Hey everyone,
hope you`re doing well! In the last months and maybe even years I have been quite involved at work in creating TouchDesigner patches that often need the same basic building blocks. After building quite a few components for our company, I have decided that I want to start building something for a broader scope, which is why I setup the TDX-Utils repo. Currently there is only one component available, but I plan to add new stuff whenever I find the time and stumble across something, that could make a great reusable piece.
For the start there is the ConfigLoader.tox, that you can drag and drop into your projects to parse config-files into tableDATs. Currently only python is supported, as I guess everyone using TouchDesigner to an extend where you need external configuration is used to writing python. However, formats like .toml or .yml could maybe be supported in the future.
With the component it is possible to pass values (str, int, float, bool) as well as lists, dicts and dataclasses composed of simple datatypes to Touchdesigner and because the config is basically a python script being run, you can even read in environment-variables dynamically etc…
I hope this lowers the burden to split configuration from logic (or “business logic”) and make someone’s life easier when deploying TouchDesigner projects in multiple environments. Although this is a very basic piece, I would love to see this help someone.
Curious for your thoughts and if this fits your needs - or if you guys aren’t using configuration-files at all…
Cheers,
Fynn
PS: I have looked at the Palette and did a very brief online search but havent found anything doing exactly what the ConfigLoader does. If I have overseen something please dont kill me! Would be interesting, if someone else has build something similar, still.