Dear Unity community,
As a former composer of notated music with some experience having used Pure Data for Live Electronics, I’ve found the program to be extremely flexible for creating stochastic (algorithmic) music. It can also be used to transform sound in any way imaginable while reacting live to audio or data input. As my interest in sound-design for games grew, I was excited by the possibility of incorporating PD into Unity, as it would allow for music whose various paramaters are transformed in accord with player input. This has already been done by some developers (e.g. the makers of Bad Hotel and Fract) via libpd, a „wrappable“ version of the software. And yet, I find myself unable to make any of the available plug-ins work, even with the aid of a programmer, Slayther.
I’m very desperate to have PD work in Unity, as it’s by far the program I know (and like) best. Here is a summary of two of the available plug-ins and their reported errors. Any insight is appreciated:
libpd4unity (Patrick Sebastien)
https://github.com/patricksebastien/libpd4unity
Article on Sebastian’s plug-in
Slayther: First, I tested libpd[4unity] without compiling the extensions
As with uPD (see below), slayther tried the 32-bit Unity 5 editor:
Slayther: Which is strange, because when I checked the code, it indeed can take 2 arguments
Slayther: The second error is also odd
Next, Slayther tried libPD4unity in Unity 4 and discovered different errors:
Slayther: But sound can be heard. Playing for the second time, however, crashes the Unity.So some stuff have been fixed in Unity 5, it seems.
uPD (Magicolo)
https://github.com/Magicolo/uPD
Slayther: As uPD is using libpd itself, it’s expected to throw same error [as libpd4unity]
I tried searching for how to compile 64 bit extension with MinGW, but couldn’t find anything
After I suggested that slayther try it in the 32-bit editor, to isolate the problem, slayther reported some strange bucks and that only one of the test scenes worked. He reported
Slayther: It says libpd isn’t compatible with Unity Webplayer
Next, Slayther tried uPD in Unity 4 and discovered different errors:
Current status
I’ve done some searching in this forum and elsewhere and have found some results for MaxMSP/PD integration (including a plug-in called Kalimba which we’re going to test soon, although it was intended for Unity Mobile). The general problem is that most of these results are a few years old and there doesn’t seem to be much current work being done on PD integration, which apparently was successful at some point but has deprecated due to the evolving Unity software. The people involved are also hard to reach. I heard from Magicolo on a PD forum 8 months ago but not since. Of course, I haven’t given up yet.
Thanks in advance,
Elliot