Normally there's a pinned introduce yourself thread in the off topic section... but I couldn't find one, so I thought I'd make one in order to introduce myself.

Hi, I'm Harry, known online as Delph or Delphic, I'm interested mostly in Unity3D (C#) and WebGL development, although I keep getting the urge to dabble in C++ / OpenGL again. I occasionally like to write article to explain stuff pitched at the gap between absolute beginner and scarily competent.

I've become particularly interested in procedural generation recently, possibly due to the fact I'd like to be able to do "all the things", but unfortunately I'm very much a programmer first, designer second, level designer way down third and artistic skills worthy of being called programmer art, and I've barely dabbled in sound and music.

Got websites at http://delphic.me.uk/ and http://darklingdevelopment.com/ although at some point I'm going to merge those into one. I'm very much a hobby developer for the time being and current project is my second attempt at a WebGL renderer where I hope to get more familiar with making interesting fragment shaders.

How about you?

Hi, I'm Sean and I am interested in C++/OpenGL development.

I too like to be able to do "all the things" but unfortunately I too am a programmer, first designer second and my artistic skills are not spectacular other than some crude pixel art that I did for an online game that I created.

I am hoping to create my own game and I am hammering out an idea which I think is great.

All the best with your projects

Hello, I'm Michael audio designer/composer and co founder of Artific Games.
We have a small startup company in Jacksonville fl building game tools and assets.
I've been creating music and sound effects for over 14 yrs and continue to learn maya in my very little spare time.

Cheers

Hi, I'm TheComet.

I am currently employed as an electronic engineering technician in ultrasonic R&D for flowmeters. I will be studying electronic engineering in half a year to earn an electronic engineering degree. My current job requires me to design and manufacture electronic circuit prototypes. This includes the painful yet exhilarating process of circuit simulation and design, drawing, PCB layout, soldering, testing, measuring and debugging, as well as microcontroller and FPGA programming.

I write games in C++ in my free time for fun, and have been doing so for more than 7 years.

I have a natural interest in high voltage circuitry combined with music, as can bee seen in the following video. There are no hidden speakers, the music you hear is being emitted from the electric arc itself.

I am a programmer, but don't have a job anywhere (it is all something I do on my own... but, otherwise, can't really seem to find a job).

but, yeah, random things I work on:

game development (sort of have a game, nevermind if it kind of sucks);

compilers and tools development (custom scripting language, basically a ByteCode + JIT based VM, etc);

developing audio and video codecs (mostly related to doing other things, *, but still ends up eating a lot of time);

...

*: because none of the common or standard codecs really match my specific use-cases, so most are basically focused on various strange/unusual use cases, like "quickly decodes to DXTn compressed textures" or "has floating-point HDR and Alpha channel support", ... and generally more focused on performance than compression. nevermind if performance is hard as well sometimes (ex: doing 1080p60 or higher from a single-threaded plain-C decoder, it is a fail if one can't do much above 1080p30 without having to resort to using multiple decoder threads...).

note that 1080p60 requires about 126 megapixels per second, which is hard to get when decoding to 32-bit RGBA (vs DXTn or YUY2 or similar).

though, for decoding to DXT5, a few of them get around 500+ megapixels / second, which is a little better.

granted, XviD can't seem to pull this one off either (it goes at around 100-105 megapixels per second on my PC), so maybe it is passable.

like, one ends up with a range of codecs "fast enough to do 1080p30 but not fast enough to do 1080p60 or 1080i120"...

granted, it is much like having a script language persistently 3-5x slower than natively compiled C, but being unable to justify the time-effort required to try to make "a JIT that doesn't suck", but finding that practically it doesn't seem to make a huge difference.

game is basically sort of like Quake + Minecraft, with Quake-like gameplay in a Minecraft-like world (with both MC and also the idTech family of game engines strongly influencing the design, basically taking engine design inspiration from the Quake 1-3 engines and Doom 3 and similar, though the engine was written ground-up).

ultimately it all doesn't really matter a whole lot though.

@TheComet:

cool, but I am left wondering if there is any way to improve the audio quality from the arc?... (like via electrode design or similar?...).

actually, this reminds me of once (when I was much younger), playing music by running an amplifier through a lightbulb (which was also glowing in-sync with the music), which worked ok until the amplifier fried.

@TheComet

That video is extremely impressive / cool!

@BGB

Don't be too hard on yourself, coding an engine and game from the ground up is always impressive and something to be proud of - even if it doesn't play all that well. Whilst obviously your opinion is what's going to matter to you, unless you've had lots of testers tell you it's no good you shouldn't beat yourself up (or even if you have, hooray for positivity in the face of adversity!).

@TheComet

That video is extremely impressive / cool!

@BGB

Don't be too hard on yourself, coding an engine and game from the ground up is always impressive and something to be proud of - even if it doesn't play all that well. Whilst obviously your opinion is what's going to matter to you, unless you've had lots of testers tell you it's no good you shouldn't beat yourself up (or even if you have, hooray for positivity in the face of adversity!).

yeah, dunno.

for the most part it had been a lot of people not really caring much, or people complaining about and/or downvoting my YouTube videos...

well, along with some amount of people being confused over the whole idea that "the code is available, but this doesn't mean it is FOSS", nor that I am going to personally bother with trying to support everyones' favored build setup (it is up to them if they want to try to get it built from source).

one person actually went as far as claiming that "code doesn't belong to developers" and "everyone is under moral obligation to use GPL" and so on...

the parts which it is ok for people to reuse are explicitly put under the MIT license, but most of this in infrastructural code, rather than the engine proper.

but, then I am left thinking things are lame for all the "little things", like, I have not personally been able to write a "good" text-to-speech engine, as my major past implementation (based on diphone synthesis) is "barely intelligible" (and also sounds "oddly British" for some reason...), and most of my attempts at formant synthesis are worse. (like, none are anywhere near MS SAPI levels...). basically, the goal would be either an intelligible diphone synth (like Apple PlainTalk), or intelligible formant (like MS Sam). note that newer voices (MS Anna, ...) are based on unit-selection. (note that using MS SAPI is non-portable). (mostly just me idly wanting characters to be able to say stuff without having to prerecord it or fall back to using text boxes, or be stuck with intelligibility as a likely Windows-only feature...). (note: have already looked into some of the FOSS libs).

then, there are various strange omissions, like me only recently getting to working on adding support for AVI videos with ADPCM audio (*1), and don't currently have built-in support for MS-CRAM / MS Video 1 (*2), ...

*1: with "real" video codecs, MP3 audio is most popular, with PCM being common for video capture. ADPCM is most commonly used along with older video codecs.

*2: not exactly like MS-CRAM is known for its amazing image quality (originally, I knew about both CRAM and RPZA, but for my uses at the time, picked RPZA as a base for building animated textures on, and put off supporting CRAM, ...). (codecs not handled directly go off to VfW for decoding).

nevermind once again, I am also left annoyed that there still aren't really any "good" options for recording at higher resolutions (1440x900 or 1680x1050) without chewing through lots of HDD space (1680x1050 recording is basically resigning oneself to use around 500MB to 1GB per minute...). the main limiting factor is mostly how much can be done in real-time by the encoder (well, at least it isn't raw RGBA, or around 13GB per minute).

though, granted, given that 3rd party screen recorders also can't do good quality at high resolutions without causing lag and/or eating the HDD, it seems maybe it isn't really "that" bad.

but, nevermind everything else which isn't very good with my projects, or life in general.

also nevermind that it is boring and kind of sucks (not as good in most regards as the games its design was based on).

sometimes it all does seem a bit like an epic fail though...

That video is extremely impressive / cool!

cool, but I am left wondering if there is any way to improve the audio quality from the arc?... (like via electrode design or similar?...).

actually, this reminds me of once (when I was much younger), playing music by running an amplifier through a lightbulb (which was also glowing in-sync with the music), which worked ok until the amplifier fried.

Thanks!

The concept is based on a class D amplifier design, so the factors that determine sound quality are primarily a high carrier frequency to signal frequency ratio, fast switching times of the output driver, and as you say, design of the electrodes (non-oxidizing and "sharp" contacts would be ideal, which my design does non of). In this case, the carrier frequency is around only 50 kHz, so there's definitely room to push that up a little more if I had the money to afford a better output stage.

Driving a lightbulb with an amplifier is probably not a good idea. :P Amplifiers are designed to drive high inductive loads, which a lightbulb doesn't have, so it's probably going to draw a lot of current. Depending on what amplifier you used, some may tolerate it, and some may not.

sometimes it all does seem a bit like an epic fail though...

Don't be too hard on yourself. Failing is part of the learning process of becoming a better human being. Failing should be a good thing, learn from your mistakes.

That video is extremely impressive / cool!

cool, but I am left wondering if there is any way to improve the audio quality from the arc?... (like via electrode design or similar?...).

actually, this reminds me of once (when I was much younger), playing music by running an amplifier through a lightbulb (which was also glowing in-sync with the music), which worked ok until the amplifier fried.

Thanks!

The concept is based on a class D amplifier design, so the factors that determine sound quality are primarily a high carrier frequency to signal frequency ratio, fast switching times of the output driver, and as you say, design of the electrodes (non-oxidizing and "sharp" contacts would be ideal, which my design does non of). In this case, the carrier frequency is around only 50 kHz, so there's definitely room to push that up a little more if I had the money to afford a better output stage.

Driving a lightbulb with an amplifier is probably not a good idea. Amplifiers are designed to drive high inductive loads, which a lightbulb doesn't have, so it's probably going to draw a lot of current. Depending on what amplifier you used, some may tolerate it, and some may not.

yeah...

IIRC, I was around 13 or similar at the time...
just sort of hooked the bulb up to the amplifier and cranked it.

but, it didn't really turn out so well though.

I had seen other videos where people had a pointed electrode on one side, and a diffuser or metal plate on the other, which in the videos shown a lot seemed to get higher audio quality than the ones using a pair of points. granted, I don't really know the specifics.

sometimes it all does seem a bit like an epic fail though...

Don't be too hard on yourself. Failing is part of the learning process of becoming a better human being. Failing should be a good thing, learn from your mistakes.

yeah...

(don't have time ATM to write a better response).

ADD: part of the problem is mostly that my life seems to go nowhere, like pretty much nothing that is done seems to effect much of anything.

also, no one is really interested in me in a personal / romantic sense, most likely because in most things that matter (job, money, car, ...), my life is a fail.

effectively, I am the sort of person that just ends up sitting around fiddling with stuff, with no job or personal independence or anything, and no one really is hiring either (probably due to a lack of things like work experience and similar, ...). like, generally, if a person has money and similar, then they have more value as a person in the eyes of others.

edited link for an example of just how bad my past text-to-speech engine was / is:
www.youtube.com / watch?v=LVsCHC574qY

using an edited link to hopefully avoid the player popping up (for those who aren't interested).

yeah...

Sorry but I just have to let you know that the way you type has made me think you're that boss from Office Space:

Good movie, that. If you haven't seen it yet I highly recommend watching it.