Tooll 3: open-source software to create realtime motion graphics | Hacker News Reader

Tooll 3: open-source software to create realtime motion graphics

github.com

106 pointsbased221 comments

I was really excited, but then I saw this is a Windows only program.

Tooll3 comes from the demoscene. It was used to make many demos. It is really uncommon to make demotools that are cross-plateform because most demos try to take full advantage of the plateform they are running for various reason.

Yep. It doesn't even occur to me anymore that something posted as open source would have no Mac or Linux version, let alone not even be buildable on one of those.

Talk about a deal-breaker!

This tool uses DirectX, so cross-platform is quite difficult with that. 3000 commits tell the story that this repo is around for a while. There was a time where Windows-only FOSS was perfectly fine. In fact, there are many FOSS tools where you have to figure out how to run them on Windows, as there are only Unix versions available.

And a lot of the time, the response to "is there a Windows version?" was a dismissive "It's open source, compile it yourself."

At least these days, with VMs and Wine and WSL type things this is less of an issue.

> Yep. It doesn't even occur to me anymore that something posted as open source would have no Mac or Linux version, let alone not even be buildable on one of those.

Yeah, these days, most FOSS apps are cross-platform. Windows exclusive FOSS apps are rare, I think.

Last time I checked, supporting more than one platform was not a requirement for open-source software. The source is open. This says nothing about which platforms it runs on. All it says that if you want to run it on another platform, you are given the chance to port it yourself.

Nor did I say it was a requirement. I said that the lack of cross-platform implementation was surprising.

Not really, this tool comes from the demoscene that overall largely went via C64, Amiga, DOS and Windows. Sure there's been people producing for Mac's, Linux, Ataris,etc but the scene at large has often been on the major platforms.

As such DX has been as much used as GL depending on the preferences of the demogroups. Myself I started with software rendering on DOS, used GL and DX both since then. DX was mainly because GL drivers for laptops were kinda bad 15-20 years ago but using GL again since the landscape is kinda better now.

Now the UI seems to be largely based on Dear IMGui and those parts should probably be possible to port to Vulkan/GL, no idea how tied other parts are to DX though.

The origins are not necessarily known nor relevant to the end user. This was posted as an open-source motion-graphics tool. That's all we know going in. Therefore one's expectations for this project do not differ from those for any other open-source project that doesn't specify platform up-front.

Basically you expected Linux support?

So welcome to open source for the rest of us!

Was looking around for open source music sequencers a few weeks back but most competent ones apart from LMMS seems to be Linux only (And LMMS releases seems to have slowed down a bit recently). Sometimes you can compile stuff on Windows but 90% of the time for smaller projects it's full of gcc-isms, hardcoded paths,etc that requires a nontrivial amount of work to fix. I remember fiddling with NodeJS in the very early days, it kinda ran on Cygwin but that gave a bunch of other nasty side-effects.

Even on FreeBSD or osX it's often a bit of an uphill battle, if you're lucky stuff only depends on GNU Make, that's usually available on FreeBSD as gmake.. until that breaks because the Makefile tries a recursive invocations via a shell invoking make. If you're unlucky there is dependencies on systemd and ALSA or whatnot.

Anyhow, I thought Wine was pretty competent these days so running DX based stuff shouldn't be too bad?

It doesn't occur to me anymore either, but that's because everything is a laggy Electron app these days. A OSS realtime graphics-creation application is probably not an easy candidate for a cross-platform port.

Better than a cloud-only program.

> Windows only

Maybe it runs on ReactOS? Or under wine?

Too bad it’s Windows only. I would love an open source alternative to TouchDesigner.

You can check https://ossia.io, the real-time GFX has still some features missing in particular for procedural geometry but it's getting there one step at a time :)

video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUlFHIP6S34

Is this in the same category as after effects or nuke?

Those tools are typically used to augment existing footage whereas a tool(l) like this is much more focused on procedural content creation like Houdini or indeed many other tooling that comes from the demoscene, which is where this came from too(ll).

If it resembles anything, it would probably be Motion.

Of course I have no idea, because it's Windows-only.

If you want an open-source compositor, try Natron: https://natrongithub.github.io

The only commercial comparable I'm aware of is https://www.notch.one/

No, Tooll is real time !

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