This suggestion requires the VEP developers, Steinberg VST3 API developers and NI Kontakt developers all liaise together to agree on the best way to modify the VST3 API and underlying code in order to support what I discuss below:
The new feature is intended to help address the slow speed of communicating COUPLED instance data from VEP plugin to VEP Server in KONTAKT and other plugins which store very large amounts of plugin saved-state data.
Kontakt has a feature called SNAPSHOTS which allows one to save different parameter settings for things like reverb, effects, volumes etc while leaving data such as sample metadata, KSP scripts and everything to do with the particular Kontakt insrtument “core” datas alone. The amount of data involved in Kontakt snapshots is generally tiny in comparison with the complete data needed for the Kontakt instrument itself and its sample layer metadata - so to save and recall just this alone would be significantly faster - arguably near-instant compared the waits for Kontakt to load and initialise the Kontakt instrument saved-state data in its entirety.
If an updated version of VST3 incorporated the additional concept of snapshot state-saving and loading - then VST3 plugin hosts like VEP could use this to make saving and restoring small tweaks to plugins hosted in VEP very fast.
Of course because a single instance of KONTAKT can use more than one KONTAKT instrument in the form of MULTIS. There would have to be support for saving and loading more snapshot data for potentially more than just one “instrument” but this could easily be added to an API by means of an index to indicate “multi-instrument 1, multi-instrument 2 etc etc
Such an improvement in VST3 would have a huge positive effect on workflow. The only other major aspect in a VST3 “+” would be to allow the plugin editor panel to be presented on the CLIENT machine - ie in a VEP CLIENT plugin if one could tweak a plugin held on a VEP server as if it were local - instead of having to use VNC or some other remote access software - then again there would be a huge benefit to workflow.
As well as this - it would allow KOMPLETE KONTROL to be used for plugins hosted in VEP.
