This morning, I’m going to try to get OPENRNDR running with Kotlin on my machine. I’ve seen it done on a Mac and on a Windows machine. What could go wrong?”

It says here on the web site: OPENRNDR is an open source framework for creative coding, written in Kotlin, that simplifies writing real-time interactive software. Since the Zoom crew think we might work on something graphical together. Hill and Beecham both just followed the instructions, so I’ll do the same and see what happens. I’ll log it here, as is my fashion.

The OPENRNDR site is quite nice, looks more professional than some of the graphical / Kotlin alternatives. I click on “Get Started”. It invites me to clone their template directly from github. I do that and it begins to build. It seems to be downloading about 500 files so far … now it is building with a rotating IDEA “I’m busy” thingie … now it is indexing Kotlin script dependencies … and it appears to be done.

Now what? I see this message in the Build window:

Deprecated Gradle features were used in this build, making it incompatible with Gradle 8.0.

I propose to ignore that on the grounds that it seems to have worked.

IDEA has opened the readme. There’s not much left to do but to run it and see what happens.

There are two mains, TemplateProgram and TemplateLiveProgram. Web site says to run the first one as the next thing to do.

And it says this, after an exceedling long list of jar files and stuff.

Warning: Running on macOS without -XstartOnFirstThread JVM argument. Restarting JVM with -XstartOnFirstThread.
[LWJGL] Platform/architecture mismatch detected for module: org.lwjgl
	JVM platform:
		macOS aarch64 16.0.2
		OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM v16.0.2+7 by Azul Systems, Inc.
	Platform available on classpath:
		macos/x64
[LWJGL] Failed to load a library. Possible solutions:
	a) Add the directory that contains the shared library to -Djava.library.path or -Dorg.lwjgl.librarypath.
	b) Add the JAR that contains the shared library to the classpath.
[LWJGL] Enable debug mode with -Dorg.lwjgl.util.Debug=true for better diagnostics.
[LWJGL] Enable the SharedLibraryLoader debug mode with -Dorg.lwjgl.util.DebugLoader=true for better diagnostics.
 INFO [main]                                 ↘ Set -Dorg.openrndr.exceptions=JVM for conventional exception-handling

I think it’s telling me that the library it provided isn’t compatible with my m1 mac. I’ll check their site and probably wait for Hill or Beecham to show up to assist: I’m completely without experienc configuring the libraries for IDEA/JVM/etc.

A quick visit to the OPENRNDR Discourse and Slack and there’s a new version out there. Rebuilding from that gives me a running demo program.

Well done. Ten points to OPENRNDR. Thanks to Abe, edwin, and Vechro!

I’ll report further when I actually try changing and writing some code!