albertobarberis / flucoma-max

Fluid Corpus Manipulation objects for Cycling 74's Max

Fluid Corpus Manipulation: Max Objects Library

This repository hosts code for generating the Max objects and documentation resources for the Fluid Corpus Manipulation Project. Much of the actual code that does the exciting stuff lives in this repository's principal dependency, the Fluid Corpus Manipulation Library.

How to build

Pre-requisites

• CMake >= 3.11
• A C++ 14 compliant compiler for Mac or Windows (via XCode tools on Mac, and Visual Studio 17 >= 15.9 on Windows)

Dependencies

• Max SDK (>= 7.3.3) : this is the only dependency we don't (optionally) manage for you, so there must be a version available to point to when you run, using the CMake Variable MAX_SDK_PATH (see below). It can live anywhere on your file system, although often it is convenient to install directly into your Max packages folder.

These will be downloaded and configured automatically, unless you pass CMake a source code location on disk for each (see below):

• Fluid Corpus Manipulation Library
• Eigen (3.3.5)
• HISSTools Library

I'm in a Hurry...

...and you already have a development environment set up, understand CMake, and have the Max SDK available? And Python 3 + DocUtils + Jinja if you want docs?

Cool:

mkdir -p build && cd build
cmake -DMAX_SDK_PATH=<location of your Max SDK> -DDOCS=<ON/OFF> ..
make install

This will assemble a Max package in release-packaging.

An alternative to setting up / running CMake directly on the command line is to install the CMake GUI, or use to use the curses GUI ccmake.

Also, with CMake you have a choice of which build system you use.

• The default on macOS and Linux is Unix Makefiles. On macOS you can also use Xcode by passing -GXcode to CMake when you first run it.
• The default on Windows is the latest version of Visual Studio installed. However, Visual Studio can open CMake files directly as projects, which has some upsides. When used this way, CMake variables have to be set via a JSON file that MSVC will use to configure CMake.

Generating Documentation

The documentation partially relies on a system that is shared with other wrappers of the Fluid Corpus Manipulation Project for different creative coding environments.

Pre-requisites:

• Python 3
• Docutils python package (ReST parsing)
• Jinja python package (template engine)
• PyYAML >= 5.1 (YAML parsing)

To generate maxref.xml documentation for the Max objects requires a further dependency, flucoma-docs, which we use to combine generated and human-written docs. We then pass DOCS=ON to CMake

cmake -DDOCS=ON ..

Unless we pass the location on disk of flucoma-docs, CMake will again take care of downloading this dependency.

This process:

• has only ever been tested on Mac, so may well not work at all on Windows
• can sometimes produce spurious warnings in Xcode, but should work

Using Manual Dependencies

In some cases you may want to use your own copies of the required libraries. Unless specified, the build system will download these automatically. To bypass this behavior, use the following cache variables:

• FLUID_PATH: location of the Fluid Corpus Manipulation Library
• FLUID_DOCS_PATH: location of flucoma-docs repository (e.g. for debugging documentation generation)
• EIGEN_PATH location of the Eigen library
• HISS_PATH location of the HISSTools library

For example, use this to use your own copy of the Fluid Corpus Manipulation Library

cmake -DMAX_SDK_PATH=<location of your Max SDK> -DFLUID_PATH=<location of Fluid Corpus Manipulation Library> ..

To find out which branches / tags / commits of these we use, look in the top level CMakeLists.txt of the Fluid Corpus Manipulation Library for the FetchContent_Declare statements for each dependency.

Compiling for different CPUs

The build system generally assumes an x86 cpu with AVX instructions (most modern x86 CPUs). To build on another kind of CPU (e.g. older than 2012) you can use the FLUID_ARCH cache variable to pass specific flags to your compiler. For example use -DFLUID_ARCH=-mcpu=native to optimize for your particular CPU.

Credits

FluCoMa core development team (in alphabetical order)

Owen Green, Gerard Roma, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay

Other contributors:

Alex Harker, Francesco Cameli

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This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 725899).