Good Sunday fellow Babyloners,
Today, no debugging or fancy adding to my scene. It’s sharing day and I’ve got something very special for you. I hope you’ll like it
For your eyes only. I made 2 early preview videos of the new Auditorium update to come and just couldn’t wait to share’em with my BJS family.
NOTE: Please do not disseminate, as I haven’t yet collected all the rights for distribution. Quite unexpectedly, some gifted me a courtesy featuring without further questions. Some haven’t answered yet and for the others, I was just waiting to have something solid to show them I’m worthy (although, everyone here knows I’m not … but then, keep this to yourself… no need to tell’em). Also, I’m not gonna tell who committed and who is still challenging me. I don’t want to turn this into a competition. If a label doesn’t want his/her artist to be featured among the greatest works of music of all times… well, if so, I will just have to replace it with a challenger;)
Jokes apart, this is my first preview of the new Auditorium section, in which you will remember or discover 66 titles from 22 categories of ‘Great Works of Music’, from the Medieval to Information Eras, all selected and described by the AI.
Without further teasing, here are the links:
HDTV full-HD 1280*1200 (~1gb):
#63 featuring: Prince - Purple Rain (1984)
#61 featuring: Michael Jackson - Billie Jean (1982)
…And for those with a small monitor OR lower speed Internet (get yourself proper Internet, haha )… Else:
720p HD version (~200mb):
#63 featuring: Prince - Purple Rain (1984)
#61 featuring: Michael Jackson - Billie Jean (1982)
Sorry for I selected songs from my generation . Because, honestly, as much as I appreciate the G-minor menuet from Mozart, it doesn’t really trigger as much emotions in me … not to mention that there were no videoclip in these times.
Also - For those interested, a sidenote on my development/struggle with the creation of ‘The Auditorium’:
DEV corner:
As said before, there’s absolutely zero new meshes in this new Auditorium section. Everything is either instanced or even ‘recycled’ from the main scene (except for the animations for the lightshow).
To free the resources allowing me to actually run and even video capture this ‘thingy’ in full HD on a 13-years old medium range GPU!… I’m disabling a number of meshes that are occluded while visiting the Auditorium (‘mesh.setEnabled(false)’). This way, from close to 1k draw calls with everything in frustrum, I can limit the draw calls to no more than about 400 (mostly 150 to 300).
The other thing is: Everything is fake. There are zero lights in this lightshow. Ok, there’s also zero volumetric light, rays and whatever fancy tech demo yours devs like (sorry for that). But then, this is also how I can deliver an experience to a 15 years old computer . And a museum - in my opinion - needs to be inclusive.
However of course, with these specs, you’ll be running just a bit better than a slide show (let’s remain realistic). The new recommended requirements to run MOE after update 2 is a quad-core at 2,4Ghz, GL-capable GPU with 2GB and 8GB RAM. The models load is still very low (and as I said, nothing added from ‘the auditorium’). However the load of materials and textures makes for this recom of 2GB GPU, with an initial load of about 400mb textures, eventually exceeding 1.2GB memory when viewing everything (despite for clearing most of which is no longer viewed, or at least, attempting to).
The lightshow : Well, it really is as I told you before. I’ve been going ‘haywire’ with this . Viewing the clips of my generation, my brain returned to the one of a teenager and rules just didn’t apply anymore. BTW, it’s gonna take me at least half a day to clean all the shit I created in my script .
Basically, the way it works is, it has a number of variables set at title selection. Obviously, there’s a ‘theme colors’ variable, which sets the colors to use (up to 3 + 2 ‘focus colors’). And then, there’s also a var for the speed: slow, medium or fast. Finally, there’s a ‘threshold’ variable in the form of an interval time-out that triggers a switch in the animations (speed and/or colors)
There are also 2 types of animations triggered by 2 functions. Both are runtime based and both use variables to set random interval and random color picking at times (with constraints). The main difference is that, the non-slow based animation is actually triggered from the frequencies on the analyzer (that’s the one for michael jackson’s featuring). While the ‘slow’ animation, that cannot rely on frequencies, is ‘hardcoded’ and based on random set intervals and color picking to make it more dynamic (that’s the one from the ‘purple rain’ featuring). In frequency mode, animations are triggered and cleared from a range of min an max capture on a frequency. So, this is where it gets a little bit tricky and requires me to properly normalize all sources. I cannot/don’t want to change this frequency with every title selected (66, remember?). So, yes, still a bit of tuning to be done here and in the end, it will be a compromise. Also, of course, given the above, the experience is slightly different every time.
Here’s where I’d like to thank again the BJS Team for creating a framework that allows me to unleash my creativity, mostly doing shit, and the thingy still works You Guys really know what you are doing (as opposed to me )
From tomorrow, my next task will be to normalize all new assets and, before release, I will also still need to move a lot to production and secure the loading sequence (to not generate errors when loading with slow/inconsistent Internet speed).
So, still a lot to do within just a few days … but I figured I need to launch this before v7 because, else, from March 28, nobody will want to look at this (including me ) while eagerly waiting for the new candy (I already ordered my pop-corns to watch the launch movie … not that I want to put any additional pressure on you Guys from the Team )
Enjoy, comment (but not too much, please ) and… Meanwhile, have a great day