New app: Noise

[rektdeckard]

This PR adds a configurable Simplex Noise generator app, which makes pretty, ambient, animated textures.

[tidbyt]

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[tidbyt-bot]

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[rektdeckard]

I have read the CLA Document and I hereby sign the CLA

[rektdeckard]

Is the 1 second execution limit really necessary? It runs consistently under 1 second on my machine, and 1.4 seconds on this runner. There's a fair amount of math going on here, and I feel the constraints are quite limiting. In order to get this below 1 second on a runner (very difficult to test from a local machine), I will have to either:

1. Make the (already short) animation even shorter. I have already done some tricks to this effect, like only generating half of the animation frames, then mirroring to form a loop that effectively doubles the anim length
2. Somehow optimize a program that is almost entirely unavoidable arithmetic. No matter what, I have to run a per-pixel-per-frame computation.
3. Instead of painting a Box per pixel, try to generate a GIF on-the-fly, and use that as an Image source (this seems infeasible, and will probably take much more compute to do)

Wondering if there is any flexibility here.

[jmanske]

FWIW, it is consistently over a second to render on my laptop. From the point of view of hundreds and thousands of apps rendering with different settings on the servers constantly, it's more an ecosystem-wide scalability problem than it is a single app problem.

For ideas to make it overall faster: Can you use any caching at all? Can "common" calculations be looked up instead of redone on the fly? I haven't looked at the code yet but I am happy to give a review if you are interested.

[rektdeckard]

Thanks @jmanske, there isn't anything cacheable. The generative nature of the app means we WANT it to be different every run, and each pixel of each frame is pseudorandom.

I understand the reason for the limit, I just feel a little short-sold on what we're permitted to do here. I honestly wouldn't mind if local apps had access to schemas and could run code, like maybe on your phone, instead of being a glorified GIF.

See also: tidbyt/pixlet#1075

[jmanske]

Have you looked into private apps at all? It's $5 a month to be able to run whatever code on their server and works more or less like apps in the community repo. I do not think you're beholden to the 1 second rendering limit for those. I use private apps a ton for pre-releasing stuff so at least I can enjoy it before I'm ready to push or can work out kinks like you might be dealing with here.

Definitely agree that the restrictions are sometimes a bummer.

[stale]

We're automatically closing this issue because it hasn't had any activity in 30 days. If that seems like a mistake, please feel free to re-open. Thanks!