Milkdrop shipped with a preset mash-up feature, which preset authors could use to combine two presets into a new one. Since this was heavily used when Milkdrop use was at its peak, it makes sense to have the same functionality in projectM's preset editor as well, ideally with additional functionality and more convenient use as the Dear ImGui UI gives us much more flexibility here.
The original feature worked by selecting a number of presets and telling Milkdrop which parts of the preset to load into the current one (original code is here and here). The following "apply flags" were supported, only loading the specified parts of a new preset and overriding those in the loaded one:
- General parameters (classic effects like brighten, darken and blur)
- Waveform parameters (any parameter affecting the "default waveform", and both custom waveforms and shapes)
- Motion parameters (rotation, zoom, warping and borders as well as the per_frame and per_pixel expressions)
- Warp shader
- Composite shader
While it still makes sense to provide the same functionality to users as Milkdrop did, the projectM app could additionally give users a more fine-grained control over the selection of values and expressions, possibly even including blending individual parameters (with a live preview) before finally applying the mash-up result.
As a technical note here:
Both expression and shader code is hard to mash-up automatically, and per_frame code, custom wave/shape code and also warp and comp shaders often only work in unison, requiring certain q vars to be set and synced to give a proper visual result. Such presets were already hard or impossible to easily mash-up in Milkdrop, and projectM won't provide an automated solution to this issue either. Thus, manual editing of expression and shader code will still be necessary in many cases!
Milkdrop shipped with a preset mash-up feature, which preset authors could use to combine two presets into a new one. Since this was heavily used when Milkdrop use was at its peak, it makes sense to have the same functionality in projectM's preset editor as well, ideally with additional functionality and more convenient use as the Dear ImGui UI gives us much more flexibility here.
The original feature worked by selecting a number of presets and telling Milkdrop which parts of the preset to load into the current one (original code is here and here). The following "apply flags" were supported, only loading the specified parts of a new preset and overriding those in the loaded one:
While it still makes sense to provide the same functionality to users as Milkdrop did, the projectM app could additionally give users a more fine-grained control over the selection of values and expressions, possibly even including blending individual parameters (with a live preview) before finally applying the mash-up result.
As a technical note here:
Both expression and shader code is hard to mash-up automatically, and per_frame code, custom wave/shape code and also warp and comp shaders often only work in unison, requiring certain
qvars to be set and synced to give a proper visual result. Such presets were already hard or impossible to easily mash-up in Milkdrop, and projectM won't provide an automated solution to this issue either. Thus, manual editing of expression and shader code will still be necessary in many cases!