[mzx] Here we go.

A good sign towards a good intro soundtrack (or executable music) so far seems to be the necessity to fix bugs which were there for years and slipped through, because they never really used this tight.

So yeah, started on the music. Jotted down some good ideas for the basic hooks a week ago, now have a basic theme, even a bit of a heel-turn which might be excellent if we can pull it off properly. Production sounds good so far, not as tight as I'd like it but we're still only about 24 hours in, and I didn't EQ much right now and the frequencies to fill in sound pretty obvious. Listening to it now I can say it's very catchy, and also very much unlike anything we've done so far, though in a sense it does sound like a logical continuation of Actuator. Size-wise we're at ~5k, plenty of headroom still. Might even squeeze some movie samples in later.

The biggest worry I have right now is (as always) the song structure, because like it or not, it's always consensual when it comes to collaborative effort like intro-making: Even basic concepts like "the introductory part is too long", "I'd like a breakdown here" or "That edit seems unnecessary" can be (and have been) subjects for a heated debate simply because most of us have ideas for how the final product should look/feel like, and they don't always match. That said, I'm a firm believe that a good song is a good song and visuals more adaptive, so I chose a different approach this time: I make the song, finish it as much as I can (or let's say up to 80-90%), they get an end product, and they take it or leave it. I've made soundtracks for 4 of our 64ks so far, and in hindsight the ones that became successful / memorable were the ones where I assumed free rains over most of the music and only asked for opinion (and NOT pointers) late in the process. It's a gamble worth taking.

The next step will be, I guess, to map out the song structure.

Bloated

Well the 12k engine size dream is not going to happen as I've already hit that mark with the latest additions: geospheres, bevel, scatter and a few overlooked generators have made it into the engine which currently is at 12340 bytes. Even 16k might be problematic at this rate if I want to add a good particle engine, but that might still be possible. All in all I'm making great progress on the modeler, only a few things left before it's completely finished.

Lots of progress

The development machine kicked into full swing over the weekend and I'm happy to write that the modeler is functionally finished - it still needs some work to make things comfortable but everything is in there. Huge thanks go out to the Maniacs of Noise for their track Firing up as it put me in the mood for the 36 hour coding session over the last two days.
Also, engine size is still only 9960 bytes with everything in there.

SVN Testrun

We got to the point where setting up an svn server for the projects made sense and we finally got around to test how the system behaves when multiple people are working on the same project file. The test went very well as changes made on both ends merged perfectly. This should help out a lot when the deadlines approach :)

Complicated

This is starting to look like an aircraft cockpit - the more technical part of the tool with material parameters finally finished and working.

The Star

Mapxform

And then there was...