lightspeed.johnny

After discovering how extremely inefficient Max is at dealing with dicts, I am now going down the path of migrating my Max external to a Jitter object.

This external has 2 input matrices - and no output matrices - these two input matrices are processed internally and sent to an external device i.e., the output of this external interfaces to an actual external device - so it is kinda like the jit.gl.render object in the sense that this object is the end of a matrix path.

My question is, when designing this external, do I still use the jit_mop macros to define the input matrices? Or is there a simply way to define an external that accepts matrix input but does not output any matrix data?

mop = jit_object_new(_jit_sym_jit_mop,2,0);

jitter-external-with-no-output-matrix

Ok... I think I figured some more things out... I really wish some of the "old/deprecated" Jitter examples were updated to the "new" wrapper/instantiation methods - it is kinda hard to piece together deprecated code vs new code... but alas, it also looks like you need to set this:

max_jit_class_mop_wrap(max_class, jit_class, MAX_JIT_MOP_FLAGS_OWN_OUTPUTMATRIX | MAX_JIT_MOP_FLAGS_OWN_BANG);

I can't find any documentation on these two flags, but I can presume that MAX_JIT_MOP_FLAGS_OWN_OUTPUTMATRIX tells the wrapper not to automatically instantiate an output matrix? Not sure how the instantiation of matrices works.

I am not sure what MAX_JIT_MOP_FLAGS_OWN_BANG does... Any insight into what this flag means? Maybe it tells the class wrapper not to automatically output the (non existent) output matrix whenever I get a bang?

After lots of trial and error (and only crashing Max 3 times), I think I have my Max Jitter external working as needed.

The MAX_JIT_MOP_FLAGS_OWN_BANG makes it so your Jitter object doesn't automatically respond to bang messages (i.e., output the current matrix), but you can still add a bang message handler to the max class wrapper to handle bang messages in a different way.

max_jit_class_mop_wrap(max_class, jit_class, MAX_JIT_MOP_FLAGS_OWN_OUTPUTMATRIX | MAX_JIT_MOP_FLAGS_OWN_BANG);
class_addmethod(max_class, (method)max_jit_ed_get_info, "bang", 0);


There is still one part of this Max Wrapper->Jitter Object architecture that I don't quite understand - which is how to call a method on my jit object from a a message handled in my Max wrapper class...

According to the Max Jitter SDK - they are wanting you to maintain some abstraction between the Max Object (i.e., the part that handles interaction with the Max Patcher), and the Jitter Object - the part which just knows how to handle jitter stuff, like matrices. That is all well and good - but I can't find a nice example of how the Max Object is suppose to call into methods of the jitter object (and send it is magical jitter object reference - usually labeled 'x') to respond to messages.

Lets say I add a "bang" message handler to my Max wrapper class (as shown above) - I can get this to work perfectly. However, I can't figure out how to turn this bang message into a call to a method that is defined for my Jitter object.

In my case, whenever I receive a bang (where the bang handler is defined in my Max wrapper class), I want to to call a method on my Jitter Object called something like "get_hardware_info" - and to make this even easier, this method expects no parameters and returns no parameters. It simply outputs a dump of data to the dumpout outlet.

It kinda feels like I am in lonely territory here - creating a custom Jitter external that integrates with custom hardware, but I think it is gonna be really awesome when finished!

Lets say I add a "bang" message handler to my Max wrapper class (as shown above) - I can get this to work perfectly.  However, I can't figure out how to turn this bang message into a call to a method that is defined for my Jitter object.

It kinda feels like I am in lonely territory here - creating a custom Jitter external that integrates with custom hardware, but I think it is gonna be really awesome when finished!


Jitter external with no output matrix