, but was too sleepy to double-check things before publishing.
The fact is –as I remember– that before we used to have a “workspace” and then there were projects inside it. Each project generated a different output, be it an executable, a .dll, a .lib, whatever. This “solutions” semantics is ridiculous. Microsoft *really* needs a decent and brevity-loving copywriter.
Still… doesn’t anyone know how to activate brace autocompletion+indentation!? Doing things manually is so Notepad-ish!