The “Food for Rhino” site is generally extremely slow.
I hope that, since no comments can be posted at present because it is “under maintenance”, it will be more responsive afterwards.
But other improvements would be appreciated :
-Sort the updates in the same order for all plugins : sometimes it is “latest first”, sometimes it is “latest last”, which has tricked me into downloading dusty old stuff in the past.
-Force to developpers to put clear dates for the various updates (
currently, some mark dates, others don’t)
-This brings me to perhaps the most important problem : clean-up ! There’s a lot of old stuff in there that should be weeded-out. Many plugins are not compatible with newer versions of Rhino / GH and it is not clearly specified. Lots of stuff has clearly not been updated for a long time, and many links to websites give 404 errors.
Maybe there should be some sort of expiration date…
-I also find that the search engine is not very good
In short, I think that the Rhino ecosystem deserves a better repository as the constellation of plugins grows.
The comment feature reporting site was under maintenance was a bug and we fixed it recently.
Could you give us more details on the speed issue you are experiencing? Is food4Rhino always slow? Is it slow for every page you visit or only for some? Could you tell us where you are located?
Each developer is responsible for its own page and decides the updates order. I agree with you, they should all be sorted from latest to oldest and if I detect some Apps with the wrong order I inform the developer but I probably missed some.
There are different ways of publishing content to food4Rhino. If the file is uploaded to the site, the date is clear, but if the file is an external link it’s not always possible to get the date. We are working on a solution that could always determine the date and show it.
We chose to leave the oldest content as some users may still find them useful even if the developer does not support the plug-in anymore. But you are right, it is not clear enough on which version of Rhino each plug-in is working, we will fix this.
As for the search engine, could you tell us how we could improve it?
food4Rhino is in constant development and thanks to messages like yours we can keep on improving it to fit the users needs so thanks for your message and keep commenting.
I am located in Albi, France ; that’s not too far from your offices in Barcelona which I have visited on multiple occasions by the way
Today, the speed is fine, but on many occasions, the page was quite slow to load.
Sorry if I can’t be more specific. Most pages load in a flash nowadays, so that type of issue is very noticeable when you bump into it.
Well that’s an issue right there : Forums have moderators. A repository like that should be carefully curated ; that was my point.
That would be a great feature : enforce date stamping.
That way, the “Sort by last updated” filter would reflect the real situation.
Also, plugins with dead links to a download or corporate site should be flagged somehow as “Probably obsolete” or something like that.
I guess that you need to make a “compatible with” tag compulsory.
Another way things could be improved is to enforce a single -bullet-proof- install procedure for Rhino/Grasshopper plugins and add-ins.
If you read the comments, you will see that most people are struggling with blocked files, head scratching on which file to put where, added complication for some GH plugins compatible with this or that version of GH, zipped, not-zipped, and if zipped, will it unzip as a bunch of files or as a folder ?, etc… etc… (and don’t get me started with plugins like Kangaroo that have two versions and where you need to have V1 if you want V2 to work).
But I guess that’s more an issue with Rhino/GH itself than Food For Rhino.
I’m in France too!! But you are closer to Barcelona than to me
I’m the moderator and I’ll pay more attention on this issue from now on.
This filter should always reflect the real situation (by a week) as for each update I verify the date taken into account by food4Rhino for sorting and change it if needed. In other words, even if there is no date in the File section, filter should reflect the real update date.
If a link to download is dead, plug-in should not be in food4Rhino so if you see dead links in the download section, please inform. Once the product compatibility will be visible on the App description, the obsolete flag won’t be necessary.
This is already compulsory, we just need to make it visible to the users.
As for the last point, it would be nice to have all the plug-ins install in the same way but the Rhino ecosystem is so vast that it’s not possible as for now.
(getting you started nonetheless…) That shouldn’t be the case. In fact, I’ve seen @DanielPiker specifically asking users not to install version 1. Are there cases where v1 is necessary?
We hope that developers turn to @will’s package manager (a.k.a Yak) more and more in the future. I do not think (but what do I know?) that we have plans to enforce developers to use this platform but I’m sure that it would help if you, the user, makes it clear to the developer of the plug-in that you use that you expect it to be available through the package manager.
Thanks,
-wim
Well, for one, “MeshMachine” from KG1 has been transplanted to a rather inferior “SimpleRemesh” component, and after un-installing KG1 I did get a “Missing Kangaroo.dll” error message, and (tell me if I’m wrong), there is no dll required for KG2. Confusing stuff.
You might want to advertize Yak on Food For Rhino, and perhaps, at some point, make it compulsory.
You’re right - the Kangaroo Food4Rhino page could use a cleanup to clarify these things.
I’d forgotten it still had those notes about the old version.
On Rhino 6 users don’t usually need to install anything extra, since Kangaroo2 comes included already and updates with Rhino service releases.
As for MeshMachine - I’ve now transplanted the whole thing, including the Plankton libraries into the next version of Kangaroo2, and am also fixing the SimpleRemesh component. (I kept getting things into a muddle with the way these libraries loaded, but hopefully this resolves it and users won’t need to install anything themselves).
Once this is sorted there should only need to be 2 versions of Kangaroo visible on Food4Rhino - a Kangaroo 2 for Rhino5, and a Kangaroo 0.099 only for (hopefully increasingly rare) occasions when someone needs to open a file made with an old version.
Another improvement would be to make the auto-download compatibility compulsory in the cases where one wants lo load a GH definition containing components from a plug-in which is not currently installed.
I just made a fresh install on a new system and here’s an example of 3 GH plugins for which the auto-download fails :
Auto loading currently is again up to the developer to implement their plug-in into the yak package manager. Many developers (I’m guilty as well) just haven’t had to the time, don’t know about it, or don’t want to stop supporting R5 yet.
Not all the plug-ins are on food4Rhino unfortunately, it’s up to each developper to upload its own plug-ins. Although I’m wondering if HDTToolsUtils is the same as Human (https://www.food4rhino.com/app/human), in this case the problem is different
