Sialk

Reference

When something goes wrong

The log, the messages along the bottom, and how to report it.

The log, first

Every run writes a log to ~/Documents/Sialk/logs/, without being asked.

It records the machine, the GPU, the frame rate, dropped frames, per-layer transfer counts and memory, and nothing about you, your sketches, or their content. Nothing is sent anywhere; it is a file on your disk until you choose to attach it to something.

If something went wrong, that file is the answer, and it is already written.

Messages along the bottom

Messages appear along the bottom of the window. Repeats are counted rather than repeated, so ×12 means the same thing happened twelve times, which is usually the more useful fact.

A layer has stopped

The two numbers at the bottom right of a layer card - 2448/2448 - are frames painted against frames delivered. If the second number stops moving, that sketch has stopped.

The show carries on; the compositor keeps drawing the last frame it received. Look at that sketch, not at Sialk.

Nothing is reacting to the music

In this order:

  1. Check the input device, and check macOS has given Sialk microphone permission - System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone.
  2. Check for signal. Sialk reports silence after a second with nothing on the input.
  3. Check the sketch reads the audio. A sketch that never touches window.sialk is deaf by construction.

From v1: put an LFO on a parameter. It needs no audio and moves regardless. If the LFO moves and audio does not, the problem is the input. See play music into it.

The blend modes all look the same

There is probably nothing underneath. A blend needs something to blend with, turn on a second layer and set the top one's opacity to about half.

A layer is invisible, or the one below shows through

If your sketch never paints a background, the layer is transparent. That is the same behaviour as a browser source anywhere else, call background(0) in p5, or return an alpha of 1.0 in GLSL. See layers.

macOS will not open the app

The beta is not signed by Apple yet. Right-click the app and choose Open, then confirm, that dialog has an Open button where the double-click one does not. Once only. See install.

A sketch is slow

Which kind it is decides what to change:

  • GLSL cares about pixels. A loop that always runs to the end costs its full length at every one of them.
  • p5 cares about count, not resolution. Reduce the number of things, not the size of the frame.

And remember a heavy layer does not slow the rest of the show, see the output.

A show opens with a layer marked not found

The sketch has moved, or the drive it lives on is not connected. The layer keeps its place, its mix and its modulators. Reconnect, reopen, and it comes back, and saving while it was missing did not lose anything.

Reporting something

Use the feedback page. It takes the run log and a sentence about what you were doing, which together are almost always enough. That is exactly what the beta is for.