EnochLight wrote: ↑06 Dec 2018
Take a moment and realize
they have user data from Reason's stats that call home - they
KNOW how many users have high-res/DPI displays. Have you considered that they weighed the necessity to bring everything up to high res/DPI and determined that maybe there were other things that were more important for the time being?
Competing against the many tier 1 VSTs that do now support it,
including their own? No, actually I don't think they have weighed up the necessity, or at least not done so and reached the right conclusion at the appropriate time. It's like you're saying you like ice cream, and you want ice cream, and you know some us want ice cream, but you won't let any bugger have ice cream until you've first ensured there's a cure for diabetes so that everyone can just have whatever ice cream they want.
(That was a purple way for making a chicken/egg argument).
I'd suggest you're wilfully conflating hi-resolution and Hi-DPI in order to subtly make the implication that can only mean 2160/UHD/4K, which, it's still fair to say, few people do currently use.
But Resolution and DPI are two entirely different, if inter-related, attributes.
On a 13"/15" laptop screen,
1080/FHD has been standard on high end laptops for a few years (ignore still common low-end 1366×768, where Reason still looks OK), and while an individual's mileage in usability does vary, you need to remember age factors into this as well: after 45 eyesight starts failing real fast when it comes to reading, making it particuarly awkward for people who already wear glasses for myopia; there's
plenty of compelling anecdotal evidence that Reason's rack is impractical for many people even at FHD resolution.
The DPI to achieve even that at 15" makes rack controls and labels
very small. I
never use the laptop anymore for music production, I find Reason truly terrible in FHD (1080) at 15", though I probably could in an emergency with a bit of a struggle. I can't even begin to imagine attempting to use it on a 4K laptop, though, and because they are bitmaps scaling can't possibly result in anything but it looking blocky like it's in VGA. It's 2018, Enoch, not 1992. Not everyone uses Grain or Europa, but
everyone uses the Rack. If your twenty-year old graphics engine stops people interacting with your program because of display issues, then there's a strong case to be made that as a developer your No. 1 priority is to find a solution that makes your GUI accessible to everyone.
What still worked in 2010, does not work in 2018. If up to 2% of users on 4K, or 20% of users on FHD aren't buying REs because the VSTs they chose to buy
do support high resolutions where they can clearly read the labels and use the controls, that, my friend, is a huge fucking problem. Because last year it was probably 1% of users had 4K. Next year it'll be 4% of users. And RE devs can't win those users back to the RE format—and this is true of VST performace enhancement too—if the VST format is demonstrably superior. Infinite undo is great and all, but ultimately what people most care about is usability and performance.
EnochLight wrote: ↑06 Dec 2018
it's not that big of a deal IMHO (and I'm saying this coming from using Reason on a 65" 4K panel this past weeked).
Now, steady on! Did you just say Reason looks big when on a big screen. Well, quelle surprise, mate
!
Sorry, Enoch, you're bordering on outright fallacy there: being big on a big screen does not magically refute anyone else's equally true notion that it's too small to adequately use on a small screen. You've effectively resorted to the lazy old faithful "if I don't need it, then there's no way you do" reductive.
I can easily imagine it will look ok on a 65" panel at 4k. However, I think we can reasonably guess the usage jason* PH receive for
that setup is just you, last weekend!
Most people asking for hiDPI support are not talking about that sort of pretty extreme scenario. In reality, there
are a few people using cheap 4K TVs upwards of 40" as PC monitors now, but when people are talking about hi-res support in Reason they are not merely talking about a handful of people using large TV panels at 4K, Enoch, and
you know this perfectly well.
At modern FHD DPIs on larger desktop monitors (24-30" say), I'd agree Reason's rack is still manageably OK, but failing to use arguably the biggest USP of the SDK (and one PH have regular proferred to be the case over the years), just means it's now catch-up. Yes, it may still be the first wall-to-wall adoption of a scalable format across every available plugin, and that would certainly be thing to be justifiably proud of, but the "wow" moment itself to do it has long since passed. Even for Propellerhead, their first use of high res art is
in a VST, which has better resolution than their RE: what message does that send to users about their use of RE format?
Demonstrably PH are saying it's important enough they wouldn't dare risk releasing a VST without high res support, but they're happy to still foist low res art on their
RE users.
For most users having upgraded to FHD laptops or moderately-sized 4K screens since 2012, when it does happen it'll be "better late than never", rather than any active pre-empting the growing need of RE users for high resolution art.
So high resolution bitmap support is well overdue at this point. And the longer they take, the harder it's going to be to rerender 400+ devices and 80,000-odd users redownloading up to 800,000 devices at 3pm on a Friday afternoon
(That's intentional hyperbole, btw... but there are some genuine considerations about how to manage such rebuilds; unless they've already been secretly rendered and just left out of the current download packages, my guess is rebuilds would be staggered over several weeks and batch run during the quietest hours. Making updated product downloads available to users might well be staggered too to prevent server overload, as it often struggles in typical use now. Mass redownloading of rerendered devices definitely comes under "non-typical"!).
Based on what Magnus said in that talk, I have a half-cocked theory as to why it's not happened, and it's probably due to the original decision to do 3D. Berger's talk stated that the original intention was for a 3D
rack, not simply a 3D design chain, and it was dumped because too many devs were scared of the 3D toolkit.
But that confession surprised me, and it confuses me because—apart from literally the first time I ever saw the SDK and the 3D viewer and went "wow!"—I and many others honestly never thought the actual Reason implementation itself would be a node-based scalable rack (and by that I mean even just as an ortho-3D view). As cool as that would certainly be the trouble
may have been that the presentation quality of the bitmap was unlikely to be entirely consistent from highest zoom in to, say, a current-Rack level of zoom out. So my view, even from late 2012, was that any implementation was going to be fixed bitmaps at at least two zoom levels, generated from the high-res art: 754, as we already have, and a big image. (My recent opinion, based on latest shop requirements, probably that additional size would be 1650, rather than a massive 3850; whether 1650 would be big enough to solve the issues at FHD and UHD, I don't know... maybe it's a decent compromise and visually
equivalent to the current rack at
old resolutions to prevent having to download thousands of massive bitmaps. That could work, although in that case we'll all be back here in 20 years when everyone begins the inexorable march towards 8K screens
/jk).
So if that statement in the video is indeed the case, there was some degree of time lost in two years of developing an actual 3D rack.
The notion of using the LLVM compiler for, say, phone/tablet devices, might be something of a red herring. I'd hazard a guess that most of our RE GUIs aren't all that viable for tablets, let alone phones. Europa was expressly redesigned for them, and even that still has issues regarding number of swipe actions to reach certain functions, and features had to be reduced or even cut (like, a whole oscillator!). Just because all REs can be recompiled for multiple targets, that's not the same as all existing REs necessarily being
viable for those targets.
<columbo>
One more thing!
At no point in that talk is it mentioned there is any kind of magical RE to VST convertor: it's clearly stated Europa by Reason was a port (likely, it was JUCE-compiled), not an LLVM recompile of the RE to the VST format. (That's not me trying to preclude any future wrapper not being possible, mind, but as far as I know right now, there is no method to convert or host an RE as a VST). It was refreshing, though, to see an acknowledgement of likely reasons hardly any VST devs converted products to the RE format, that potentially the RE to VST direction is somewhat more straightforward for those coders.
</columbo>
_______
* I hate to back up an argument with actual facts, but Wikipedia, quoting Steam stats and
http://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolu ... 201808-bar, shows that for web users 27% are on 768 (HD), while 20% are on 1080 (FHD). Both figures are substantial and it's not a big gap: sure, 4K figures are between low to bugger all, but like I said, we're not just talking about rack resolutions being an issue at just 4K. I fail to see how anyone could reach the conclusion that one should not have already moved Reason to support up to UHD already thus provided the full gamut from HD to FHD to UHD. (And those stats are just for web browsers! For games, a massive
64% are on FHD. I'd imagine a higher than general pop. proportion of tech-savvy music producers have FHD screens too.)