Last week I had an idea for a small project – party entertainment. The trend towards computer party games is long gone, but there are still many unexplored ideas. I’ve been thinking about using another concept that used to be a hype – floor sensors, most notably used in Dance Dance Revolution.

The thing I’m trying to accomplish is to use the floor as a kind of instrument – more specifically a sample playback device. This idea is not new by any means, but I just thought it would be a good exercise, and a nice usage of my engine. Also, if it works properly it should be pretty fun and something that would be a special enhancement for parties and such.

So I got my old DDR dance mats and looked into how the buttons could be read. Turns out they are being modeled as gamepads with 10 buttons. So I needed joystick support, which turned out to be pretty straightforward to implement.

I also needed some way to load and play back audio samples, which meant audio support. I went for OpenAL with the libsndfile library, which took a bit longer to get working. It turned out kind of okay, although the sound playback is slightly too slow – right now there is a noticeable delay between pressing a button on the dance mat and the actual playback.

Even so, given some good audio samples the setup is pretty fun to toy around with. I’m probably going to refine it a bit more over the next couple of weeks and try it out at a small in-house party I’m having. As soon as it’s at least semi-working, I’ll put it up here for grabs.

It’s pretty exciting to have something that’s even remotely fun working… I’m probably going to do many more of these as I continue to develop my engine.