Интересно, как бы выглядел индийский DDR?
Friday, September 17, 2004
I thought about this yesterday and now I think I have confirmed that this is all actually possible and even feasibly practical.
People like internet radio, especially if they have the bandwidth for it. Ogg streams at low bit rates like 40-60kbps sound good enough for dancing to them. Now, unlike MP3 streams, for which ID3 tag metadata is a chunk of essentially totally extraneous data which is not part of the stream, Ogg files are containers by definition — they are a format which encapsulates the audio stream encoded by the Vorbis codec. This is what allows OGM video files to actually work. The metadata chunk is an integral part of the Ogg stream. When an Ogg stream is passed through a streaming server like icecast, the metadata chunk remains intact.
This allows us to do some nifty things which haven’t been tried before.
Since we can actually pass metadata through a streaming server, we can embed data for the player to act upon, and all players which don’t know about this data will happily download it and ignore it. That allows us to distribute the songs through internet radio with various interesting things — like icons, lyrics, and most importantly, stepfile data for StepMania!
Embedding Stepmania data like stepfiles, song banners, backgrounds and other junk into Ogg streams appears to be easy enough to do even with a python script. What’s more important is that even transcoding stream generation programs — at least, I’ve successfully tested this with ices — seem to keep song metadata intact when converting the audio data to the specified bitrates and sampling rates.
Which means that we can relatively easily set up a streaming client that will listen to the specified internet radio, buffering the song until it’s done, and if it contains embedded Stepmania data, signal it to add it to the playlist or even play straight away.
Can you say “radio dance nonstop”? :)
Filed in Ideas
|
Also tagged
|
Local arcade mini-event — lotsa people came to dance together. I just finished a dance, breathing heavily, leaning on the screen. A friend comes up.
— Here, a present from the arcade owners. — he says, giving me a token.
— Express my gratitude to them please…
That’s… refreshing. I don’t even dance all that well or all that much.
Открыли сайт про бемафию и в первый же день получили эдак полтыщи хитов.
Волна.
Теперь главное не упустить.
Filed in Events
|
Also tagged
|
Sunday, February 22, 2004
Okay, so I get a proper soft dance pad and not one but three different Playstation to USB converters. And a couple of cheap PS1 gamepads too, just in case. You’d think one of them worked right? Even ONE of them? The only thing that did was the dance pad.
Converter 1, a blue triangular two-player device, works fine under Windows. In Linux, it emits enough bus errors for the system to not recognise it at all. It doesn’t seem to have the capability for axis-as-button emulation, since it only presents 12 buttons to the system in Windows. The PS1 gamepads work fine in it, except that the buttons in one stick. :roll:
Converters 2 and 3 appear to be the same device in different boxes. They also appear to be the ones tested out with StepMania, but the code combination which reportedly makes them switch to axis-as-button-emulation mode does not work.
They definitely have the capability, though, cause they present four extra buttons to the system both in Linux and Windows. And in Windows, after some mucking around with their ‘macro’ program, you can actually make them send in the axis to button mappings as these four extra buttons. Unfortunately, that macro program crashes StepMania in my case. (sigh) Only one of the two identical PS1 gamepads works in these convertors – the one with the buttons that stick!
So I get a usb sniffer up and listen for the whatever the ‘macro’ program sends to the converter to make it switch modes. And get this – it doesn’t send anything! I just get a continual buzz of the converter sending 8-byte packets to the system with no control messages going to it. How the fsck does it work?!
sigh… Ohwell. If this doesn’t work, I’ll make the infrared dance mat talk to LIRC instead. :E
Filed in Rants
|
Also tagged
|
Friday, February 13, 2004
Here I spend a few hours transferring the gamepad components to a new (smaller) board, messing with the wires, soldering the tiny parts and squeezing them tight so they are sure to fit comfortably, work, work, work and when I plug it in, woo, it registers, I didn’t make any mistakes, it’s just as it was…
…but crashes in exactly the same manner as it did before, when there was a long wire connecting the pad and the gamepad board. But much sooner now, in a matter of tens of presses and not hundreds. And it crashes when I use the two trigger buttons which need to be logical 1 to press and not 0 like the other ones, too.
What in blazes is wrong with that thing?!
And then I have to spend more time getting it back the way it was before. It still crashes, but at least I get through some of the songs. Sometimes.
Sigh.
Why the heck nobody on the net describes any problems like this? They just solder the wires straight to the gamepad board and go! Why doesn’t it work for me?
Filed in Events
|
Also tagged
|
Thursday, February 12, 2004
Судя по всему, хорошо танцевать и быть хорошим музыкантом действительно невозможно. Во всяком случае несчастный Вольф вот уже второй час прыгает на моем несчастном DDR-коврике. И до сих пор не смог пройти ни одной песни ни разу.
Я ему давал самые простые — All that she wants, Boom Boom Dollar, Kung Fu Fighting… Все бестолку.
Он в половине случаев не может так наступить на плитку чтобы она сработала, потому что не переносит свой вес из центра коврика. И вообще панически боится потерять равновесие. Но это ладно. Это свалим на его давнюю привычку к боевым, блин, искусствам, которые предписывают все время находиться в равновесном состоянии. Но он же басист! И все равно не попадает в ноты, причем много, много хуже меня. Про то что он периодически путает стрелку вперед и стрелку назад я как-то уже молчу — на дороге он лево и право путает, это хуже. Он ярится и грозится, “Ну ладно скотина, я тебя все-таки победю!” но пока больше сорока секунд он не продержался.
Это ужасно. Без слез смотреть невозможно — ржу потихоньку от него. :)
P.S. Когда ему в конце концов надоело (это отняло еще около получаса, но у него так ни разу и не вышло) я станцевал Break Down! (BASIC-4) на C, чего со мной прежде не случалось, в очередной раз крепко попортил себе коленный сустав этим занятием, и изложил ему суть проблемы с повисающим геймпадом, которая помешала мне сделать это с первой попытки.
Вольф не замедлил предложить свою помощь, свалил все на отсутствие подобающего заземления (опять) и полез проверять наличие настоящей земли на батарее.
Найти не нашел, (я и так знал что на батарее земли у меня нет, сколько всего из-за этого сгорело — жуть) но щупы мультиметра основательно оплавил, угробил радиобудильник и напомнил мне как хорошо иметь UPS. :)
Алкоголики — вечный анекдот.
Filed in Events
|
Also tagged
|
