I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and wanted to see what/if other people thought. I wondered a little while ago about the ability to create “private” toxes as a sort of plugin. The .tox setup is a great part of touch and has allowed everyone to share great things.
The private-ability of full .toe files is a step in the direction of making touch a real “product” making tool though I think it is probably not used all that much, as I imagine most professional jobs done with touch are also manned, deployed and then removed by the same groups of people who are programming the systems.
In the vein of the music software world, I think some of the best “clients” for Touch programmers, such as myself, are other touch users and programmers. At the moment, there is no system in place for allowing this. I understand there is a whole set of consequences that would come about by setting up the ability to sell, licence and protect “plugins” that can be dropped into the touch network, but not cracked open. I just think it may add another dimension to the professional community by allowing those of us who want to focus on discreet tools to develop, support and sell plugins to be used by others. The digital music community seems to thrive on this model, where as the touch designer video/media community is not as communal. In the professional circuit it’s all closely guarded workflows, where each firm or individual is reinventing the wheel because there’s no way to share work without making it completely open (aside from C++ operators i suppose, which is certainly something to look into).
I know I’m making generalizations (some of which may be pretty naive), and would love to see a discussion taken up about what people think about this, the hazards, benefits, etc.
I would also like to ponder on what it would take to set something up like this. I foresee some infrastructural changes needed to allow for this, like perhaps nested instances to take better advantage of multi-cores, texture sharing (haven’t done any tests of the DirectX top yet), and of course private toxes. I haven’t thought through it completely, but I imagine the framework for creating a license system for private plugins can be developed as things are now with some scripting, web server checking, etc.
Anyways, I would love to hear everyone’s thoughts, and of course what the Derivative crew think!
Thanks!
P