Having used all 3 fairly extensively, here are my thoughts on the 3 different pieces of software for what it's worth.

I came from both Romplur & Maize before transitioning to HISE. They are easy to use but you hit issues and/or limitations pretty quickly IMO.
Maize & Romplur are very similar to each other despite the Romplur CEO saying otherwise.

Romplur has a huge issue if you want to use real sample mapping for each individual note and will just grind your DAW to a halt if you have even a modest number of presets/banks.
Maize doesn't have that issue at all depsite being the significantly older software.
With both, you are limited to the built in effects and functionality so if you have far reaching or even moderate ambitions you will hit the ceiling fairly quickly.

They only really have 2 advantages over HISE and one was mentioned by the OP - that you can export both Windows & Mac format plugins on 1 platform, you don't need to have a Mac to export Mac plugins and so on.
The other advantage is ease of install.
Other than that, I would say HISE wins hands down in every other category.

But in fairness to HISE, once you have got your head around the HISE install/build process & how it works, it's not really an issue tbh

After making the move to HISE I would 100% never consider moving back to either of the other 2 and the more I learn with HISE, the more possibilities there are and the more powerful/flexible it becomes.

@d-healey Turns out you were kinda right and I had done something stupid.

When I changed the preset browser from 3 to 2 columns I just left the default widths as 3 x 0.33333
It didn't seem to matter as it worked fine in HISE but in a built plugin it was doing what I described in my OP.

After your suggestion I flicked it back to 3 columns, re-exported and sure enough the factory presets weren't editable & the add buttons were there as they should be.

I then changed it back to 2 columns but set the widths to 2 x 0.5 and when I re-exported it this time it was also working correctly.

Glad I have that sorted as it was really bugging me. Thanks for the assist

@rzrsharpeprod can I just say, this forum is great as people are very forthcoming with suggestions and help. It is much appreciated and quite rare in a forum I find so thanks everyone

@d-healey ah ok strange.

Thankyou for your help as I now have it working properly and selecting the correct samplemaps.

I've also got the expansion load working in daw as well so I can progress with my project which is great news.

Thanks again, your help is always invaluable

@d-healey Ok thankyou. I have created a minimal project and sent it to you via DM

@d-healey Thankyou, as usual your help was invaluable.
Ironically I have been using autocomplete quite a bit recently but it didn't even occur to me in this case.

Thanks again, it is doing what I want it to do now

@Lindon @d-healey

Thankyou both. I tried both methods and have come up with something that works.

I need to do a little rejigging of the samples once to get it working 100%.
That is a one time job and after that I can add new samplemaps without messing up my presets and having to manually reassign the samplemaps which is exactly what I wanted.

Thanks again, your help is much appreciated

@gorangrooves said in FL Studio midi problem:

@gorangrooves Found it. For anyone else looking, it is in:

top menu Options-> Audio Settings-> CPU-> Align Tick Lengths

Apologies I've only just seen this. Glad you found the setting though

@d-healey I forgot to say earlier but this worked like a charm. Thankyou for your help as it would have taken me forever to figure that out (if ever)

@DabDab yes that the code I used to get it working in he first place but it didn't translate across when I made firther changes in daw.

@Christoph-Hart said that it should though so I'll double check something else isn't stopping it

@d-healey said in A couple of expansion questions:

Can you give me an example of the text you want to apply?

Sure, so it would be 2 rows at the bottom of the panel with line 1 being the expansion name and then a line underneath that is more descriptive.

   Expansion Name
Dark - Gritty - Trap

As an example

Hope that makes sense?

@d-healey ok the universal paint routine stuff makes sense and is how I would get around the hover, drop shadow and other shared requirements I think so thankyou for that.

But what I still don't understand is how I would set individual, unique text labels for each panel as I am still not getting how to interact with the child panels due to their dynamic nature.
Your example shows how to do something to all child panels or even set each one to be different so it has a unique number as the text.
But how can I make panel 1 always say the unique text that I want it to and the same for panel 2, panel 3 etc.

That is really where I am struggling most and maybe I haven't asked the right question or explained what I am struggling with very well?
Do I need to write out code for each potential child panel in order for me to allow each one to have the unique text I am looking for? If index is 0 then do this, if index is 1 then do this etc etc?
The text isn't stored anywhere like the Icon pngs are so can't be called that way I don't think as it is more than just the expansion name that I want to set for each child panel.

@d-healey Thankyou it is much appreciated. I will go through and have a look and try to figure it out

@d-healey said in A couple of expansion questions:

@rzrsharpeprod said in A couple of expansion questions:

You have done so much already and I appreciate it but would you be able to post a snippet of how you would add a label or the hover to the child panels

Do you know how to do it for a panel - a regular panel?

Yes, I was messing with hovering the other day when I was toying with using panels as buttons.

With the label I would either add it via code the correct way or sometimes just create a label and attach it to the panel in the component list for speed.

But this goes back to me just not getting it when it comes to the child panels and the fact that they are dynamic, can be 1 or many and all have different positions etc. I am just not understanding how it works hence me asking for the example. I just don't get it and the more I try the more I get annoyed with myself for not getting it.
I don't think the penny is going to drop until I see it working and can pull apart the code to understand it...and then I am going to feel like a fool for not getting it sooner. But at least then I will get it.
I'll happily take being a fool who understands it over a frustrated fool who doesn't

@d-healey said in A couple of expansion questions:

Ok, we'll investigate that later. Probably a simple fix.
Thankyou, do you need another snippet or is the one further up here ok? Nothing much has changed so I think it probably will be ok.

@d-healey said in A couple of expansion questions:

Take a break, come back to it in a couple of days. If I find some time I'll try and make a video about child panels. I think you need one of those moments that triggers something and it will suddenly all click into place.

You're right but that's exactly what I did when I couldn't crack this after a couple of days. That has just ended up ramping up the pressure on me to get this done as now I have less time to get it built due to the days spent basically idling.

Yeah I agree re a trigger moment. You have done so much already and I appreciate it but would you be able to post a snippet of how you would add a label or the hover to the child panels so I can at least get my head around it and see how it should be done. I can at least then extrapolate it out to try and get some other parts of the project ticked off. Right now the only thing that is ticked off is me haha

@d-healey said in A couple of expansion questions:

Maybe, is the Icon.png in the expansion's images folder?

Yes, each expansion has an image called Icon.png in the images folder. The case is correct Icon with a capital I.
I even added a preset browser as a test and used the code I got from your tutorial to check and the images loaded just fine in the expansions column of that preset browser so everything is where it should be .

@d-healey said in A couple of expansion questions:

Or the simplest way is to do it in the creation loop because at that point you have each individual child stored in the cp variable as it's created. So you can enable mouse callbacks and stuff at that point.

The great thing is you don't need to treat them all separately. Thing of this, when you create the child panel you store the expansion name associated with it in its data property.

Then in the generic mouse click callback which you apply to all children, you just check which expansion this particular panel is associated with and load the expansion. One function to rule them all :)

To be honest, I know this is solid advice but as I said I have spent days on this and reading it just made me genuinely sad that I probably understand it less now than I would have done last week. It has properly scrambled my brain trying to figure this out. I'm so close to just throwing in the towel as it is stressing me out more than it should do at this point as I feel I am no further forward, possibly even less so than I was at this point a week ago

@d-healey ok first off I didn't see your reply before I started building it so I ended up testing it in DAW as it was built. Still the same result with the XXX placeholders/missing images.
If I delete the expansion folders in AppData and open it in DAW they are gone and it's just a blank background so it is reading them. If I put them back and reopen it reads the correct amount so that part is working, it just won't load the images in HISE or in DAW. Something must be wrong with the code surely? Or it is a bug but I wouldn't be confident saying that.

@d-healey said in A couple of expansion questions:

They are just the same as any old regular panel, the only difference is they are created dynamically.

Any property you can set for a panel also applies to a child panel - you have to do it through code though instead of the interface designer.

But that is the part that I can't quite get my head around. Because they are dynamic how do I code/tell HISE what to do for a specific one? In some cases there may only be 1, others there could be 5 or more expansions installed so the tiles are on different rows etc. I know I don't have to code every possible example using if elses and xy references as that would be bonkers, but I don't know how to reference them dynamically as they may or may not be there.

It just isn't making sense to me. I can do all of the children as I did last night with the images and I can do stuff to the parent panel but I do not know how to reference child 1, child 2 etc and have actions specific to them

@d-healey said in A couple of expansion questions:

Why not?

Because I don't know how to essentially. I don't know much about child panels as I have never even come across the concept until a couple of days ago and when I did I tried to research on the forum etc first as I always do as I like to try and solve issues myself if I can. There doesn't seem to be that much info on them and the bit there are mainly threads with specific issues.

I have no idea what you can do with them really, other than they seem to be the only way to get this grid working.

I have been spinning my wheels for nearly a week now and have made little to no progress which is very unlike me and it has me extremely frustrated.
Whenever I do anything with expansions it never goes smoothly due to the added complexity. The grid on top is just a whole different beast in this case

What I have to figure out in order to get the project back on track is the following. :

• How to get the images loaded onto the child panels in the grid
• How to add a drop shadow to the child panels
• How to add a dynamic label to the child panels for the name. I could include the text in the image to get around this but I would rather not but it isn't as clean looking
• How to change the child panel colour slightly when it is being hovered over.
• How to load the expansion AND change all of the elements that should be displayed for that expansion (BG, control paint routine etc)

1 & 5 are proving particularly difficult as you know so I haven't even attempted 2,3 or 4 yet and at least 2 of those are going to require me to reference the child panels individually I assume which brings me back to the start of this reply...

I even just did a quick callback test on the main panel and even that didn't go smoothly. The hover event worked fine but the click event only registered if you click somewhere where there wasn't a child panel. So even something as simple as that isn't going smoothly so I am starting to question my own sanity.
Admittedly part of that is my lack of understanding of the child panels so it's all feeding into each other and slowly chipping away to make me feel dumber by the day

@d-healey said in A couple of expansion questions:

I suspect that within HISE it reads the files, and once you export it will read the hxi from the app data folder. Test this.

Oh do you mean build it and test it in DAW? I only encrypted and then tested again in HISE so I misunderstood if you meant test in DAW.

Regarding the mouse events for the child panels, as I can't individually set the child panel to allow callbacks if I set the main panel to allow callbacks do the child panels then inherit those same properties?

What is the best way to distinguish which of the child panels is being hovered over/clicked etc? Presumably I can do it dynamically somehow (how) rather than coding the x & y values for each to say if x & y = this then load exp 1, if x & y = that then load exp 2 etc

@d-healey said in A couple of expansion questions:

We can work on this later, I think we can make it load based on the expansion rather than the preset.

I hope so but I tried the methods that were obvious to me and I think a lot of the issues were whatever I tried would end up clashing with other parts of the code that were working fine before that.
I am not sure if it is making it worse because I am using radio buttons to control the background selection and to drive which paint routine is used?
I did this to reduce the amount of code, but it seems if you call a radio button in more than 1 function it doesn't like it and stops one or both from working.

Otherwise I could leave the preset selecting the relevant radio buttons which is working fine and then have the when x is clicked to load the expansion from the grid also set the radio buttons values but it didn't seem to like that at all and just stopped the presets working as an example.

@d-healey I just encoded each expansion so there was a .hxi file for each of them, closed HISE and reopened the project but still getting the same error unfortunately

Image {EXP::ExpansionName}Icon.png not found

I really don't know why it isn't working? I have tried various different codes but get the same outcome.
Is this the same method you have used in the past for Rhapsody or have I done something differently to you?

@d-healey said in A couple of expansion questions:

You can assign a mouse callback to each child panel.

Even with this though I am going to be back to my original issue I think where I am unable to directly load a preset from an expansion aren't I?
I can use set expansion when something is clicked as I was doing that further up, but if I don't load a preset directly then the BG, control repaint etc doesn't change and it just shows whatever the last BG & control colour scheme was until the user clicks a preset which looks wrong/bad.
When the expansion is clicked I would like it to also load the correct BG, paint routine etc but I was struggling with it for a few days before I posted and can't find a way to do it.
I can do it easily from regular presets but not from expansions.