Breakpoint demolog, day 34: VSTi+Renoise working again

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!