sound/8 bit boy

[Cimmerian]

Does anyone has any idea of how andre michelle made this thing?
http://8bitboy.popforge.de/
I cant find a tutorial for this in his site and i think a randon music would be awesome for a game i am making

[renderhjs]

did you ever tried asking microsoft how they did windows? - well pretty much goes about this.
It seems that andre michelle isn´t finished with that project (some sound effects are sill missing) and I am pretty much sure that he wouldn´t like to release something that isn´t even finsished- if he would.
If you are really interested in it,- write him a mail and ask him for some insight

[Fall_X]

The technique he uses is, if I'm not mistaking, generating an swf with an embedded audio file in memory, and then play this audio. Can only be done with as3, off course.
It's quite complex, because he needs to read and parse the mod files, etc.

[Cimmerian]

did you ever tried asking microsoft how they did windows? - well pretty much goes about this.

I dont want to copy his code,all i want is a direction, even vague, of how to make random music

[Cimmerian]

The technique he uses is, if I'm not mistaking, generating an swf with an embedded audio file in memory, and then play this audio. Can only be done with as3, off course.
It's quite complex, because he needs to read and parse the mod files, etc.

I've heard about some new Sound class, i dont know if its andre´s stuff or new AS3 stuff, but maybe it has something to do with this?

[AndreMichelle]

Hey there!

Unfortunately we are both very busy and neglected our cute player.

After all I decided today after reading this thread to spend some hours to extract all the essential sources to a swc library. You can even prerender a complete modfile to a sound object, but of course this takes much time. The docs should help you to playback a modfile. There is also a simple as3-project to download. We do not release the sources, yet. They are not included in the docs, except the class BitBoy. They are simply put a mess :)

http://8bitboy.popforge.de

[AndreMichelle]

Before I forget...

make sure that you update the .actionScriptProperties in the example or use the flex enviroment to link to the library.

@Cimmerian:
This isn't 'random music'. Browse this article on wikipedia to learn more.

[Captain_404]

I dont want to copy his code,all i want is a direction, even vague, of how to make random music

I used (kind of) random music in my latest game, not like that, but if you want to load just random sounds...

_root.noise = new Sound ();
_root.noise.attachSound ("mess-s" + random(/*number*/));
_root.noise.start ();

just as long as you have all the exported tracks to match the names generated, it will pull out random sounds each time, I suppose the rest of the code is up to you...


meh, similar, but not exact...

[Fall_X]

André Michelle, is it possible to create a swf version as well, for those of us using the Flash 9 Alpha Preview? As far as I know, this does not support swc's.
I'm not talking about a complete wrapper or anything, it could probably be a mostly empty swf project, that embeds the swc, and gives access to it.

Just asking, off course I understand if it's too much work.

[Cimmerian]

Hey there!

Unfortunately we are both very busy and neglected our cute player.

After all I decided today after reading this thread to spend some hours to extract all the essential sources to a swc library. You can even prerender a complete modfile to a sound object, but of course this takes much time. The docs should help you to playback a modfile. There is also a simple as3-project to download. We do not release the sources, yet. They are not included in the docs, except the class BitBoy. They are simply put a mess

http://8bitboy.popforge.de

Hi Andre!
Didnt know you were here in fk too!Nice to know that, i am a HUGE fan of ALL of your work, even that being too advanced for a beginnrer like me
Thanks for answer that, i will look to the docs,learn a bit more about the mod format and see what i can learn!

[joa__]

André Michelle, is it possible to create a swf version as well, for those of us using the Flash 9 Alpha Preview? As far as I know, this does not support swc's.
I'm not talking about a complete wrapper or anything, it could probably be a mostly empty swf project, that embeds the swc, and gives access to it.

Just asking, off course I understand if it's too much work.

This is possible. You can gain access to the BitBoy class using it from an SWF. No big deal to compile such an SWF, I'll do it if I get the ok from André.

Might be interesting for you:
http://wahlers.com.br/claus/blog/as3...es-at-runtime/

[Fall_X]

Thanks for the info joa, but I already knew that. I probably wouldn't have asked if I didn't know it was possible In fact, I think I saw that same page when I was trying to figure out how to do this a few months back when I needed to dynamically load things from external swf's for a game I'm making. It opens up a lot of possibilities.
But it would be great if you could create the swf file. I'm really looking forward to trying it out.

[Sietjp]

Sorry to popup this old thread but I wanted to know if any of you has progressed. The mod songs are very light and sounds very good, that is perfect for flash games. That would wonderful if we could have an as3 library that can load and pre-render a mod file in a as3 sound object...
The only thing I wonder is about the prerendering time André Michelle told us about ("You can even prerender a complete modfile to a sound object, but of course this takes much time").

[Squize]

The source is out now, and works really well, but you do get a performance hit for using it, so it may only be useful for title screens rather than in-game.

Squize.

[Sietjp]

I guess that if you prerender the song in a sound object before starting the game, you can use it in-game without any performance drop down ?

[Son of Bryce]

This is very interesting, missed it the first time around. Gonna check this out!

[Sietjp]

Hi,
The bitboy sources was a flex project. I've adapted it to flash cs3.

I had to modify the SoundFactory.as because it is not possible to embed a binary in flash cs3.

And I've created an AbsctractBitBoyPlayer.as that is cut from all gui objects.

You use it like this :

var test:AbstractBitboyPlayer=new AbstractBitboyPlayer(["emax_delicate_oooz.mod"]);
test.playMod(0);

Now I need help to undertand why there are short interruptions during the play when the cpu is suddenly busy.
I tried to increase the buffer size but it does not solve the pb.
I'm sure we can do something that can be used ingame.

[Sietjp]

It seems the sound hack (to turn a bytearray into a sound object) is not working very well with the new flash player on vista.

Anyway this is my progress with the 8bitboy adaptation for games :

I've added 4 extended effects (fine porta up, down, fine volume up, down)
I've also added the support of the tone parameter which was supposed to be always 0 but this was not true for a song.

I've tried to prerender entire mods in a sound object (it's about 10 seconds to prerender 2 minutes of song), but the problem is the memory usage (about 200MB!).
This approach is valid fo short mods.

For longer songs, I'm trying a new approach. I try to split the workload of mod processing on every frames. This is promising but not yet achieved. To be continued...

[tomsamson]

all sounds great, keep it up
On the performance site, well, yeah, we´ll have to wait and see if Adobe does something there or as usual try to tweak things on our side as much as possible.

[Squize]

Yeah good work Sietjp.

As a Vista user I can only hope adobe release a fix soon. I've got the 8bitboy running in a current game but I've not tested it with the new FP release so I'm not sure if it's broken or not.

Squize.