BassBox

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi Charles,

This is fine if you know which control is where in space, but if the spaghetti monster steals  your hypertransport console, taunting you by waving it about in the air, it is going to be very complicated to work out the spatial position. Its tentacles gyrate through several rotation, translation and scaling transforms, and unless you have done all the calculations yourself, only Opengl knows where your console is.

Nice scene

You are right. For this reason I created some functions bound to entity system in thinBASIC TBGL module - you can track points on those tentacles at any time, so no problems with calculating where the hell the console is ( no problem for user, I almost failed when composing the functions ).

But fact is using your approach you must not rely on such a functions and you can just ask OpenGL to do the job for you. On other side mine approach could be better for general ( very lazy ) collision detection, where mouse clicking is not involved.

I think it is good to know we have choice of approach to reach this task


Bye,
Petr

[Patrice Terrier]

I have been advised by a member of the Un4seen forum of a "small bug" in BassBox 

http://www.un4seen.com/forum/?topic=7768.msg53080#msg53080

Being an old dog, I never start my application like this using Explorer (I am still using the prompt a lot).

Anyway the solution is quite simple:

'         // Load SKIN components and create SYS buttons
          CALL zInitSkin(hMain, zsExePath() + "BassBox.zsk")

zsExePath() was missing, thus the skin components were not found, this is because in such a case the active directory remains the source folder holding the audio files and not the EXE's.

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[Patrice Terrier]

--Charles

There is the same problem with your plugins, I shall fix it either, but better to let you know for the future.

Conclusion: we must always use full qualified path.

Note: I could change the active folder in BassBox, but I won't do it, to keep the Windows's default and avoid to cause havoc to the end user.

[Patrice Terrier]

Here is the patch to fix the bug that was reported on the Un4seen forum.

See below BassPatch41.zip

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[Charles Pegge]

Thanks Patrice,

Here  is an update for Plugin005, with some new functions for generating geodesic polyhedra. Octasphere is a 4 branch recursive function so for every increment in n, there will be 4 times as many triangles so be careful!
The corners of each triangle are snipped to expose squares and hexagons. The hexagon voids are not quite coplanar (flat) so this will be refined in due course.

[Patrice Terrier]

--Charles

Nice additions!

Note: The icon located on the top left corner of BassBox is now a button. I plan to use it to display a help file.

I am thinking of using HTLM help file (using the freeware HelpMaker) or "read only RTF", your thought?

[Charles Pegge]

I favour HTML every time Patrice, unless you want to freeze a version. HTML makes it very easy for multiple contributors.

[Charles Pegge]

Petr, I am looking at another method for obtaining spatial data: glRenderMode GL_FEEDBACK instead of GL_SELECT.

I have not tried it yet, but potentially it can yield the x y z coordinates of every single visible vertex, and supports primitive labelling with glPassThrough. It is very efficient if you need to get the positions of large numbers of vertices. The problems with it that I can see is that it may generate too much data, and it does not return culled vertices (outside the viewport, so it may not be sufficient for CAD purposes,

[Petr Schreiber]

Charles,

sounds exciting!
I am not sure if I get it, but using glPassThrough you need to render twice in case you want picture and coordinates at the same time ?

In any case, this is very exciting part of OpenGL I have not fully discovered yet.
It could result in very challenging plugins - imagine shelf with different things, and you can choose which of them will represent music


Bye,
Petr

P.S. That recursive geometry looks good !

[Charles Pegge]

GlPassThrough is a rather misleading term. It performs a similar function to the glLoadName in GL_SELECT mode, by allowing you to insert any of your own tokens into the feedback buffer, along with the vertex tokens. You can use them as markers so you know which group of vertices belongs to which object in the scene.

Yes great idea. How about assembling a musical instrument with a selection of bodies, arms, fret boards, keys and horns.

[Petr Schreiber]

Charles,

thanks for the info on glPassThrough.

I like a lot idea of musical multi-instrument, have you seen ATi Animusic Demo ?


Bye,
Petr

[Charles Pegge]

Watched the video, very impressive combination of music,physics and plumbing. I wonder how many man hours it took to create that demo.

[Patrice Terrier]

This version introduces a help file named BassBox.chm that is created with the freeware HelpMaker.

All the HTML files are embedded into the "_tmphhp" subfolder, and the Helpmaker project is named BassBox.sh6.

I have added a new visual plugin: "Bumper".

Some minor changes have been done to zSkin.inc, BassBox.bas, plug007.bas.

See below BassPatch42.zip

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[Patrice Terrier]

I have downloaded and installed the ATI demo...
on my Vista NVidia GeForce Go 7600, and it works just fine with it!

Very very impressive demo.

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[Petr Schreiber]

I liked that demo a lot,

it was bundled with my ex-graphic card , Radeon 9600. I liked it a lot too.

One idea for the plugin SDK, maybe it is already there.

We can now detect how strong the sound is ( volume ), but it would be handy to get how high the "tone" is.
This way our multi-instrument could detect high tones and show flute playing, for deep ones bass for example.


Thanks,
Petr