"Real" Live Coding / Dumb Live Reloading / Accessing Editor State from user scripts

[TiborUdvari]

Increasing Access

Hello,

I'm currently working on p5.xr, and I would like to share examples with the web editor. Because of how WebXR works, the user has to press a button to give access to an immersive session. Entering this mode takes a few seconds and it's quite cumbersome to have to go in and out of the mode to change simple parameters.

I would like to have a "real live coding" experience, as with p5.live, as you can see below. I don't want to use p5.live, because the sharing functionality is not working as well as with the web editor for now.

https://github.com/processing/p5.js-web-editor/assets/1434442/da8f46f0-8fb5-4d4c-8eee-765e35830cf0

Feature request details

As mentioned in #3 currently the page reloads completely on changes. Having a live mode would entail only reloading parts of the sketch.

For my use case at least, a quick and imperfect way to prototype is all I need. I know that having this work "properly" would involve handling a lot of edge cases and could be quite tricky.

I made a simple script today that works fine locally: https://github.com/TiborUdvari/p5.dumbLiveReload/blob/main/src/index.js. I'm using a polling approach, which works fine on my localhost, but I think that could be problematic with the web editor.

I've quickly checked the networking in the editor, and on save there seems to be a PUT request that sends all the data to the server.

My questions, to be able to make this work properly with the editor would be:

• How can a script being loaded with the editor (in the preview iframe) know when there was a save event or a change event
• How can a script access the global state of the editor to be able to get the script and execute it

Thanks a lot!

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[Faizan-Alam-1]

Not everyone has a VR headset. Only a few people are able to take advantage of this feature.

[TiborUdvari]

I don't completely agree. This can be useful for any feature that requires an expensive initial setup:

• Loading an ml5 model
• Making generative music, having a beat playing and adding on top of it
• Loading non-cachable real time data, like 3d models etc.
• Anything with the webcam
• Tweaking values real time once the sketch has started

This is the whole raison d'être of p5.live. I think a minimal MVP version in the editor could be a nice feature a lot of folks with different use cases can benefit from.