Brief
Just a short note here. My cousin's currently replacing the transmission in my car, so I'll have my car working again soon.
Date posted: 21 September, 2009Tags: cars personal
ZUN!
So I guess I've mentioned once before, I own a Zune instead of an iPod. Never wanted an iPod, never liked Apple products in general after having tons of problems with old Power Macs and G4s throughout the years. But I have this nice little Zune 30, which is getting to be some three years old now. Battery life is wearing down, but it still functions fine. I usually keep it connected to my 360 so I have my music library on there. I like the device quite a bit.
As such, I've been following Zune developments for a while. I had wanted to get a Zune 80, but never got the chance to. I also have been keeping an eye on software development for it, since at least the older Zune's support XNA, although there hasn't been any distribution platform for it yet. For the new Zune HD, it is going to have a games platform, however the details on it haven't yet been finalized.
Now that it's finally released, we should start to see more coming for it. For now, they've released an incremental update for the older firmware as well, which won't have all the features of the HD because of hardware changes, of course, but as long as it adds Unicode support in the device then I'll be happy. My library is re-syncing right now after formatting the device, so we'll see what it has when it finishes.
Date posted: 15 September, 2009Tags: computer music software
Hide In Plain Sight
One of the more interesting topics I've found is the subject of steganography. Digital steganography, more particular, is done usually with images. One particular online comic I read recently had its creator using steganography for hiding spoilers to the upcoming storyline. However the methods are so varied that, without knowing any particular technique, it's just as well impossible to know how a message is hidden in a digitally steganographed image. There's apparently 725 different variations according to the Wikipedia article on it; the programs I found when originally learning about it is JPHIDE/JPSEEK. However, for simple things, I accidentally stumbled upon a different way of doing it entirely that I hadn't thought of before.
Years ago, I found a program that was designed for aiding the blind with using computers, by using a method to convert the screen into sweeping sound data to piece it together. It would require some training, of course, but it was a rather interesting software. I unfortunately lost it and the name of it, though, so I don't know whatever happened to it. I decided, though, to look for something similar, more for the goal of looking for audio clues for composing music. I came upon a program called AudioPaint, which for most stuff I tried came up with just noise, simply for the way the algorithm works. I however, plugged in a PNG I have of the actual look of Spiral Island (not the in-game map), and it created a nice, clear tone.
I sat and played with the options for a bit and got a few different results, and as I was combining things in GoldWave to come up with a sound effect, I noticed that the spectrogram had an odd look to it. So I used another program I found mentioned along with AudioPaint, Sonic Visualizer, to open it up one of the saved files and look at it the complete spectrogram. The results were rather impressive:
I found that pretty cool, myself. It is the exact image I used, as an audio file. Obviously not terribly encrypted, but still steganographic. That file itself sounds like a kind of warping sound effect, so unless you looked at it with a spectrogram you wouldn't suspect it was an image there.
Date posted: 11 September, 2009Tags: software
Father of Death
The Protomen.
Act II: The Father of Death.
That is all.
Date posted: 07 September, 2009Tags: music
Content Control
One of the things that's concerned me for a while is how much information to present in Spiral Island. There's a lot of backstory, but most of it isn't relevant to the actual game itself, and presenting too much at once would likely make things too boring. However, without explaining at least some of the past, what all is going on may end up being too confusing. So trying to find the proper balance between the two has been really difficult.
The game will have an unlockable profile system from the main menu, with information on the characters and other things, and while actually coding together my editor for that (oh dear, I'm using XML again) I finally found my balance, figured out what information would be useful to know in Spiral Island, and what information to save to present later when touching more on what happened at that time. Right now I'm at a total of 39 entries, the bulk of those the major character profiles, I may add maybe at most 10 more on top of that, plus a few variants of entries presenting more information as you unlock it through gameplay. Not too much information, but enough to understand everything going on.
Date posted: 06 September, 2009Tags: spiral_island writing