October Update

I am writing this quick post just because it has been a while since the last one. Usually the individual things that I work on are small enough that there will be either an alpha build or a blog post every few weeks or so but all I have been working on for the past month is the sandboxing system that I described back in August and there is not much to report yet.

This is a really complicated thing and I am making a lot of assumptions about how things are supposed to be done because I haven't written anything like this before and I'm working at the limits of my knowledge. I am at least making steady progress. The current state of the project is here:

colugomusic/scuff (github.com)

I am at the point now where I am working on integrating this system into Blockhead, even though a lot of the details around things like error handling are not ironed out yet. This means replacing Blockhead's current effect rack processing with a dedicated 'sandbox group' and doing the same for Blockhead's baking and exporting operations.

For the time being what I am likely going to do is have all project-level CLAP plugins existing in one single sandbox process, so if one crashes then it will take all the others down with it, but Blockhead should continue running and then give you the option to restore the crashed effect racks.

How exactly to handle a crashed or failing sandbox process is quite complicated so it will probably take a few iterations to get that right.

As I mentioned in the previous post, the reason for the sandboxing system in Blockhead is not just crash protection, but also to resolve some of the compatibility problems with some OpenGL-based plugins, and to hopefully iron out the windowing issues.

In "Real Life News" I am pretty miserable living where I am currently living due to the increasing amount of noise occurring in this building both during the day and at night, causing more sleeping issues which unfortunately is having a bad effect on how productive I am working on Blockhead. So I've started looking for other places to live. Hopefully I can find somewhere a bit quieter and cheaper by moving away from London.

So at some point, hopefully before the end of the year, there might be a brief pause in development during the moving process. I hope I can find somewhere better to live where I can get a decent night's sleep and really focus properly during the day.