A conversation between Andy and I a couple weeks ago sparked a new addition to the Fishbeat engine: support for MIDI controllers as input devices. We already support keyboard, mouse and gamepad input, but it seemed appropriate for a music game engine to also recognize the industry standard for transmitting musical data electronically.

As an aside, it’s interesting to consider the possible applications of a MIDI keyboard in terms of level creation and world building. Consider that most prototypical content  creation tools concern themselves with object placement and modification in a virtual world. The majority of actions in 3D Studio Max, for example, consist of manipulating various abstract widgets via key presses, mouse clicks and mouse movement. The computer keyboard, in this case, has been demoted to a panel of buttons, with mostly arbitrary functionality assigned to each key. A device intended to be used for forming words and constructing sentences is now a dumb operating terminal. Why not replace it with something more suited to the task?

There is a plethora of knobs and buttons and sliders available on a MIDI keyboard, all of which would lend themselves well to manipulating widgets in a more intuitive way. Turning a knob to rotate an object in three dimensional space feels so much more natural than using your mouse to drag a slider back and forth. I expect that our future content generation tools will take advantage of this kind of device, which I’m sure will be the topic of a future post.

As Andy was wiring up the input engine to support MIDI, I started forming a sandbox in our engine in which to test these new changes. Sure, we could do something boring like using printf() to output the note index or velocity when a key press is detected, but it’s hard to resist playing with a new toy…

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It begins!

My latest obsession/side-project has been revolving around digital organics – that is, a system of generating trees, shrubs, flowers, etc. on the computer.   This all emerged from a desire to make a small, simple tree widget.  As I worked away, two ideas arose that inspired me to develop this into a larger, more robust system for generating and visualizing organic structures.  I’ve been plugging away at this for around two and a half weeks now, and while still early in development, there is enough going on now for me to write about.

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For those of you that have been following the Fishbeat homepage over the course of the past year, I hope this new facelift comes as a welcome change. One of my personal resolutions this year was to finally do the deed that all of us have been avoiding for the past several months: making a new website. Various incarnations of the website in the past have always felt very temporary and for a while we even had the Aleph project page parked in the Fishbeat domain. I’m pleased with the way the website turned out this time and I think we’ll be sticking with it for a while.

One of my other resolutions was to start blogging more often. A lot of cool stuff happens in this basement that doesn’t ever see the light of day, but no more! Over the next few months we’ll be posting several articles related to design, tech, music and whatever else happens to interest one of us for long enough to write about it. I personally have a lot of information about the Lua-based Fishbeat scripting engine and tools that we’ve developed that I’d like to share, so keep an eye open for those!

Not only has the new year brought about a new Fishbeat website, it’s also brought about a change in personnel. Our team size was recently halved from eight to four while we make this transition from one project to the next. Working with everyone on Aleph over the past year has been a real pleasure and I’m sad to see them go.

At the moment, for the first time in a while, we are not currently developing a game. The next few months are going to be busy for us, but relatively uneventful in the grand scheme of things, as we do some maintenance and housecleaning on our engine in preparation for future projects. I hope this will also be a good opportunity for us to connect with those of you reading this and to catch up on the Fishbeat happenings that have taken place over the past year.

Here’s to a new year full of creative independence and financial stability!

-z