This is a rendering engine that aims to be a blend between photoshop and code-based generative art.

The interface to the renderer is a declarative project file powered by the V8 Javascript engine.

The interface to the user is either the Javascript file or the VueJS based UI.

Quickstart

Create starcry alias that uses docker (see docker.md for other versions, including with podman)

alias starcry='xhost + && docker run --rm --name starcry -i -t -v `pwd`:`pwd` -w `pwd` -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix --device /dev/dri/card0:/dev/dri/card0 --entrypoint=/starcry docker.io/rayburgemeestre/starcry:v8'

Get a test project file and render it (use ctrl+t to toggle a preview window, or provide --gui as an additional parameter):

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rayburgemeestre/starcry/master/input/web.js
starcry ./web.js

View the video with ffplay, mpv or something else, e.g.:

ffplay output*.h264

Building

git clone --recursive https://github.com/rayburgemeestre/starcry
cd starcry
make            # display all targets
make build      # execute containerized clang build
make build-gcc  # execute containerized gcc build
make debug      # execute containerized clang debug build

The executable from the dockerized build will be in build and should run on Ubuntu 22.04.

Architecture

The architecture is only partially documented here.

Components

• libs/piper - a pipeline architecture is used for the main architecture.
• libs/framer - ffmpeg wrapper to generate video output.
• libffmpeg + h264 - dependencies used by framer.
• V8 + v8pp - used for scripting, starcry is tightly coupled with it.
• Quasar - web UI framework (vue3, pinia, typescript)
• Seasocks - internal web server with websockets support
• png++ - used for writing PNG files
• fmt - used for string formatting
• SFML - used for preview window
• OpenEXR - used for writing exr files
• tvision - used for the console UI (TUI)
• inotify-cpp - used for monitoring changes to loaded js file on disk.
• Redis - used for pub/sub between starcry and remote rendering workers
• vivid - color library used for hue etc.

Almost everything is statically linked, resulting in a relatively portable binary.

TODO

• Introduce proper v8 javascript <> shape mapper and get rid of v8 code in a lot of places (except for the mappers).
• Getting rid of the old properties system we have for shapes.
• https://varun.ca/noise/#glossy-blobs
• Move more properties to "base" class object_bridge, some are needless duplication.

Separate worker processes

Starcry can run with redis as a pub/sub. First install redis, run it, then:

redis-server
redis-cli config set client-output-buffer-limit "pubsub 512mb 256mb 120"

make build
./build/starcry -i input/test.js -t 0 --server tcp://localhost:6379

./build/starcry --client tcp://localhost:6379 &
./build/starcry --client tcp://localhost:6379 &
./build/starcry --client tcp://localhost:6379 &
./build/starcry --client tcp://localhost:6379 &