Hey bjeorn and joreg, thanks for the prompt replies! Make no mistake, I hold all you devvvvs and this supportive community in the highest regard! I was delighted what is now 15 years ago to have found vvvv in my evaluation of various frameworks for interactive work, for after 30+ years of professional coding, it made it wild fun again. That is not something I consider moving away from lightly.
Yeah, I’ve been aware of the VL integration, and dabbled in it slightly, but with my time being consumed by clients (some of them even paying!) who want stuff yesterday, my focus has been and remains getting stuff out the door as quickly as possible, and just never had the time to really delve into it. I did a quick survey of my code base, and my base library is 600+ .v4p files (not counting plugins), and my applications that I am still supporting are over 2000 patches.
Believe me, I would love to delve into gamma, as it does look to address some of the structural issues of beta and adds a whole lot of new stuff. I know already it would be WAY more fun than delving into Unreal, which I have been dabbling with over the years (Unity too) as some of my installations were done with Unreal developers and our programs interworking via sockets and spout - it is plagued by a LOT of legacy inconsistency.
I mean a big reason I am here with this problem, with actual clients and cool installations in my portfolio, is the kind of stuff vvvv made possible. And continues to - just this last week I had the VP of marketing of a huge corporation standing in front of an installation suggesting tweaks which I was able to do live from across the continent without a stop/compile/restart cycle for each tweak. That kind of responsiveness buys a lot of cred, and I do not lightly consider losing that capability.
So yeah, here I am wrestling with a Very Big Decision. For on the other side, here in Rochester, New York, RIT is one of the top game development and 3D graphics schools in the US, with a number of freelance game developers and game studios; so Unreal and Unity talent is all over the place. I have interested a number of folks here in vvvv, and gotten positive feedback about it, but they are still just dabblers.
That being said, I am weighing using the same techniques I used to inter-operate with Unreal to have my main beta stuff interoperate with new gamma stuff, enabling a gradual transition. We’ll see - thanks folks!