[WEEKLY] Week 1: Stripping

Week 1: Update & Goals

So, Quaternion development is finally starting! Get excited!

As I said, in these weekly threads I'll begin by posting the goals for the week. Then, the thread will serve as a general discussion / update thread for everything that gets done that week. Every week, I'll try to have a primary goal (what I expect to be able to finish with no issues) and a secondary goal (what I'd like to finish but am not sure).

This week's primary goal is Stripping: taking a fresh copy of MBG and stripping it down to only include what I think I'll use. That means removing hazards, powerups, etc. so that all that's left is the basic gameplay functionality. This is to eliminate the potential clutter that would result from having too many unnecessary files and such in the Quaternion directory.

This week's secondary goal is Audio Hacking: to add engine functionality to the game for FMOD audio. FMOD is a more extensive audio system than the OpenAL library that MBG uses, so this will be helpful in enhancing the game's audio (like adding pitch-shifted sound beyond just the marble's rolling).

Looking forward to the week! As always, if you have any questions/comments, they can be posted in this thread.

This is a great way to start the project! It's good that everyone knows exactly what is happening

Well, stripping took about 10 minutes. Talk about overestimation.

So now I'm focusing on the Audio Hacking part. So far, I have an engine plugin that initializes FMOD and can use it to play sound effects. It's the most basic functionality (just a "play this sound" function), but it's going to be expanded over the next few days.

Has it exceeded MBG functionality yet?

So far, the FMOD functions can play and stop audio and set the volume and frequency of audio channel groups (SFX/music). Note that setting frequency is new! So you can type e.g. fmodSetChannelFrequency(2, 0.5) to make the music play at half speed. It's pretty trippy.

Is Quaternion going to be packaged as a stand-alone application, or just extra files to insert in MBG?

Quaternion will be stand-alone, similar to MBPU.

In other news, 3D audio is now working! The next step is to actually go through the game and change all of the audio calls to use Fmod instead of OpenAL. This is harder than one might think, thanks to engine calls.

UPDATE: FMOD integration is basically done at this point. I'll be streaming to show it off! Check twitch.tv/whirligig231 at 8 pm tomorrow!

whirligig wrote: UPDATE: FMOD integration is basically done at this point. I'll be streaming to show it off! Check twitch.tv/whirligig231 at 8 pm tomorrow!

What timezone?

Thanks for asking.

That's 8 pm Central Time (9 EDT).

And wtf is central time? GMT pls so the rest of the world understands

whirligig wrote: 9 EDT

Isn't that good enough for you to understand? EDT = Eastern Time. I think Sweden is 6 hours ahead of that IIRC. You should check though.

EDT = GMT -4
Sweden = GMT +1 (excludes DST)
Add on Daylight Savings Time (+1)
Sweden = GMT +2
2+4 = 6 hours difference

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The joys of timezones. (or be lazy and google 'EDT to [City e.g. Stockholm] time')

The stream happened! You'll be able to watch it on YouTube soon.

For those who watched, I inadvertently discovered a glitch where upon trying to set the frequency of an individual sound, it would appear to have stopped the audio. Turns out it wasn't stopped, just slowed down over 40,000x! I used the wrong FMOD function--setPitch() is what does pitch shifting, while setFrequency() sets the sample rate, which defaults to 44100 Hz.

In any case, the script function will still be called fmodSetFrequency, because "set pitch" makes you think it should use a log scale, which it doesn't.

whirligig wrote: The stream happened! You'll be able to watch it on YouTube soon.

Can you post a link to your channel or the video when you upload it? I can't find your channel.

Video's up: