3D-rack: won't happen in any forseeable future

[EnochLight]

...... just have to wait for them to figure out the old native devices and such. It will happen, for sure - it's just a matter of time.....

How do you think they will actually handle this though? I had imagined that they are going to / have been working on transferring all native devices over the the RE SDK? Is this likely? Is there anything that the native devices do that isn't yet covered by the current SDK?

It's anyone's guess. Personally I doubt they'll build all native devices as RE's - it might just be easier to rebuild all of them as native devices baked in like they always have been. Reference: they chose to upgrade the RV7000 to RV7000 MK2 and add impulse response sample loading instead of building it as an RE.

[RoryM0]

It's anyone's guess. Personally I doubt they'll build all native devices as RE's - it might just be easier to rebuild all of them as native devices baked in like they always have been. Reference: they chose to upgrade the RV7000 to RV7000 MK2 and add impulse response sample loading instead of building it as an RE.

Yeah that's a fair point regarding RV7000. I find it mildly jarring that some devices are 'native' and built into the graphical engine and some are SDK REs but yet still included as part of Reason. I wondered if they would attempt to 'unify' this somehow. But it's mainly just OCD on my part

[Loque]

While i think of it...a 3D model has lots of advantages...VR, 3D printing, maybe AR...But who knows, maybe we will see different approaches in the future like a direct brain interface, so i finally can easily synthesize the sounds in my head.

VR Reason!
customisable VR studio with customisable VR rack where you could twiddle actual real fake knobs.
anyone who has expereiced VR will know that this WILL be the future of DAWs
in fact, why is this not a thing already? (maybe it is, ive never actually looked)

I suppose there is no hope props / reason studios ever doing it... i mean we've been waiting 20 years for scaleable rack and they cant even manage that.

There was already a sound generation experiment with VR and it was quite strange. I forgot its name...

I think the biggest drawback of VR is currently, that you cannot touch it. But maybe some kind of extra combi-controller, which simulates a knob, slider and button would be enough.

Guess this will come back at some point in future, but its still too early....

[SebAudio]

It's anyone's guess. Personally I doubt they'll build all native devices as RE's - it might just be easier to rebuild all of them as native devices baked in like they always have been. Reference: they chose to upgrade the RV7000 to RV7000 MK2 and add impulse response sample loading instead of building it as an RE.

Yeah that's a fair point regarding RV7000. I find it mildly jarring that some devices are 'native' and built into the graphical engine and some are SDK REs but yet still included as part of Reason. I wondered if they would attempt to 'unify' this somehow. But it's mainly just OCD on my part

Some « semi-foldable » devices (Thor, nn-xt, rv7000) would likely require an Sdk update ? I’m sure we’d have seen REs with such capabilities if it was « sdk native » (too bad because it not only looks cool but functional).
However other native devices seem to be « in line » with other REs. Only RS knows if it’s worth to have all the devices in the rack as REs

[QVprod]

How do you think they will actually handle this though? I had imagined that they are going to / have been working on transferring all native devices over the the RE SDK? Is this likely? Is there anything that the native devices do that isn't yet covered by the current SDK?

It's anyone's guess. Personally I doubt they'll build all native devices as RE's - it might just be easier to rebuild all of them as native devices baked in like they always have been. Reference: they chose to upgrade the RV7000 to RV7000 MK2 and add impulse response sample loading instead of building it as an RE.

Do we know this for sure? Remember The Echo, Alligator, and Pulverizer we built with the RE sdk yet were always native devices. Same would apply to Synchronous, Audiomatic, and Pulsar that are now native devices. I remember someone on the old PUF saying James Benard told them rebuilding native devices as RE was the intent back when he was still around. I'd be curious if RV7000 got the RE treatment in its update. Nonetheless I agree that rebuilding (if they haven't already) might not be necessary if it's juts for the sake of upgrading graphics.

[EnochLight]

It's anyone's guess. Personally I doubt they'll build all native devices as RE's - it might just be easier to rebuild all of them as native devices baked in like they always have been. Reference: they chose to upgrade the RV7000 to RV7000 MK2 and add impulse response sample loading instead of building it as an RE.

Do we know this for sure? Remember The Echo, Alligator, and Pulverizer we built with the RE sdk yet were always native devices. Same would apply to Synchronous, Audiomatic, and Pulsar that are now native devices. I remember someone on the old PUF saying James Benard told them rebuilding native devices as RE was the intent back when he was still around. I'd be curious if RV7000 got the RE treatment in its update. Nonetheless I agree that rebuilding (if they haven't already) might not be necessary if it's juts for the sake of upgrading graphics.

In regards to the RV7000 MK2, yes I’m sure. I can’t find the thread where it was posted back in the day, but Props confirmed. To be fair, at the time I don't think the RE SDK supported sample loading (but I could be wrong). With that said, there are some items missing in the current RE SDK that would still prohibit porting all native devices, strangely enough.

[fieldframe]

With that said, there are some items missing in the current RE SDK that would still prohibit porting all native devices, strangely enough.

The only thing left is folding panels, right?

I don’t think that's actually a roadblock anymore, because Reason Studios has clearly deprecated this design pattern. I mean, the Rack Extension SDK is eight years old. Not supporting folding panels in that time period does not signify something they haven’t gotten to yet, but rather something they have made a conscious decision not to do.

They could port Thor, NN-XT, and Kong to RE and they’d all just be full-height devices with no folding panels, some people would complain, but they’d move on. Same thing for the half-rack devices: They’d just become full-rack devices, because Reason has (long ago) deprecated the half-rack format.

Obviously there are a few devices that wouldn’t be ported because they’re part of the infrastructure, like mix channels and Combinators, but everything else from Reason 1-5 should, to my understanding, be possible with the current SDK.

[EnochLight]

With that said, there are some items missing in the current RE SDK that would still prohibit porting all native devices, strangely enough.

The only thing left is folding panels, right?

I don’t think that's actually a roadblock anymore, because Reason Studios has clearly deprecated this design pattern. I mean, the Rack Extension SDK is eight years old. Not supporting folding panels in that time period does not signify something they haven’t gotten to yet, but rather something they have made a conscious decision not to do.

They could port Thor, NN-XT, and Kong to RE and they’d all just be full-height devices with no folding panels, some people would complain, but they’d move on. Same thing for the half-rack devices: They’d just become full-rack devices, because Reason has (long ago) deprecated the half-rack format.

Obviously there are a few devices that wouldn’t be ported because they’re part of the infrastructure, like mix channels and Combinators, but everything else from Reason 1-5 should, to my understanding, be possible with the current SDK.

Sure, that's one approach that could work. But that also means that they would need to separately alpha/beta test three dozen or more different RE devices - basically every instrument, effect, and utility device from Reason 1 all the way up to Reason 5. I'm not sure how feasible that would be. It takes months just to properly do 1 Rack Extension, even for a seasoned veteran RE dev, from concept to execution/testing and release.

I'm still fairly confident they'll bake in high res support to the classic devices instead. If we've learned anything, they don't seem interested in updating/upgrading old devices, with the RV7000 and Dr. Rex (now Dr. Octorex) being the exception. There just doesn't seem to be anything to gain by spending the time and resources porting three dozen+ RE's.**

** I really would like to be wrong!

[JiggeryPokery]

The only thing left is folding panels, right?

Sequence button painting, e.g. ReDrum/Thor steps, can't be done? (Other than converting skeuo buttons into a custom display but who'd want that for classic devices? ).

Matrix/ReDrum pattern select buttons couldn't be done for the longest time, but they could be done now using switchable panels. Less sure about the stack of buttons on Kong, though.

I don't see why any of the old devices would need to be converted to RE, especially as has been noted the high risk of introducing just way too many new bugs, the small but definitely present additional CPU overhead the RE versions might have. At the risk of getting my bottom handed to me again , surely all that needs changing is the art to be switched out and the hitboxes updated.? It seems inconceivable that at least the artwork wouldn't have been made by now, regardless of whether it's been implemented in any form.

And in deprecating the 3D chain entirely, one would have thought adding folding panels and half-racks to the RE SDK now would be a shit-ton easier.

[tronam]

I think the issue with high res assets all along has been about memory consumption and rack performance. Even modern computers struggle to scroll the rack smoothly at a decent frame rate. I can only imagine how poorly it would run with asset pixel dimensions 4-8x more dense. Is GPU acceleration the answer? Wouldn’t that require enough GPU memory to hold them all?

[bxbrkrz]

Struggling to scroll the rack smoothly? On Macs maybe?

[jlgrimes]

I quite enjoy the foldable panels of Thor and NNXT. When you are just playing presets, they save a ton of screen real estate but yet have decent basic controls on that panel (somewhat a precursor to macros on VSTSis.), but for deep tweaking can be opened up to show all of its deep controls.

The sequence buttons too would really help.

I'm guessing though they know at some point they will need to increase the resolution of everything and its probably a way of keeping everything from getting too out of hand before that conversion with REs.