Porting Sonique Visual Plugin
Porting Sonique Visual Plugin
I used to lurk on the sonique forums and even posted a skin for S2 on soniquex back in the day. I was feeling nostalgic for the old rabbithole vis and took to the internet and eventually ended up here. I was thinking how awesome it would be to have all these old visuals up and running with kodi. Is this technically possible?
Re: Porting Sonique Visual Plugin
Svp files themself are win32 dll so I would not expect much from non windows platforms. Maybe wine or similar could manage the code, or maybe not 
If we are talking about a Kodi plugin for the windows platform in particular, then sure it might be possible. But I really have nfi what Kodi offers for plugins.
The code would need to be adapted to fit Kodi's plugin api.
Eg how to initialize, get audio and where to write the video buffer.
Tuniacs Svp plugin as it stands expects these main points
1)tuniac app to tell it to render each frame as required. It is not running by itself.
2)raw audio data to be copied(by tuniac) in to a supplied buffer. This audio is in 32bit float format, and due to tuniacs memory copy optimisations the buffer must be byte aligned.
3)to be offered a window handle to directly write to.
Many players that support visuals do all or some the above very differently. In fact sonique was fairly different to tuniac. The different ways for each player to implement visuals may require significant rewriting work with Svp plugin only being used as a working example of an Svp renderer.
At least tuniacs renderer example initializes visual functions in the correct order so you don't get acidspunk crash and other bugs like it did on sonique 2.
Emulating another applications api so you can load it's dll's can be complex but smart coders would likely consider the task easy enough since their is source code for it all.
If we are talking about a Kodi plugin for the windows platform in particular, then sure it might be possible. But I really have nfi what Kodi offers for plugins.
The code would need to be adapted to fit Kodi's plugin api.
Eg how to initialize, get audio and where to write the video buffer.
Tuniacs Svp plugin as it stands expects these main points
1)tuniac app to tell it to render each frame as required. It is not running by itself.
2)raw audio data to be copied(by tuniac) in to a supplied buffer. This audio is in 32bit float format, and due to tuniacs memory copy optimisations the buffer must be byte aligned.
3)to be offered a window handle to directly write to.
Many players that support visuals do all or some the above very differently. In fact sonique was fairly different to tuniac. The different ways for each player to implement visuals may require significant rewriting work with Svp plugin only being used as a working example of an Svp renderer.
At least tuniacs renderer example initializes visual functions in the correct order so you don't get acidspunk crash and other bugs like it did on sonique 2.
Emulating another applications api so you can load it's dll's can be complex but smart coders would likely consider the task easy enough since their is source code for it all.
Re: Porting Sonique Visual Plugin
Thanks for the reply Brett. I guess in short it would entail a bunch of work for someone who has the necessary skills and desire to bring it to Kodi. I guess I can always load up tuniac if I'm feeling nostalgic
Re: RE: Re: Porting Sonique Visual Plugin
Hah exactly.phool wrote:Thanks for the reply Brett. I guess in short it would entail a bunch of work for someone who has the necessary skills and desire to bring it to Kodi. I guess I can always load up tuniac if I'm feeling nostalgic
You could just use tuniac instead of Kodi!