.

[Ahchay]

Err....thanks I think I understand more, although I'm puzzled how it could "listen" to your hifi to detect the beat. Does the Gamecube have a microphone? Or is some other wizardry at work here?

I guess we'll know when it is done.

Erm. What Jedburgh said - I fear I may have been overly obtuse - by "mechanism" I meant "a mechanism within the Unity software". Whether this will be a "Enter BPM now?" type prompt in the VLM settings or, as has been mentioned, a way to tap the beat in using the gamepad only time will tell.

Cheers
Chris

[dtj]

It's a four-player light performance instrument, not a beat-detecting visualisation plugin.

Sadly, of course. In an ideal world, it should be both.

[DutchLlama]

It's a four-player light performance instrument, not a beat-detecting visualisation plugin.

Sadly, of course. In an ideal world, it should be both.

Yeah. Of course playing it will be fun, but it would be great if there was also a "passive mode" so you e.g. can feed it a bunch of MP3's and let it play, similar to the VLM on the jagCD and the Nuon.

I hope this will be available even as a separate product. I'd gladly pay for both.

[Jedburgh]

Okay. I'll just wave my magic wand and magic some audio inputs onto all Gamecubes. By magic.

[dtj]

Okay. I'll just wave my magic wand and magic some audio inputs onto all Gamecubes. By magic.

Broadband adaptor is still the best option. Why not stream tracks off a network? At least mention next time you're playing. I'm sure someone at Lionhead could help Yak with the network code...

[Bonk]

Hi,

so I´ve seen the new pictures in the Blog and really like them. One question though:

Do you always fly through these tunnel-like areas or are there more open areas as well?

I´m aware of the fact that may just be what was Yak was trying out with his new texture thingy and may not be representative. But asking won´t harm, I guess?

[moobaa]

No answers, but... Welcome to the Furoms, Bonk

[PVB]

No answers, but... Welcome to the Furoms, Bonk

Yes, welcome Bonk, to the fluffiest forums on the net!

As to your question; ain't gotta clue, sorry.

Maybe Yak will spot this here and answer.

[Dr. M]

Welcome, Bonk, to the fluffiest forums on the Internet

May your stay be extremely fluffy

[Bonk]

In all fluffiness: Thanks, guys!

[Frogacuda]

Someone tell me if this is a viable alternative for providing a means of music input for custom soundtracks. I know the BBA has been discussed, but I think streaming from a computer is rather elaborate and costly, and there might be a more direct means: The controller port.

You can pick up a GC extension for about $5, and cut one end off of it. I doubt wiring a female headphone jack into that in a way that could be read by the software would be too terribly difficult. I could be wrong, but has anybody thought to try this?

I know selling custom hardware for this game is out of the question, but this really seems like something that would require minimal skill. A couple cords and wires, maybe a resistor or two, and you might have something that would allow the GC to listen to your music, and accomidate custom soundtracks.

It just seems like a waste to me to make a game that can algorithmically generate its visuals based (partly) on the audio and not support interchangable music of some kind. At that point you might as well just have the visuals be scripted, like Rez.

Just my 2 cents. Am I talking nonsense?

[BuG]

I was actually thinking about the same sort of thing earlier this morning, except I was thinking more along the lines of an audio line-in jack instead of a headphone jack, and that it'd be cool for some 3rd-party peripheral company to make one (didn't even think about hacking one up yourself). Even though I have no experience whatsoever with wires, sparky things and doo-hickeys, your idea sounds easier.

[Frogacuda]

I was actually thinking about the same sort of thing earlier this morning, except I was thinking more along the lines of an audio line-in jack instead of a headphone jack, and that it'd be cool for some 3rd-party peripheral company to make one (didn't even think about hacking one up yourself). Even though I have no experience whatsoever with wires, sparky things and doo-hickeys, your idea sounds easier.

I don't think anyone would take offense if I said that Unity is going to be a fairly niche game. If it were Sega or Nintendo or someone backing it, it might be possible for a game like Unity to get a peripheral for it, but as it stands I doubt it would happen.

But I think the hack-job is very doable. The lawyer's would probably have a problem if the manual was really explicit about it or told you how to make it, but just coding support for a peripheral that isn't availible at retail won't get you into any trouble. I don't know too much about the details of the interface though, what frequency it reads at, how the audio quality would be, etc. I'm hoping someone could tell me if it's worth pursuing.

[Dr. M]

Welcome, Frogacuda, to the fluffiest forums on the Internet

May your stay be extremely fluffy

[Max_Sterling]

First off hello

I was thinking it would be very difficult to get the GameCube to just allow music to be streamed into it. However (if I'm jumping in late and just missing the point completely let me know) I was thinking you may be able to tell you PC to do stuff in time to the music and then have your PC tell your GameCube to do specific actions... (Okay, that statement isn't very clear..)

Example:
You have your PC play some music. Then you have a VLM-ish type program to interpret the music. Then you have your PC hooked up to your GameCube via some hacked up USB-type device to a controller port. The GameCube thinks the PC is just another player using a controller controlling the VLM.

So basically what I'm envisioning is instead of 3 of my friends and myself playing with VLM-3, 2 of my friends and my PC is playing with VLM-3.

I think this would be somewhat possible, since we wouldn't be completely backwards engineering a GameCube to accept music and it would provide the results I would be interested in seeing..


Max