Coding ops and working together on projects or in teams is an important part of the cables community. Therefore, making it easier to find out what's going on in your teams and patches, without breaking your flow of working, has been long overdue.
Read on here or visit our changelog to find out how that works, and what else we’ve got for you in this update.
But Before We Start…
We would like to thank everyone who chimed in to support us via Patreon so far!
Your paid memberships already provide enough budget to cover server costs and the monthly discord "boosts". This means a lot! Up until now, we had to stem this purely through undev, our small, two dude company behind cables.
If you enjoy using cables, please consider supporting us as well. Patreon is now offering annual memberships as well, with a 10% discount!
Activityfeed
Lots of patches, collaborators and teams working on different projects or ops, and public patches collecting likes and comments. That’s a lot, and it was a little hard to keep track of what needs doing, and what else is happening in the cables community.
With this release we are introducing the Activityfeed. This is the one place where cables will notify you about actions required, likes to your patches and comments left for you.
If people are requesting access to your patches or teams, simply find a note on the Activityfeed, click the red bubble on the website or in the editor, and act on these right away.
Go check it out. The last 30 days of activity on your feed have been pre-filled by us...
Notification Settings
To flag even more what needs your attention (access requests, invites, ...) you can now set how to get notified.
Get an email (as you used to), get a small hint in the editor when you are currently working on a patch, or register different
devices to receive push-notifications.
Try registering your mobile phone for really quick reactions on access requests and invites by people you are working with.
All these are for "action items" only, keeping the signal-to-noise ratio in check, even with large teams and collaboration projects.
Editor Changes
Texture Preview
We’ve updated the texture preview in the editor to allow for quick rescaling of the preview image. Along with the VizTexture-Op
this gives you a nice, quick way to see the outputs of your different
render- or post processing stages.
Did you know you can also make it
stick open?
Color Indicators
To give you more visual feedback on the state of your patch, we added an indicator for the color that is set on basically any Op that works with RGB inputs.
This works even when animated and provides a quick overview of all the colors that make up your patch.
Color Schemes
Using the ColorScheme op you can now act on a scheme that's set in the browser or device.
Create dark- and light-themed versions of your patch by querying the preferred settings of your users.
Manage Op Code
There is room for parameters now! To save you from clicking back and forth while working on ops, we moved the tabs below the renderer to the
"three dots menu" of the op.
Select "Manage Op Code" to open up a new editor tab with all the functionality you need for your ops work. Add libraries, clone or rename the op, work on
attachments...you name it.
You can now also select all of this with a simple click in the top of the code-editor tab.
More Neat Things
Unlisted - View Only
We implemented the concept of "patch visibility" in the last release, and removed the "secret url" while we were at it. But we heard your feedback, so now we are introducing the "Unlisted View-Only" mode mode option. Share patches with the community or your clients, but keep your cables magic to yourself.
PBR Material Revisited
Thanks to amajesticseaflapflap for revisiting PBRMaterial and adding more "clear coat" options and "thin film iridescence" for everyone to use!
You can now finally coat your automotive models in a metallic look and put some oily, shiny puddles underneath.
Patch Page Improvements
On the patch page, collaborators will now find all your used User-Ops and Team-Ops along with all the Patch-Ops that belong to the patch.
Time to clean up before you publish your patch!
With the right permissions, you will also be able to access the settings or export the project directly.
Faster Loading And Saving
Thanks to the support through Patreon, we were able to revisit our server-infrastructure and optimize it significantly. And while we had our eyes on loading and saving speed, we went through a lot of pages on cables.gl to reduce loading time, waiting for saving (i.e. in the editor), the size of requests by removing unneeded data and a lot more… You should notice that immediately. Sorry, less coffee breaks for you!
...that concludes the November 2023 Release.
cables is brought to you by
If you want to see some special feature integrated into cables,
contact us to see if we can make it happen.
The following users helped to make this release possible by their membership on patreon.
kikohs - thanks for your "Gold" membership
wirmachenbunt - thanks for your "Gold" membership
Thank you!