Whoah, I got an SMS from leaphion last night in which he told that he has almost completed the music. It is still missing the end part and many minor tweaks but the biggest work has been done and I have to say that I’m very very pleased so far :)

–fragment

..again. This is nothing new for us, but this time we are actually further than ever before. We now have the content fully planned out. Last year we had to come up with many parts while finishing the demo at the party place. For example the stars that spin in the girl picture in Pulque were added 10 minutes before the deadline ;)

Anyways, my summer vacation begun a few days ago so I should have quite a lot of time and energy to spend on the demo. About 18 days till the deadline! That is not very much though..

The lineup has changed slightly. Zef is spending his vacation abroad so I’ll handle the coding alone. Also, the music will be done by leaphion. This is the first time we’ll use his music in our demo. He is currently working hard on it and I hope we’ll get it somewhat ready in the next week so we can start putting the demo together.

–fragment

Here we are again, fragment and plokk. The plan is to try to make some content for the demo over the weekend.. But today we will concentrate only on bbq and beer.

–fragment

It is interesting what two men with excessive amounts of beef, pork, beer and caffeine can achieve in three days. We now have an almost finalized design and also got a good start on many 3D scenes.

Not much coding was done during the weekend, only some prototyping and 3D scene tests. The actual coding will happen later on.

The demo will basically be a 3D fly-by which means the content consists mostly of 3D scenes with a story. However, there will be a bunch of interesting effects so it will not be “just a .3DS player”. There should be something for everyone to enjoy.

–fragment

So, it is time for my first post. My name is plokk and I am one of the founding members of Hedelmae. My role is to create graphics. I have been working my ass off in my day job this summer and I have no vacation what so ever so I am trying to spend every bit of a free time I have on this project. This is the second day of our two man democrunch weekend and we actually have got some stuff done already. I have been drawing some concept art and fragment is creating 3d models based on them. I am already surprised of how much stuff we have managed to put together. Now it is time to open an ice cold beer and spend some time sitting in the sauna, so we will see how the rest of the evening goes :)

-plokk

Yess,

plokk and I are spending the midsummer weekend inside! We gathered at my place and are really going to get the project going. We are going to concentrate on the 2D and 3D side for now. When we have enough content we can start coding and putting stuff together. We will report our progress and might even show some teasers later on..

plokk and fragment working hard

 –fragment

Okay,

as of now the blog is officially public. Please register and send comments, criticism etc. And be sure to read Synesthetics’ blog also. The first post in our blog should explain what this is all about so you should start the reading from there ;)

–fragment

Here is the list of people whose names should be found in the credits when the demo is finished.

I (fragment) will be doing the most of the coding and the 3D modelling. Cyrus is the musician and plokk will do graphics. Zef might give some support in the coding process. Ideas and other support have and will come from other members as well.

It will be interesting to see how much the list will change.

There will probably be some kind of introductions from each member later on..

–fragment

Yay,

just wrote my first shader.. There’s still an insane amount of small stuff to test and try out.

–fragment

A soundtrack in a demo is a must.

I’m currently prototyping miscellaneous stuff and just did my first audio playback test with the XNA. Standard wave files can be played on both win32 and XBOX360 environments. Uncompressed wave files tend to be huge and luckily it is possible to compress the sounds. On win32 the only option is ADPCM and for the XBOX there is XMA. It would be nice if MP3 or OGG were supported..The tune I tested for compression was originally a variable bit rate MP3 10MB in size. Uncompressing it into wave produced a 54MB file. Again compressing the wave file using the XACT tool with default compression settings (128 samples per block for ADPCM and quality level 60 for XMA) resulted in a 15MB file with ADPCM and a 7MB file with XMA compression. With quality value of 100 the XMA compressed file was 20MB in size. I didn’t do any proper listening tests yet so I don’t know what the worst quality sounds like.

The XACT tool may be confusing at the first glance but there is a good example in the documentation. However there is no compression used in the example. It is pretty straightforward to do: add a new compression preset, adjust the quality settings if needed and finally set the wave bank to use the new compression preset.

The actual playback is a very simple thing to do. Just load the sound and wave bank files and play the cue. Again, there is a good example in the documentation. It took less than 10 minutes to configure and compress the wave file and to make it play in the XNA application.

There is one important feature missing from the XNA. There is no way to know at what position is the sound clip currently playing. This information is crucial when the demo uses the music to sync all the effects (not the actual sound data but the playing time). One solution is to start a timer at the same time with the music and hope it won’t go out of sync. I have to test this later.

– fragment