Vote on most needed fixes/features to pay people for

[revmischa]

We have a small pot of money to give out to people who provide useful contributions. As of today it's $329 and someone anonymous very generously signed up today to donate $100/mo. See our OpenCollective page.

If any contributors would like to request a small payout for work they've please submit the request here and open a GH issue to confirm it. I'm happy to approve.

I don't know if this will be a significant incentive to people but at least it can be a token of appreciation and we might as well spend the money. I'm opening it up for suggestions of most-desired fixes and features.

Things I'd really like to see:

• Help fixing broken presets and improving compatibility and accuracy of milkdrop presets - Complex presets with problems and parsing issues #118
• Get emscripten port fully working - Emscripten #307
• Along with emscripten, a nice web GUI for live editing and sharing presets - Discussion: preset editor #204
• Taking over maintainership of downstream packaging, in particular the debian package - Update debian/ubuntu/etc packages #200

What else would be of value?

[milkdropper]

That's great people are contributing (including you @revmischa). I would recommend #118 as a priority (for user-experience), but it might be the hardest to find someone willing and able.

Another option is to get projectM working in VR via SteamVR. I was thinking that would be a feature worth making a "DLC" or "PRO" version on Steam that is sold for a cost rather than being free. I would be happy to redistribute all of the profits to OpenCollective from Steam.

[revmischa]

It also is probably worthwhile to spring for the $99 Mac Developer license from Apple so we can sign and distribute the application on macOS.

[milkdropper]

If you want to save the money for the higher priority tasks then I am happy to pay for the Apple developer license just so I can learn how it works.

I am planning to release projectM on Steam this weekend, and I created a thread about how to visualize music in macOS properly on here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1358800/discussions/0/2798376078345846591/.

Since this requires a few steps, I also included a commercial third party option : https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/. If Steam gets any reasonable usage rate in macOS, we could consider contacting the author of loopback to see if they have a referral program. If the profits from that could go directly into Open Collective that would could help fuel development.

[milkdropper]

Ryan Geiss recently (a few months ago) released a list of his favourite presets:

http://www.geisswerks.com/
"May 23, 2020: I recently spent some time refining and rating my favorite MilkDrop presets. If you'd like to try them out, you can grab them here. Happy quarantining!"

I tested, and some of these presets don't work. In the spirit of @revmischa's request to prioritize efforts of the project, getting these work seem like an honourable task. There is also a topic about comparing projectM with milkdrop and it's clear they are not exactly the same.

So consider this a bump with some presets to use as a baseline!

[kblaschke]

Working hard on compatibility. Shader translation is last, but I've already identified a large number of bugs and missing features which together make almost all presets render incorrectly. I've already fixed many issues, either already in master, some still in my working branches, but the deeper I dig, the more issues pop up. Here's a selection of the worst issues as of release 3.1.12:

• If a single equation code line in the preset contains more than one expression/assignment (separated by ;), only the first one is parsed, the rest ignored.
• The built-in noise textures were generated in a wrong way, having the same value in RGB channels and all 1.0f values in the alpha channel.
• Most built-in textures used "clamp to edge" wrapping instead of "repeat", which broke most shaders using noise. One visible artifact is a square noise texture in the center which "streaks" going horizontally and vertically.
• Waveform modes had an off-by-one issue, e.g. wavemode 0 wasn't rendered (or rather with static memory garbage) and every other wave mode was offset by one, 1 being rendered like 0 and so on.
• Waveform smoothing didn't work, making the lines look jagged. Presets rendering waveforms as dots rendered too few dots as Milkdrop duplicates and smoothes the vertices in the rendering process.
• Waveform mode math was far from perfect, so the wavemodes looked way different than in Milkdrop.
• Instanced shapes were not supported at all, projectM only renders a single instance and doesn't even process the num_inst parameter in shapecode.

There are more smaller issues everywhere. Most of the above issues are completely or partially fixed already. If all is done, doing a side-by-side comparison between old and new projectM will show the difference.

[revmischa]

Ah interesting I was wondering what was up with those "streaks"

[kblaschke]

Is this issue still relevant, or should we open a new one once the need arises?