Migration Guide

Ventuz Designer and Runtime always guarantees Backwards Compatibility and thus are always able to load scenes and presentations created in previous Ventuz versions.

However, if upgrading from one major Ventuz version to the next, there can be some (breaking) changes in functionality and work-flow to be considered. These changes can be grouped in three categories:

• Removed functionality which causes major differences.
• Changes in work-flow when building scenes and configuring a Ventuz Machine.
• Changes in scene logic which make scenes behave and/or look slightly different.

Ventuz Migration Helper

General

Since Ventuz 6.0 the folder locations and structures for settings, configurations and caches have changed. All versions starting with Ventuz 6 come with a small utility located in the installation folder: VentuzMigrationHelper.exe

With following startup options it's possible to specify which settings/files should be migrated:

Migration

This utility allows to copy all according files from the Ventuz 5, 6 or 7 locations to the new Ventuz 8 folders. On the first run of the Ventuz installer this utility is started automatically and allows to select the items that should be copied. When the migration has finished a report is presented. This report is located in C:\Users\Public\Documents\Ventuz8\Logs. On every next installer run the utility checks if a migration already has been performed (by checking the existence of the migration report file) and does not show up anymore. But it's possible to start this tool manually and perform a migration again.

Files and settings that can be migrated are e.g.:

• Designer and Director User Settings like Layouts and Shortcuts
• Resolution Preset File used in Designer
• Custom SystemID
• VMS Settings
• Software licenses
• Machine, Hardware and Render Setup configurations (converted to the new Ventuz file formats)
• Repositories
• Font & Emoji Caches

Config Import

During the Migration process all configurations that are found are already converted and imported, but you might have a backup of some of your old Ventuz configurations and want to manually convert them.

To do so:

• Start the Migration Helper
• click on Config Import
• select the configuration files that you want to import and convert into Ventuz 8

Designer/ Runtime Changes

Deprecated

• Old V4 scenes do not load anymore. If you need to load such an old scene in V8 please open and save it in V5-7 first.
• No ActiveX anymore
• DMX per sACN is now off by default: Fixed wrong DMX universe display in Designer when both Art-Net and sACN are enabled but one of them fails to initialize.
• No more Remoting2. This is caused by the upgrade to .Net 8.
• 3D Layer Root: XY Relation 'Device' not available on DefaultCamera property anymore
• Send Statistics Via OSC (Legacy) removed

Render Engine Changes

• Renderer changes due to color management: Color Management and HDR Workflow
• New image library for loading Jpeg, Png, etc. In some cases this might result in textures that look different when compared pixel by pixel. Differences recognisable for the human eye should be very rare.
• Default font rendering slightly different: Introducing new text rendering technique that gives you high speed with very good quality. The technique can be set via 2D Font Style dialog or the Text Style 2D node.

Scripting

• Scripting now based on .Net 8: As the concept of a GAC does not exist in .Net Core it is now possible to reference assemblies from the installed Frameworks. See C# / VB Scripts for details.
• Script assemblies can now be shared resources. That affects static fields! : C# and VB scripts can now be handled as resource to reduce compilation time if the SharedResource property is enabled. See C# / VB Scripts for details.

Other Changes

• New Multicast address: Moving from 225.x.x.x Multicast addresses to 239.255.x.x range instead.
• Moved 'Project Menu': We changed the menu entry "Scene" to "File" and combined the Project menu (by clicking on the project name) and Scene menu under the new "File" dialog.
• RamDiskWriter Uri output on load: RamDiskWriter node now provides an empty Uri output on scene load to prevent file-not-found errors from bound resource loaders.
• New (less fault-tolerant) JSON lib for JSON node: now using System.Text.JSON instead of Newtonsoft. Contents must now strictly follow JSON structure guidelines. Ventuz will no longer tolerate minor errors with commas.See JSON for details.

System Requirements

CPU

• Minimum CPU requirement: Minimum requirement for the CPU is an Intel Haswell (4xxx series, released 2013), AMD Excavator (released 2015) or any AMD Zen / Ryzen / Threadripper / Epyc. Ventuz Runtime and Designer will not start on older CPUs.