For other people reading this, it's worth noting that SpriteAttack has an excellent website with a lot of really nice art and excellent Inkscape tutorials.
Also, thanks for taking the time to do this. I think it'll make it a lot easier for programmers to use.
One thing you might consider doing is arranging the blank templates in the same way and putting those out as separate files so that people can work with them in this format.
That's an excellent counterpoint, and one that I happen to agree with. In fact, I've ranted about it at great lengths in the past. If your modding instructions start with "open a text editor", you've lost most of your potential artists right there.
That being said, these minecraft mods I'm referring to aren't texture alterations, they're essentiall programs written in Java, which is one of the more beginner-unfriendly languages out there. I think the primary reason that minecraft has so many mods is that it's immensely popular.
Compare minecraft with minetest, which is built with modding in mind. If you compare ratios of community size to the number of mods, minetest (which has a small community) is actually vastly more successful than minecraft, partly because modding doesn't involve mucking around with Java. Sure, you need a text editor, but most modding of minecraft requires a decompiler.
Then, write a few simple synths (white noise, square, triangle, saw, etc) and associate them with whatever midi channels you want (obviously you're not going to want to write synths for every single standard midi instrument, because that would take forever).
I've never written a music synth before, but I'd try something like this:
At the beginning of the main loop, check the current time and compare it to the previous time.
If a note should have played in that timeframe, synthesize that note as raw sound and begin playing it.
If this makes things too choppy, you might want to make a separate thread that you can call to synthesize your notes a second or so before it's time to play them.
If memory usage isn't an issue, you could synthesize the entire song before the actual game stars playing it, and then just play the entire raw sound in the background. This may be 10 to 50 megs per song, though, since it's uncompressed sound data.
That's about it. If you need anything clarified, let me know.
One of the things I'm planning to add is a way for people to list their game on an art page when they use a particular piece of art, so we can see where all it's being used.
I don't necessarily have an issue with a subscription model as long as you're providing value and people who stop subscribing don't lose access to the software that they've already paid for. (It's worth noting that a program can be both free software and subscription based.)
That being said, I'm not a fan of the idea of software as a service. Microsoft and Adobe are doing it this way, I think, because they can see the writing on the wall. With each successive release of Office, Microsoft provides less value -- in fact, Office 2000 is still a perfectly reasonable piece of software that does what most people need even now. The only way for them to get people to keep giving them money is to go to a rental model and take away access to their software when people stop paying them.
Honestly, in comparison to the major mods that have come out, Mojang's updates to minecraft have been pretty underwhelming. The big thing about this latest update was horses, and modders have had horses for ages now.
I think part of the problem is that they may be focused on Xbox Live, which IMO has been nothing but a drain on the PC gaming scene.
Awesome! :)
For other people reading this, it's worth noting that SpriteAttack has an excellent website with a lot of really nice art and excellent Inkscape tutorials.
Also, thanks for taking the time to do this. I think it'll make it a lot easier for programmers to use.
One thing you might consider doing is arranging the blank templates in the same way and putting those out as separate files so that people can work with them in this format.
That's an excellent counterpoint, and one that I happen to agree with. In fact, I've ranted about it at great lengths in the past. If your modding instructions start with "open a text editor", you've lost most of your potential artists right there.
That being said, these minecraft mods I'm referring to aren't texture alterations, they're essentiall programs written in Java, which is one of the more beginner-unfriendly languages out there. I think the primary reason that minecraft has so many mods is that it's immensely popular.
Compare minecraft with minetest, which is built with modding in mind. If you compare ratios of community size to the number of mods, minetest (which has a small community) is actually vastly more successful than minecraft, partly because modding doesn't involve mucking around with Java. Sure, you need a text editor, but most modding of minecraft requires a decompiler.
Antifarea is Charles Gabriel. :)
AS3 is a bit out of my area of expertise, since I've never worked with it, but here's how I would go about it:
First off, apparently there's an alpha quality midi loader on google code under the MIT license:
http://code.google.com/p/as3midilib/
Grab the code to that.
Then, write a few simple synths (white noise, square, triangle, saw, etc) and associate them with whatever midi channels you want (obviously you're not going to want to write synths for every single standard midi instrument, because that would take forever).
I've never written a music synth before, but I'd try something like this:
That's about it. If you need anything clarified, let me know.
Bart
Awesome! :)
It's hard to say, really.
One of the things I'm planning to add is a way for people to list their game on an art page when they use a particular piece of art, so we can see where all it's being used.
I don't necessarily have an issue with a subscription model as long as you're providing value and people who stop subscribing don't lose access to the software that they've already paid for. (It's worth noting that a program can be both free software and subscription based.)
That being said, I'm not a fan of the idea of software as a service. Microsoft and Adobe are doing it this way, I think, because they can see the writing on the wall. With each successive release of Office, Microsoft provides less value -- in fact, Office 2000 is still a perfectly reasonable piece of software that does what most people need even now. The only way for them to get people to keep giving them money is to go to a rental model and take away access to their software when people stop paying them.
I would tend to agree with that.
Honestly, in comparison to the major mods that have come out, Mojang's updates to minecraft have been pretty underwhelming. The big thing about this latest update was horses, and modders have had horses for ages now.
I think part of the problem is that they may be focused on Xbox Live, which IMO has been nothing but a drain on the PC gaming scene.
I could see these being used to construct platformer levels, too.
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