in new Plugdata beta version GEM replaced Ofelia and allegedly can also be used in vst version (Ofelia was grounded to Stand Alone version).
Despite this awesome news it's bit upsetting to those who liked Ofelia (Lua based lib), especially when Pd_Lua is going to merge/ being forked into Else, run under guy who has all the time been against scripting in Pd and have no proper programming experience.
Imo opinion it is just unfortunate if u using lib in PureData and it gets discontinued, but it is different story in Plugdata, where u have only handful of libs.. so u also expect some stability in them or at least some proper announcement.
Beta Plugdata was released with replacing GEM and quite unfortunate may be for some that it was mentioned/ discussed only on Plugdata official discord-forum, mentioned only as sidenote on FB forum. Which is actually at the moment imo good thing..
Alex than sounded quite careless saying to people expressing upset about lost lib they were learning/ using for some time, that this is just their own problem.
Timothy commented on it shortly after on PureData forum - and explain it that OpenFrameWorks turned out to be difficult to handle so they decided for GEM... and with his hilarious chillax record, one cannot much complain tough.)
I think one of the solution could be, if Timothy would kind of guarantee that he will keep maintain Libs that r in Plugdata if they got discontinued.
Few marks about bad handling of announcement of ending support of Ofelia
First - despite Ofelia wasn't directly integrated, its support was not complete, but it was only lib that could be officially installed to Plugdata as external.
It was said directly by Thimothy that users can use Pd version of Ofelia, route it to Plugdata and use it regularly when it will be integrated to Plugdata. So users rely on it..
Second - del.
Third - I have no idea if users would more prefer Ofelia or GEM, I am talking about very unfortunate way situation was handled.
It is not fully clear, tough, whether it doesn't a bit shooting itself in foot, when its coding capabilities were already lacking behind M4L Cbased Codebox, Lua based Jitter, win for Python (giving some emergency exit in case of rise of AI) and Java for API, and now they will be most likely lacking even more.
Fourth - Plugdata cannot influence development in PureData. If Pd_Lua is forked into Else, it has limited options.. meanwhile, since Else is in Plugdata it still has some control over it ..
Just wanted to say there is no simple way of this, especially when not everyone is interested in coding and significant part of users of Plugdata are those who primary do visuals in PureData.
Fifth - Plugdata Imo works on further graphic enhancement w/ coding.. some interesting stuff may in Lua/ Bezier curves...
