Have used Cinder for the last 6-7yrs or so. Been a fantastic foundation to all of the creative engineering projects at HUSH and various other studios across NYC. Excited to see it receiving attention within the HN community -- definitely a notable C++ framework.
Is it still being actively developed? I used to follow their message board and it felt like it kinda lost steam a few years back. It never quite got the critical mass it needed. The community is tiny.. and other tools have improved substantially. I've seen people do crazy stuff in an afternoon with Touch Designer that would take ages in C++/Cider. There are of course usecases where you need to squeeze out every ounce of performance but that window has narrowed a ton
Can I ask what value Cinder has in a world of Unreal/Unity? I'm guessing you don't use Houdini either since it's not realtime.
But take Unreal for example: you have this absolutely massive world of presets/plugins/etc made by the community. You have Niagara particle systems. You have incredible post-processing / color correction / cinematic grading / etc. You have Blueprints, the ability to write code, etc. You have the entirety of Quixel's megascans, etc. It's almost completely effortless to make unbelievably gorgeous/immersive things, whether it's near-photorealistic environments/landscapes, abstract audio visualizations, full on games, etc.
I'm genuinely trying to understand why anyone who works in interactive/realtime 2D or 3D visualization would ever use Cinder or Processing these days. Thoughts?
Be sure to checkout the gallery: https://libcinder.org/gallery