Trippy visuals

[Ish]

Don't know if this is really the right folder but.....

I'm listening to some music files on my PC right now in Windows Media Player and I've got the Alchemy visualiation running. Its quite nice.

And it made me think of Unity.

Now I'm a programmer by trade (and I think a pretty reasonable one) and I've fiddled with games stuff over the years. Minter says all his levels are mathematically generated. Presumably this kind of visualisation is too.

But what the freaky f*&^ kind of maths is this stuff using....

EDIT - had to get the word freaky in there

[Peet]

I have no idea about the answer to your question, but I figured this thread would be suitable to pimp one of my favourite winamp plugins, MilkDrop.

[Mayhem]

That's for Jeff to know and for the rest of us to speculate. Actually he regularly gets to show off progress to a select group of people to see what they think and get more ideas. But for the main part it's all Minter and his brain... can't really compete there

But yes, everything in WinAmp and Media Player is essentially "borrowed" from him

[nips]

I'm no programmer, mathematician or human, but I assumed that it could be something along the lines of:

Each note of the sound file that was used was given a value depending upon its pitch, tone and other musical words which I don't understand. Then put through some equation to give a graphical representation of it on the screen.

Now, this probably is no where near the truth. In fact I really can't see how it would work at all, but it makes sense to me, and makes it easy to understand in my head!

Sometimes it's better to follow in blind faith instead of questioning, I think!

[dataDave]

It all runs along similar lines of the Chaos Theory...

http://home.inreach.com/kfarrell/fractals.html

Head-binning stuff. I use fractals for backdrops on my work sometimes using Fractal Explorer within KPT5.

[nips]

It all runs along similar lines of the Chaos Theory...

http://home.inreach.com/kfarrell/fractals.html

Yeah, that's exactly what I was saying

Those crazy Fractals!!

[Vaipon]

Jeff uses a lot of 2d post-processing effects to make the underlying 3d scenes look 10 times better, and it really works. After the scene is ready to render, an additional level of processing is applied to give the "trippy" look. "Radial blur" is one of the most well-known, and many of the winamp plugins use this as well as Rez (watch the layer transitions). It's a reasonably simple effect where pixels are smeared outwards from a point and their alpha value is diminished with each frame. Looks really cool, and is fairly cheap in terms of CPU power. Radial blur effects have matured quite a bit now though, and there are multiple points of origin on the screen and rotation elements to make the image appear to be washing away.

If you want to know how a lot of these maths effects are done, it's worth hanging out on EFNet in a coding channel. Just make sure you have a good understanding of algorithms though. If you are new to graphics coding, it'll blow yer mind.

*EDIT*
Btw, I agree with the others about the fractal element used to generate levels.. Many games use a fractal seed to generate a terrain map (games like "project IGI" have non-random terrain that is generated from a tiny algorithm). Unity is probably working along the same lines. Even back in the C64 days, Elite used maths to generate the star maps, and "The Sentinel"'s 10000 unique levels were a result of similar coding.

There is a recent interview with Jeff Minter taken at the last Assembly party (around 9th August just gone). It's quite large (about 250MB), but it's got some good stuff in it about his games and his involvement with the Nuon technology etc. Sadly he can't mention a lot about Unity because of a NDA. Get it here:

ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/parties/2003...ff_minters.mpg

[Peet]

That interview was actually made during the Alternative Party in January. I suppose he couldn't say anything until the Edge interview was published.

[Vaipon]

aha. That explains why he couldn't talk about the gamecube then. Should of guessed it was an older interview. Thought it was a bit strange that he had to keep quiet even though Unity has been common knowledge for quite a while. They must have just showed it on the Assembly Party network as a repeat.