oscjoy/fluxus project update

I’ve managed to get my xbox360-controller to work with fluxus in a
effective manner by modifying the gamepad-script (read here), but it struck me that
I would have to do this modification to all fluxus-programs I want to
use. That’s more hassle than I can handle.

Therefore I contacted Jeremy Friesner who’s developing oscjoy (I’m using oscjoy to interface with my joystick),
and asked him if he could add axis and button-remapping to the program.
He could, and I’ve already tested the initial build, and it works great.
(It’s not yet up on the homepage, but Jeremy said that he should add it
in a week or so.)

So, there you got it. Solved The Proper Way. The open source model really works!

New live coding project 2: a day of fiddling

(read the first post here)

I’d love to write more, but I’m too tired. Some of the results from todays fiddling is pasted at the end.

Boy, isn’t Scheme well suited for live coding? It’s very algorithmic, and you can develop fast and abstract. And it’s the most beautiful language out there (is in looking at code as if it was a picture)!

Boy, isn’t Scheme badly suited for live coding. It’s a pain to write, a pain to read, and hell of a pain to debug!

Was a lot harder than I expected, but I managed to hack a cool script for my Xbox360 which will ease joysticking. Pasted below.

I’ve also started to swap the keyboard-controls to joystick-control in the asteroids-example. Unfortunally I managed to break it a little a couple of minutes ago, so you will have to live without it for now.

New live coding project

Started to play around with Fluxus late last week. It’s absolutely great! I thought 3D-graphics was a lot harder than it really is (well, ok, both OpenGL and Fluxus takes lot of the blows. Glad I can fiddle around in 3D-space without brainfucking things like garbage collection).

Pretty soon I realized what I wanted to do: a abstract 3D-game that triggers sounds when stuff happens in-game (a bit like this by AlgoMantra). Also, and this is the exciting part, it should be livecoded as the player is playing.

I Haven’t really worked out all the details, but I Imagen it as a very bare-boned space-shooter (there is a asteroids-demo in the examples-directory which I’m gonna gut), that just got the very basic: joystick-support, it draws the gfx, and sends osc to something like puredata (it would be great if the audio would be livecoded as well). As the performance progress the coder will add more graphic, change the existing stuff, and manipulate the rules of both the game and physics. It should progress from some early 80’s tech-demo to some kind of Geometry War 3D-clone.

Yes, I’m gonna get a joystick for this project. I’ve wanted to buy one when I started with Chuck, already. In fact, I already bought it. Understood yesterday that I were free from school today (lazy place) so I went ahead and bought a Xbox360-controller with USB-out. Compiled the drivers and stuff, and it works great! It’s a bit sensitive, and there is some axis-noise, but I can live with that (I just make my code less sensitive).

Oh, yeah: the controller-mapping is totally fuckup. I blame Microsoft.

My aim is to have something that runs later today (hopefully in a state which I can show you).