To begin with I documented my experiences on another post using the FL SDK...
The Fruity Plugin SDK is on the website but if you try to compile the example plugins in Visual Studio 2022 you will likely run into many errors that are daunting for a beginner to diagnose.
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This redone version of the SDK is needed in order to do so smoothly.
The example plugins are okay and show the basics of using the SDK, but if you tried to use them in a project you'd realize that they are not the most functional examples and may even find that trying to automate them can crash modern versions of FL. While they are fruity plugins, they do not grant the ability to right click on controls and the GUIs appear to be internet explorer dialogue boxes for whatever that is worth.
So if you look into the easiest way to learn to add a customized GUI, a promising post shows that the fruity plugin SDK can be combined with others... this combination of vstGUI and FL's SDK works... https://github.com/fukuroder/fl_vstgui_sample
But you fist have to download the original 2014 Fruity SDK and then replace the files with the updated 2017 one from above. And while the GUI looks more creative, the buttons the knob does not update it's position with FL and once again does not respond to a right click. Also the knob behavior is not as intuitive as FL's given it tries to literally imitate the twisting motion [which Gol instructed against in the developer forum].
Now if we leave the world of fruity plugins, there's a brilliant set of plugins call the "Piz Midi" suite that works with whatever its host's default buttons are (so it looks different in FL than in ableton) and when you right click something, it usually just works and can be activated like any button on a control surface. So i figure there's a lot to learn from here. The github is here: https://github.com/sleiner/pizmidi/tree/main
Upon downloading you also need to download https://github.com/R-Tur/VST_SDK_2.4/tree/master this VST 2.4 sdk, place the master folder inside of the "pizmidi-main" folder and rename it to "vstsdk2.4." Then when you go to compile any of the plugins, you just need to make sure to retarget it and change the platform toolset. Retarget is pretty much a 1 click with a right click on the plugin inside of the solution explorer. If you go to the bottom of the 'right click' list and select properties there you can change the 'platform toolset' to whatever yours is (probably the latest) and it should compile just fine. They do seem like they might be based on a loose variant of JUCE.
With all of this out of the way, I'm wondering if it's possible to combine the piz midi tools, and fruity SDK, and perhaps in a more intuitive way to make it easier to build capable plugins with fully functional GUIs. I haven't found great examples that compile 'out of the box' right now with the strengths of all of the above and would like to make that more accessible. VST2 architecture is still more capable than VST3 in FL (until FL 24 hopefully) so this seems like the best compromise for getting started with development.
Does anyone else have any good examples to learn from? Any nuggets of knowledge to share? I'd love to see/share how to get into this the 'right' way and smoothly. And seeing how to make a hybrid fruity plugin seems like a decent way to start given the leads I have. I'd appreciate those willing to discuss sharing thoughts
