Back again

Busy week again, last week was tiring but awesome 🙂

I’ve been working with the Gogbot Festival, which turned out really great. Lots of good people, looking forward to the Galactic Circus (sorry, Dutch only), with a lot of people from Pronksnor. I’m also working on some new tech for a game project, so look forward to some actual practical application of the tutorials on this site (omg, I really have to work more on these).

Last weekend I went to the IBE with my bboy crew, and had a really good time there. Still, lots of little things irked me — ticket prices have gone way up again, no more group discounts, if you’re with a group you still have to get your wristband individually, it’s still really tough to find a spot where you can actually see the battles (bad crowd stands), and even if you manage to conquer a good spot you end up standing/sitting in the same position for a long time so lots of soar feet, bums and backs, the endless standing in line for the final battles… Good atmosphere though, and in the end that’s the most important thing. Also, the programming was more spread out so I get the feeling that I’ve missed less cool stuff than normal. I didn’t bring my camera (it’s not very camping-compatible), so pics will be scarce but as soon as I get them they will be posted here.

Another little tidbit of info – I’m probably going to move this blog to a new spot on the interweb pretty soon, look forward to more new stuff and more reliable availability 🙂

RawShaping 0.28a

I’ve been working on the RawShaping project some more, and right now it’s actually working well enough to start experimenting a bit. I’ve uploaded a (bad) video of how it works right now to youtube, (update: another one here), it should give an idea on what the tool looks like (although the video compression and real-world lighting conditions really don’t help). There is plenty of room for improvement, of course, but for a one-man job it’s pretty nice 🙂

My current to-do list:

  • Accuracy improvements
  • Cutoff plane by example
  • Depth-of-field
  • Surface reconstruction
  • Performance through improved parallelism
  • Persistent program state
  • Improved surface reconstruction through feature tracking and temporal coherence
  • Voice control
  • More coloring schemes
  • More file exporters
  • Background file exporting
  • Tool chain integration

As you can see, this will keep me busy for quite some time. I didn’t really realize that it would be this much work when I started it, but at least it’s interesting stuff 😉

Update – Rumbler project

I’ve dubbed the project with the DDR dance mats the Rumbler Project, and I actually mostly fixed the sound playback issue I was having last week. There is still a lot more work to be done with the audio module, but it works and is fairly simple in usage.

I did find that, while the concept is kind of fun in a “ooh that’s neat” kind of way, it’s too hard to actually use the mats to produce some kind of music. So this week I’m going to introduce a basic rhythm system – pushing a button starts a sound and a timer, and pushing it a second time will play the sound again and indicate the end-of-loop time. Here, the sound starts to loop with the timing that the user has provided himself, freeing his feet up for more stuff.

Doing this should make it easier to make music, although the users’ control becomes less immediate. We’ll see how it works out in the end. If all goes well I may add a lot more sounds and start improving the layout-to-sound mappings to ‘feel more natural’.