Plugins Discussion: Transitions and Beyond

[cmang]

An exciting feature coming in Durdraw 0.30 is user-created plugins!

They are currently in an early state. I am still working out the details of the plugin API, but here is how they work so far:

0: Make sure you are using the latest Dev branch.

1: Create a plugin as a Python script (Lua coming later). There are some examples in example_plugins/.

2: Drop the .py file into ~/.durdraw/plugins and restart Durdraw.

3: Animation plugins (plugins that implement transform_movie()) will show up in the Animation -> Plugins menu.

Here are some examples you can try right now:

Plasma:

Screen.Recording.2025-03-19.at.1.39.37.PM.mov

Sine effect:

Screen.Recording.2025-03-19.at.11.37.27.AM.mov

Color randomizer:

Screen.Recording.2025-03-19.at.1.01.48.AM.mov

Screen.Recording.2025-03-19.at.1.11.40.AM.mov

The script contains some metadata to register itself, including a "provides" field, describing which methods they provide. This tells Durdraw what "type" of plugin it is:

# Durdraw plugin format version
durdraw_plugin_version = 1

# Plugin information
durdraw_plugin = {
    "name": "random letters",
    "author": "Sam Foster, samfoster@gmail.com",
    "version":  1,   # Plugin verison, if applicable
    "provides": ["transform_frame", "transform_movie"],
    "desc": "Fill canvas with random letters."
}

Then implement the functions you are registering.

Transform_movie() takes a Movie class, manipulates it, returns a modified Movie.. Some important variables here are Movie.frames, which contains a list of frames, and Movies.sizeX (columns), Movies.sizeY (lines).

Transform_frame() takes a Frame class, and similarly, returns a new Frame. Frame contains Frame.content (a list of lines, each line a string, containing the Utf-8/ascii characters without colors) and Frame.newColorMap, whch contains a list of color pairs. Each color pair is a list. eg: [[1,0], [3, 1], ...]

You can also look at the Durdraw file format spec to get a better idea of how Durdraw's internal structures work together.

Here is the random character example:

def transform_movie(mov, appState=None):
    frame_num = 0
    for frame in mov.frames:
        mov.frames[frame_num] = transform_frame(frame, appState=appState)
        frame_num += 1
    return mov

def transform_frame(frame, appState=None):
    # fill canvas with random letters.
    line_num = 0
    while line_num < frame.sizeY:
        col_num  = 0
        while col_num < frame.sizeX:
            frame.content[line_num][col_num] = random.choice(string.ascii_letters)
            col_num += 1
        line_num += 1
    return frame

I hope this makes sense. Please feel free to leave any feedback or suggestions.

[cmang]

These pair nicely with the new transparent paste!

Screen.Recording.2025-03-19.at.8.08.14.PM.mov

Screen.Recording.2025-03-19.at.8.56.03.PM.mov

And stacked!

Screen.Recording.2025-03-19.at.9.05.12.PM.mov

[cmang]

Plasma overlay effect combined with sine effect

Screen.Recording.2025-03-19.at.11.57.41.PM.mov

Screen.Recording.2025-03-19.at.10.13.14.PM.mov