soledad penadés

Today I have been thinking about the visual part, doing some sketches and all that. I’m not going to put any of them here, for obvious reasons. Although probably the end result won’t match with any of these early drafts, but you would probably comment about them and that would influence me, which I don’t want to happen.

I was also speculating and investigating about the capabilites of the v8 javascript engine, to use it instead of Lua, but after remembering that it doesn’t work on PPC’s (yet?), I decided against using it.

I also thought a bit more about the way the components are going to interact together, which is something that I hadn’t thought about in depth yet.

Apart from that, I haven’t written a single line of demo code today :P

So the quest is set, the aim is clear: create something for Breakpoint 2010. There won’t be another opportunity; not at least under the Breakpoint umbrella.

The organizers have expressed publicly they don’t wish to organize yet another edition of nowadays biggest demoscene event, so it’s now or never! (At least until a new event this good takes off).

I already have had stuff of mine shown in their big screen. But that was before the true Big Screen, with capital letters. The 70 square meters one. I must release something, I said to myself.

Of course, this means that in a way, I’m going to break my own self-imposed rule (I will release things when they are done), but I’m working in a slightly pressurised scenario in order to finish the demo before setting off for the airport.

I have decided to keep a somewhat sporadic short demolog to keep people informed of what I’m doing, trace’s style. Hopefully it will help/force me to do things, daily, so that I don’t slack or procrastinate, and maybe you may help me too when/if I get stuck somewhere ;)

I’ll keep things short –this is probably going to be the longest post in the series– so that writing here doesn’t starve me of time to code.

This is the current status of the project:

• the theme is approximately set, but I won’t disclose it here
• I’m working on converting my on-its-own rudimentary OO-C synth (sorollet) to a bit less rudimentary C++ synth that can be embedded and interfaced, VSTi style, so that I can sequence everything from Renoise and play with parameters and settings in real time…
• … and convert Renoise’s Song.xml (inside the .xrns file) to my own data file — kind of means recreating a simple tracker which follows Renoise conventions (Lines Per Beat for example). I have taken a look at the Song.xml file, extracting and using the relevant data seems easy, specially since Sorollet was already using a tracker style format.
• So far I have managed to compile a VST plug-in in Linux. I had to solve several issues like having to compile for 32 bit while using a 64 bit OS, because Renoise is 32 bit too, gdb not willing to cooperate most of the times, the VST SDK docs being scarce and incomplete and not ready for Linux and etc, but I’m slowly progressing. Now I have a basic synth that can play sines or triangles, and transpose octaves. Awesomeness!
• This means I’m not using an mp3 this time. Could this fit into an intro? Maybe, but I don’t want to sacrifice code readability in order to make it fit into an intro… I’ll be more than content with making a demo!
• I need to find a way of producing a working Windows executable. Sadly, party organisers won’t allow a non-Windows .exe to enter the demo compo. Big BOOOOOOH for them. I have thought of different solutions, the easier is to install mingw in a VirtualBoxed Windows I’ve got, recompile my sources there and run the exe in my main machine, using wine. But I still have to try that, and I hope it works in Windows Vista :-S
• I still haven’t thought about the visual part, I fear I’ll have to script it as in ye olde times –no time for writing a visual timeline manager–, but I will probably use Lua to alleviate the pain.

Complimentary screenshot:

More later.

So here’s the last installment of my demoscene sources: escena.org dentro version 2. It was done for past year’s Inspire democompo and it won (incidentally, there weren’t any other entries in the compo but hey, it’s not my fault! :P).

This demo used a different approach; instead of building a whole scaffolding of C++ classes I just wrote some glue code with C++ in order to be able to draw something with OpenGL, and scripted everything else using Lua. It was also a bit of a benchmark. The result isn’t bad, given my lack of experience with Lua :)

Here’s the HD video (and here’s on vimeo, if you prefer it to youtube), and finally, here are the sources.

PS: The count down goes on to 1, and…

If you’re interested in VJ software, you may probably have heard about Neon v2, the VJ application that shine/xplsv.com developed a few years ago and which has been used not only for lots of VJ gigs but also for creating several real-time demos (including the euskal 2005 winner demo, Sound Pressure)

Unfortunately Shine is very busy right now. But instead of letting the software stagnate, he has made the full sources available under a GPL license, for whoever wants to pick up the development. This pretty much follows the story of Neon v1: when the author (mac/xplsv.com) got too busy, he released the sources for Neon V1 and Shine continued it, creating Neon v2 a while after.

You can check the sources from the SVN repository with your favourite SVN tool, or just be curious and browse them. It has lots of interesting stuff in it. Some examples that come to mind:

• a full real-time 3d engine, with support for pixel and vertex shaders for building really cool effects
• 3dsmax mesh export plug-in – if you want to know how to build a plug in for 3dsmax, here’s an example
• integration with Lua for scripting – allows you to use the engine features programmatically
• video play, using native windows video support and also ffmpeg for other formats
• custom skinnable gui

etc etc etc… there are more things but I’ll let you find out by yourself!

As Shine says in the news, if you make new features for it, contact him and we’ll include them on the repository. If the updating gets active we could then manage new users with write-access for the SVN.

I personally wish someone with better knowledge of OpenGL and GUI’s than me would port the software to Mac/Linux (fingers crossed). It would be awesome to have it working without depending on DirectX as it does now (hint hint hint!)

Add this post, this one and this comment and you get a Lua universal build for your mac in Leopard – which works for Tiger too! Assuming you uncompressed the source code onto a folder called lua…

In lua/Makefile, add a new target, macosx_ub, to the PLATS definition. It should look like this:

and in lua/src/Makefile add this

Then instead of typing make macosx, type make macosx_ub et voilà! You have a universal Lua! :-)