[ilomambo]

Big discovery! I was browsing the github source code for Vortex and found the following interesting lines:

Code:

char g_TexturePath[ 512 ] = "special://xbmc/addons/visualization.vortex/resources/Textures/";
char g_PresetPath[ 512 ] = "special://xbmc/addons/visualization.vortex/resources/Presets/";
char g_TransitionPath[ 512 ] = "special://xbmc//addons/visualization.vortex/resources/Transitions/";
char g_AnnouncePath[ 512 ] = "special://xbmc/addons/visualization.vortex/resources/Announcements/";

Let me explain them to you:
Textures will be fetched from the resources/Textures folder
Presets (.vtx files) will be fetched from the resources/Presets folder
Transitions (.tra files) will be fetched from the resources/Transitions folder
Announcements (.ann files) will be fetched from the resources/Announcements folder

This is weird because the XBMC installation of Vortex does not have a "Transitions" folder, neither an "Announcement" folder, the "Presets" folder contains both .vtx and .tra files.
.ann files are a mistery

So I manually created a "Transitions" folder and copied there the .tra files that were on "Presets" and to my (expected) surprise transitions started to occur in the visualization!!! So even if you enabled transitions in the Vortex settings you were not getting them!!

It seems that the vortex visualization addition to XBMC was half done and in a rush. Mr C already said the code version in github is not the latest, Let's hope the Helix final release includes a proper Vortex visualization with all the components in place.

I will continue to explore the code to see if I can find out what the .ann announcements file are for. I suspect they may have something to do with presenting text in the visualizations.