29th October 2007, 10:51 pm
Well I felt like a total newbie at programming on Sunday night. I spent well over an hour wondering why the sound effect program I was working on seemed to be locking up. Eventually it turns out a increment in a for loop was in some cases being calculated as zero! I was happy to find it but annoyed it took me so long. My only defense was my brain was a bit fried by the time I started coding that evening.
I decided that using the Gui builder in NetBeans is useful but I should spend a little bit of time understanding Swing, so one evening latter I had a set of notes on the basics. I don’t really plan on ever writing Gui’s for apps by hand - life is just to short. But having a better understanding has let me start to use custom events and listeners - which solve some of the higher level communication issues I was having in the program. I am sure I am still making some design/coding errors in the Gui side of things but my experience is growing.
My aim is to create a very simplistic version of the program and then build on that. The Gui is now usable, we can edit the frequency and amplitude, select the wave form and we have space saved ready for special effects, loading and saving and any other future ideas. The next task is the generation of the actual sound. This might turn out to be a bit tricky and requires some experimentation. So far I have two ideas on how to implement this. One feels more correct than the other - guess which one is trickier to implement? I will try the tricky one but will probably end up with a cross between the two ideas as is often the case when figuring things out where you have multiple ideas.
26th October 2007, 08:29 pm
I have been thinking a little more on how these are created within mist. Currently to create an empty list or array you do
Continue reading ‘Mist arrays and lists.’ »
24th October 2007, 08:22 pm
I had previously messed a little bit with Java and its sound api. Other than checking that I knew how to generate a pure sine wave tone I have focussed on the UI side of things. For now it looks like a poor clone of the Sound Effect Generator and that is a fair assessment of what it is – well I have not implemented any functionality yet. Continue reading ‘Sounds effect Generator - progress!’ »
22nd October 2007, 08:27 pm
Arstechnica has a posting about how adobe expect a gradual move over the web apps rather than the traditional download and install type of apps. The time span is over the next ten years and that is dependant on bandwidth increasing at a reasonable state. They also expect, as this happens to lower the reach of their flagship products into the less professional (hobby?) markets using ad funded cut down versions of their products. If you pay a subscription, ads are removed and presumably, you get some features not in the free addition. Here is the link. Continue reading ‘Adobe and the gradual move to web apps’ »
21st October 2007, 08:24 pm
I have been looking around for a simple to use sound effect generator, that can generate some retro game sound effects without a huge investment of time to get over a learning curve of the app.
If you have looked for something similar then you will know there is not much out there. Sure if you are after a drum machine or want to make music you are well catered for. Creating laser effects or explosions in a simple way - your choice is limited.
The only application that fitted the bill was created over 10 years ago. It is simple to use and seems to generate the sound effects I am after. It is called Sound Effects Generator and the programmer mentions he originally wrote it for himself, he creates quite a few games, but decided to see if he could earn some money from it - which is fair enough.
It is shareware so try out the demo, fairly intuitive to use, so I won’t discuss its usage. The only thing stopping me from registering is I wouldn’t mind spending a few evening(read as a week or two) having a go at implementing a clone of it. It would make a good mid sized project for getting more familiar with Java.
If you are looking to generate some 80’s style computer game sound effects then look no further than here - Unless you know of some better application to use?