Bonzomatic

What's this?

This is a live-coding tool, where you can write a 2D fragment/pixel shader while it is running in the background.

The tool was originally conceived and implemented after the Revision 2014 demoscene party's live coding competition where two contestants improv-code an effect in 25 minutes head-to-head. Wanna see how it looks in action? Check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG_2q4OEhKc

Keys

• F2: toggle texture preview
• F5 or Ctrl-R: recompile shader
• F11 or Ctrl/Cmd-f: hide shader overlay
• Alt-F4 or Shift+Escape: exbobolate your planet

Requirements

On Windows, both DirectX 9 and 11 are supported.

For the OpenGL version (for any platform), at least OpenGL 4.1 is required.

Configuration

Create a config.json with e.g. the following contents: (all fields are optional)

{
  "window":{ // default window size / state, if there's a setup dialog, it will override it
    "width":1920,
    "height":1080,
    "fullscreen":true,
  },
  "font":{
    "file":"Input-Regular_(InputMono-Medium).ttf",
    "size":16,
  },
  "rendering":{
    "fftSmoothFactor": 0.9, // 0.0 means there's no smoothing at all, 1.0 means the FFT is completely smoothed flat
  },
  "textures":{ // the keys below will become the shader variable names
    "texChecker":"textures/checker.png",
    "texNoise":"textures/noise.png",
    "texTex1":"textures/tex1.jpg",
  },
  "gui":{
    "outputHeight": 200,
    "opacity": 192, // 255 means the editor occludes the effect completely, 0 means the editor is fully transparent
    "texturePreviewWidth": 64,
    "spacesForTabs": false,
    "tabSize": 8,
    "visibleWhitespace": true,
  },
  "midi":{ // the keys below will become the shader variable names, the values are the CC numbers
    "fMidiKnob": 16, // e.g. this would be CC#16, i.e. by default the leftmost knob on a nanoKONTROL 2
  },
  // this section is if you want to enable NDI streaming; otherwise just ignore it
  "ndi":{
    "enabled": true,
    "connectionString": "<ndi_product something=\"123\"/>", // metadata sent to the receiver; completely optional
    "identifier": "hello!", // additional string to the device name; helps source discovery/identification in the receiver if there are multiple sources on the network
    "frameRate": 60.0, // frames per second
    "progressive": true, // progressive or interleaved?
  },
  "postExitCmd":"copy_to_dropbox.bat" // this command gets ran when you quit Bonzomatic, and the shader filename gets passed to it as first parameter. Use this to take regular backups.
}

Building

As you can see you're gonna need CMAKE for this, but don't worry, a lot of it is automated at this point.

• On Windows, use at least Visual C++ 2010. For the DX9/DX11 builds, obviously you'll be needing a DirectX SDK, though a lot of it is already in the Windows 8.1 SDK as well.
• On Linux, you'll need xorg-dev and libglu1-mesa-dev; after that cmake should take care of the rest.
• On OSX, cmake should take care of everything.

Organizing a competition

If you want to organize a competition using Bonzomatic at your party, here's a handy-dandy guide on how to get started: https://github.com/Gargaj/Bonzomatic/wiki/How-to-set-up-a-Live-Coding-compo

Credits and acknowledgements

Original / parent project authors

• "ScintillaGL" project by Mykhailo Parfeniuk (https://github.com/sopyer/ScintillaGL)
• Riverwash LiveCoding Tool by Michał Staniszewski and Michal Szymczyk (http://www.plastic-demo.org/)

Libraries and other included software

• Scintilla editing component by the Scintilla Dev Team (http://www.scintilla.org/)
• OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library by Nigel Stewart (http://glew.sourceforge.net/)
• BASS.DLL by Ian Luck (http://www.un4seen.com/)
• STB Image and Truetype libraries by Sean Barrett (http://nothings.org/)
• GLFW by whoever made GLFW (http://www.glfw.org/faq.html)
• JSON++ by Hong Jiang (https://github.com/hjiang/jsonxx)
• NDI(tm) SDK by NewTek(tm) (http://www.newtek.com/ndi.html)

These software are available under their respective licenses.

The remainder of this project code was (mostly, I guess) written by Gargaj / Conspiracy and is public domain.

Contact / discussion forum

If you have anything to say, do it at http://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=9881 or