What's Native Instruments Doing About Hi-DPI Support Of Instruments & Effects ?

[THE INTRANCER]

... I settled for the re-skinning option and I made these skins available for users to download back in December to use and edit as they wished, from here.

I think rescaling these myself will be another project, which will be worth doing... in the year ahead.

What is your estimate on man-hours for the Form project?
Is it likely that the experience and creations will make
subsequent efforts easier? Sounds like a commercial scale
project (no pun intended) to me, as a total non-coder.
I did a small mod to U-he ColourCopy beta, using Inkscape and Gimp,
it was tedious, but rewarding. Layered some see-thru zebra stripes
on the main panel, changed green LED to blue. Need to apply that
to the V1.x when time is available.
Cheers

To resize 'Form' to one fixed resolution up to say 1440P (aspect dimensions retained), would take I'd estimate, pretty much a solid week, 5 to 10 days to do properly...and that's for someone that is experienced in doing this. It would be hard to get everything looking exactly the same because there are no assets provided as there is with plugins like from UHE's, thus one would need to guess the transparency values and adjust accordingly, screen grabbing, replicating names of elements with a new ID so you don't get mixed up, continual saving and cross checking the results of those changes every single time.. yup, a long tedious process but worth it if you know you'll be using these for years to come. Another aspect is that when you create a new element, it needs to be placed manually and on the correct level to match the element you are replacing, like a display for example. Numbered displays would have to be recreated from scratch again. The only other issue is that of sharing that altered ensemble that has a new GUI which isn't allowed. The graphic assets themselves, sure...but I'm not sure how many people would be down for the same tricky process to rebuild a complex ensemble themselves.
It's not for the impatient person... that's for sure.

[Echoes in the Attic]

It is a huge project to overhaul 20 years old codebases like Kontakt and Reaktor for the thing that didn't exist back then. It is not a topic NI is not concerned about, and if you'll notice, the latest released products (Dirt Pack, Mod Pack and Massive X) all have scalable GUIs. So they are working on it, but it's a more complicated thing than you could imagine.

Do note that there's probably nothing NI can do about the bitmap-based GUIs for libraries/ensembles done for Kontakt/Reaktor. They would have to be scaled with their current assets, so they will get blurry at 4K for sure. No other way except redoing each and every library/ensemble ever made, which I'm sure you can understand not every developer will be willing to do, if any.

Funny how companies like U-He, Aturia and Spectrasonics can update old instruments with resizable GUIs but NI, by far the largest of these companies, can't seem to do it.

[SLiC]

I think it is more likely that the older NI products will just be dropped and replaced with new code versions like Massive X....but none of this will happen soon....low hanging fruit is just to make more Reaktor instruments and sample packs of people hitting pans with rusty hammers ‘for film composers’. Komplete Filler.

[kmonkey]

Stupid question: can i resize Massive X?? how?

[EvilDragon]

Click on the down arrow in top left corner, there are options.

Funny how companies like U-He, Arturia and Spectrasonics can update old instruments with resizable GUIs but NI, by far the largest of these companies, can't seem to do it.

It all depends on the toolkits the companies are using. u-he has their own, NI has their own, they started from very different points and made them very differently - my conjencture is that u-he's codebase is much more easily expandable/updateable than the one NI is using due to early decisions in the 90s (00s in case of u-he).

Given the cost and lack of need of Massive X in my setup, I've not downloaded it yet to explore it's scalability options, how did they implement that ? (i.e the method / location for rescaling).

MX requires OpenGL, the GUI is done in Qt, so there's very few graphical assets and most of the interface is vector-based (that's how it looks to me).

[firepile]

Stupid question: can i resize Massive X?? how?

Choose "View Size" from the system menu.

[firepile]

It is a huge project to overhaul 20 years old codebases like Kontakt and Reaktor for the thing that didn't exist back then. It is not a topic NI is not concerned about, and if you'll notice, the latest released products (Dirt Pack, Mod Pack and Massive X) all have scalable GUIs.

Unfortunately, they forgot to scale the text on the system and presets menus.

[Winstontaneous]

It is a huge project to overhaul 20 years old codebases like Kontakt and Reaktor for the thing that didn't exist back then. It is not a topic NI is not concerned about, and if you'll notice, the latest released products (Dirt Pack, Mod Pack and Massive X) all have scalable GUIs. So they are working on it, but it's a more complicated thing than you could imagine.

Do note that there's probably nothing NI can do about the bitmap-based GUIs for libraries/ensembles done for Kontakt/Reaktor. They would have to be scaled with their current assets, so they will get blurry at 4K for sure. No other way except redoing each and every library/ensemble ever made, which I'm sure you can understand not every developer will be willing to do, if any.

What's the chance of NI just increasing the itty-bitty aliased fonts throughout Kontakt & Reaktor to start? The people who created them have eyeballs that are 20 years older now...

[EvilDragon]

It is a huge project to overhaul 20 years old codebases like Kontakt and Reaktor for the thing that didn't exist back then. It is not a topic NI is not concerned about, and if you'll notice, the latest released products (Dirt Pack, Mod Pack and Massive X) all have scalable GUIs.

Unfortunately, they forgot to scale the text on the system and presets menus.

Those are OS-based menus, so not handled by the plugin scaling feature - I think.

[perfumer]

It is a huge project to overhaul 20 years old codebases like Kontakt and Reaktor for the thing that didn't exist back then. It is not a topic NI is not concerned about, and if you'll notice, the latest released products (Dirt Pack, Mod Pack and Massive X) all have scalable GUIs.

Unfortunately, they forgot to scale the text on the system and presets menus.

Those are OS-based menus, so not handled by the plugin scaling feature - I think.

They shouldn't be. And should be.

[glokraw]

... I settled for the re-skinning option and I made these skins available for users to download back in December to use and edit as they wished, from here.

I think rescaling these myself will be another project, which will be worth doing... in the year ahead.

What is your estimate on man-hours for the Form project?
Is it likely that the experience and creations will make
subsequent efforts easier? Sounds like a commercial scale
project (no pun intended) to me, as a total non-coder.
I did a small mod to U-he ColourCopy beta, using Inkscape and Gimp,
it was tedious, but rewarding. Layered some see-thru zebra stripes
on the main panel, changed green LED to blue. Need to apply that
to the V1.x when time is available.
Cheers

To resize 'Form' to one fixed resolution up to say 1440P (aspect dimensions retained), would take I'd estimate, pretty much a solid week, 5 to 10 days to do properly...and that's for someone that is experienced in doing this. It would be hard to get everything looking exactly the same because there are no assets provided as there is with plugins like from UHE's, thus one would need to guess the transparency values and adjust accordingly, screen grabbing, replicating names of elements with a new ID so you don't get mixed up, continual saving and cross checking the results of those changes every single time.. yup, a long tedious process but worth it if you know you'll be using these for years to come. Another aspect is that when you create a new element, it needs to be placed manually and on the correct level to match the element you are replacing, like a display for example. Numbered displays would have to be recreated from scratch again. The only other issue is that of sharing that altered ensemble that has a new GUI which isn't allowed. The graphic assets themselves, sure...but I'm not sure how many people would be down for the same tricky process to rebuild a complex ensemble themselves.
It's not for the impatient person... that's for sure.

Thanks for the detailed answer. It's easy for the masses to see a gui,
and miss the nervous system and skeletal like mechanics that make
controlling things with handy shapes and pretty colours such a delight
Cheers

[firepile]

It is a huge project to overhaul 20 years old codebases like Kontakt and Reaktor for the thing that didn't exist back then. It is not a topic NI is not concerned about, and if you'll notice, the latest released products (Dirt Pack, Mod Pack and Massive X) all have scalable GUIs.

Unfortunately, they forgot to scale the text on the system and presets menus.

Those are OS-based menus, so not handled by the plugin scaling feature - I think.

No, they are not OS-based.

[EvilDragon]

Yes, they are - in Massive X, Mod and Dirt Packs, they definitely are OS-based.