Paris Treantafeles wrote:
hi list,
can someone please suggest which objects i should be looking at to do the following.
i would like to have one computer with a pd/gem patch that is actually being executed/rendered on another machine. is that possible?
yes
(the suggestions here are totally different from what derek proposed, as you are running only one single instance of pd which is rendering the Gem-window to a remote machine)
the simple solution: use linux; create the gemwindow on the remote machine with something like [create dali:8.0( (where "dali" is the remote-computer that should render the window, and "8.0" is the display on "dali" you want to render to); for more information search for X-forwarding.
the complicated solution: use chromium (http://chromium.sf.net), a cross-platform distributed highly-scalable openGL (and so on and so on...) rendering system. runs on linux, w32, osX and irix (and probably some other os's...); does not require any changes to the openGL-application (in this case: Gem), so it should work out of the box. it is quite complicated to configure (but gosh, it is really powerful); i have only tested it under linux and it works after some quirks (search the gem-dev mailing-list archives) if you are trying to use it with some other OS, i would be thankful for any reports.
notes: X-forwarding will run the server-side of openGL on the remote machine chromium will run everything (in the openGL domain, of course) on the "render-network" (and i guess you can configure what computer is what node in your network) using chromium is really an overhead for a task as simple as forwarding a window using a lot of textures (like video, for example) will of course make a significant traffic on your network.
something totally different: if you just want to run the patch on 1 computer and the rendering on the other computer because you want to use all of the gfx-cards outputs for the video and you don't want to show your patch (e.g. you want to interact with your dual-head fullscreen rendering) you can also (and this might be simpler):
the like.
though pd (and Gem) are running on the "render"-computer
tcp/ip-connection; this means you can run pd on one computer (the "render"-target) and pd-gui on another computer (your interface)
mfg.a.sdr IOhannes