libpd64

A port of LibPD to 64-bit compatibilty with Unity

Setting up a build environment

LibPD must be built in a UNIX-like environment because the build toolchain requires a few UNIX system tools. There are many packages that provide this, but MSYS2 is a particularly good one.

Download MSYS2 here

MSYS2 doesn't come with a compiler as part of the base package, so you'll need to install gcc and make next. From an MSYS2 terminal, run:

$ pacman -Sy
$ pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc
$ pacman -S make

Finally, you'll need a git installation if you don't already have one.

Compiling the libpd DLL

Open up a git terminal and run:

$ git clone https://github.com/libpd/libpd

The LibPD repository has a few submodules that must be added:

$ cd libpd
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

Back to MSYS2:

$ cd libpd
$ ./mingw64_build_csharp.bat

This will result in a lot of warnings as libpd has many pointer-to-integer casts. We'll fix those later.

The important things that we're looking for are:

libpd/libs/libpdcsharp.dll
libpd/libs/mingw64/libwinpthread-1.dll

These are what we'll copy into we'll end up copying into our Unity project.

Setting up a Unity project

We'll be building off of uPD by Magicolo. Clone uPD with:

$ cd ..
$ git clone https://github.com/Magicolo/uPD

Then make a new Unity project that you want to use LibPD with. Go to Assets > Import Package > Custom Package and select uPD/uPD.unitypackage. Import all assets, then select that you made a backup and are ready to upgrade.

uPD has a few rough edges; you should get an UnauthorizedAccessException about being unable to copy libpdcsharp.dll. We'll fix it later.

Example scenes are:

Assets/Magicolo/!Examples/PureData/SoundExample.unity
Assets/Magicolo/!Examples/PureData/ContainerExample.unity
Assets/Magicolo/!Examples/PureData/SequenceExample.unity

The DLLs packaged with uPD are compiled for 32-bit, so we need to inject our new LibPD DLLs into the project now. Copy:

libpd/libs/libpdcsharp.dll → Assets/Magicolo/AudioTools/PureData/Plugins/libpdcsharp.dll
libpd/libs/mingw64/libwinpthread-1.dll → Assets/Magicolo/AudioTools/PureData/Plugins/libwinpthread-1.dll

Unity will now be able to use these DLLs. However, the interface for LibPD has changed since the last update to uPD and we need to change a few things.

In Assets/Magicolo/AudioTools/PureData/LibPD/LibPDNativeMethods.cs
- On line 88, change EntryPoint="libpd_safe_init" to EntryPoint="libpd_init"

That's all of the changes we need to make to get uPD working again. Open up the first example scene and try it out!

Fixing uPD

uPD has a few persistent warnings and errors. Let's get ride of those.

In Assets/Magicolo/AudioTools/PureData/PureData.cs
- Add using UnityEngine.SceneManagement; to the top
- Change OnLevelWasLoaded(int level) to OnLevelFinishedLoading(Scene scene, LoadSceneMode mode)
- Add:
```
void OnEnable()
{
	SceneManager.sceneLoaded += OnLevelFinishedLoading;
}
void OnDisable()
{
	SceneManager.sceneLoaded -= OnLevelFinishedLoading;
}
```
In Assets/Magicolo/GeneralTools/Extensions/AudioClipExtensions.cs
- On line 27, replace the true, false arguments in the call to AudioClip.Create with just false
In Assets/Magicolo/GeneralTools/Extensions/StringExtensions.cs
- Change charInfo.width to charInfo.advance on lines 142 and 166
In Assets/Magicolo/AudioTools/PureData/PureDataPluginManager.cs
- Comment out or delete the body of CheckPlugins() on lines 47 through 58.

Fixing LibPD

LibPD comes with a lot of warnings when we compile it, and we'd like to be able to see if there are any legitimately worrying ones. We can dump the build log to a file using:

$ ./mingw64_build_csharp.bat &> out.txt

Looking at the build log, there appear to be a lot of warnings about casting pointers to integers of a different size. Most of these are because of the type of pure-data's casting between integers and pointers of different sizes now that it's being compiled for 64-bit. We can fix them by changing the type of t_int to be 64-bit.

On line 86 of m_pd.h, change:

#define PD_LONGINTTYPE long

#define PD_LONGINTTYPE long long int

After recompiling, that's the vast majority of our warnings fixed. The rest of the warnings are pretty benign, so we'll leave them alone for now.

Using patches with uPD

uPD makes it really easy to load a patch and start communicating with it.

Preparing a patch with PureData

To make a patch compatible with uPD, feed their output to throw~ Master_left and throw~ Master_right objects. Patches must be placed in Assets/StreamingAssets/Patches.

Communicating with a patch

To open a patch and start it, call PureData.OpenPatch(...) with your patch's name. To communicate with a patch, call PureData.Send(...) with the event name and any arguments.

Example

An example patch is in Assets/StreamingAssets/Patches/samplePatch.pd.

A script that communicates with the patch is in Assets/Scripts/PureDataPatchLoadingExample.cs.

You can demo this script by opening Assets/Scenes/PatchLoading.unity.

djkoloski/libpd64