Wondering if there’s any plans to ever release a plugin sdk for developing custom nodes? Having just had to write a wrapper c++ application to connect to a custom input device, unpack the data into OSC packets, receive them in Notch, and repackage them via tonnes of OSC modifier nodes into a sort of fake array, I’d much rather have been able to write some kind of class MyNode : public NotchArrayNode {} and called it a night.
I appreciate your target market probably isn’t programmers so there’s likely plenty of higher priority stuff to contend with but was curious if it might appear one day.
No trouble at all. I get where the request is coming from, but you’re right in that coders are not the primary audience for Notch so it’s not a high priority for us at the moment.
It would be immensely beneficial if Notch could be extended by its developer community the way just about every one of it’s competitors can be (C4D with python/plugins, TouchDesigner with python/tox components/custom c++ ops, After Effects with plugins and javascript, etc…)
Developers don’t need to be the target audience to enable them to make better tools for the main audience, the artists. Heck, even Apple, one of the most closed companies in the world, supports its developers wholeheartedly in this aspect. https://aescripts.com/ is a beautiful example of this in action in the mograph community.
As the great Balmer once said, Developers, developers, developers, developers!
Agree with what you are saying here.
The studios I worked at employ devs to create tools inside creative content software (Maya, C4D, AE etc…) and it would be awesome to be able to extend this support to Notch.
FYI, it’s not an issue of desire to do this, it’s an issue of practicality.
As software that’s still been in beta (officially) up to now, the underlying engine / codebase has been in quite a bit of flux. Providing an API makes changes considerably more difficult due to the need to maintain support for legacy 3rd party plugins. Or, alternatively (if you go the way some other engines do…) you just continually break 3rd party plugins and annoy everybody.
An SDK will appear once the system settles down sufficiently to make it practical - probably sometime after 1.0.
