The days before Flowstone/SM
Posted: Thu Dec 31, 2020 8:54 pm
Feel free to post anything about any projects you might've worked on in the days before finding out about this program, including early forms of any concepts that might've continued up into your current work.
I'm new here and am eager to get to know some of you better, but I generally get the idea that this is a very slow affair where patience is a virtue, so please don't rush to reply on my account. I am here to listen and learn.
Way back in 2009, I spent a lot of teenage days on Garry's mod, which was a modification for valve software's Half Life 2 videogame. HL2 had a robust-for-the-time physics system, so it was just the thing to build a multiplayer sandbox experience on.
[Begin explanation of what Garry's mod is. Those who know what is is can skip]
Various 3D props from HL2 (and other valve titles) could be placed into the world, welded together, and assembled into various constructions (like a primitive version of Fortnite for those youngins out there who are even younger than myself). You could fart around in gm_construct for about 5 minutes and assemble yourself a dopey l'il bathtub car that you could control with the numpad. All sorts of things could be made, like forts, ships, and giant robots, all collaged out of props from your wide selection. You could take these things, modify them, smash them around like a mindless idiot, blow them up, it was the perfect outlet!
Later on, the LUA scripting integration paved the way for a pretty diverse world of user plugins. You had all sorts of game-modes like Spacebuild (Build spaceships out of props, build life support systems, and fly between different "planets"). There were others like Roleplaying, which remarkably still sees activity to this day. All of this stuff was janky in its own charming way due to the community-driven nature of it all, and the old beleaguered Source game engine doing things it wasn't designed for.
One of said plugins was a thing called Wiremod. It allowed you to place all these little logic gates around whatever contraption you'd built, and control things with logic values, rather than the numpad. You had sound emitters (Like the sine or saw audio modules), constant values (stored values like Int/Float arrays), 7 segment displays, nors, nands, switches, display screens (ingame oscilloscopes, anyone?) , the whole works. You even had a special chip called "Expression 2" which pulled up a field in which you could code your own components (like a Ruby module!).
All of this would get "wired" together with a special toolgun. Point, choose output, shoot, point at next object, choose input, shoot. (Kinda like a virtual wirewrap gun now that I think of it!).
[End explanation of gmod, here's the point]
So, with this going on, now add the fact that I got bitten by the Hammond bug. Hard. Spent a lot of time on The Organ Forum soaking up any tidbit I could find about them. The wiremod contraptions below were what resulted from that time (I was blissfully unaware of SM's existence back then, somehow). These pictures are also all that remain; all associated save files are completely lost to time, I'm afraid.
(Got into some trouble figuring thumbnails out, so I will link the images for now.)
https://i.imgur.com/7bdgn2V.jpg
This was the first general design I played with. Each of those "tin cans" were individual sound emitters whose pitch inputs were governed by the velocity picked up from the spinning gear by a sensor, and multiplied by a unique constant value for each note. The spinning gear was a novelty thing, only really providing a global pitch bend effect.
https://i.imgur.com/Op7zelP.jpg
This was a later design, which actually starts to uncannily represent what was being imitated. Now you had multiple wheels governing pitches, likely governing top octaves (It never really saw completion, and the details are fuzzy). It was a neat piece because I'd finally started to use Expression 2 chips for various things, including fully animated keys and stoptabs.
At any rate E2 was becoming a necessity to make the generator work. I'd toiled for a while on it, but the game's physics simulation was coming short in a few ways. The tonewheels were just ordinary physics props with a motor constraint, using Euler rotation calculations which routinely ran into gimbal-lock. The wheels just wouldn't rotate at a constant enough speed to be on-pitch and usable.
A friend I'd made there helped me out, developing a new tonewheel that used an ApplyTorque method, allowing for quaternion rotations. I recall that working well, but it was all starting to get a bit complex at that point. You also really couldn't play these instruments worth a damn either when your only input method was pointing your ingame crosshairs to a key, and mashing the use button.
This, along with physics weirdness ultimately killed interest, at least for doing so in garry's mod. At any rate we'd moved on to this hip new thing called Minecraft, but I met a lot of good people there who got me through a typically tumultuous adolescence. One of which actually went out of their way to buy, and send me my first arduino (the conversation actually going "Here, you should check this thing out, it's like expression 2 but in real life!")
Despite making good headway in analog electronics, I was recently actually looking to get back into making virtual instruments, and Flowstone struck me as a way to do it infinitely better, without having to deal with an actual video game running on top of it, bogging things down.
Lurking for a bit, I found a post from Spogg, talking of the simple fascination of seeing these little seemingly magical components sitting on a board doing their job. That was the point where I decided that you all seem to be pretty cool people (To say nothing of Hugh, I went down the VDGG rabbit hole back in 2019, so there's a level of sheer geeking out I have to contain). Would've posted something like this in Offtopic, but that seems to have turned into a de facto spambot flypaper.
At any rate, once I stick my nose in the books, I hope to offset my babble with some form of contribution. May not happen for a while, but it's too good a job to rush
Hell, it's kind of a cursed situation now. Doesn't matter what you start, it won't get finished until 2021
I'm new here and am eager to get to know some of you better, but I generally get the idea that this is a very slow affair where patience is a virtue, so please don't rush to reply on my account. I am here to listen and learn.
Way back in 2009, I spent a lot of teenage days on Garry's mod, which was a modification for valve software's Half Life 2 videogame. HL2 had a robust-for-the-time physics system, so it was just the thing to build a multiplayer sandbox experience on.
[Begin explanation of what Garry's mod is. Those who know what is is can skip]
Various 3D props from HL2 (and other valve titles) could be placed into the world, welded together, and assembled into various constructions (like a primitive version of Fortnite for those youngins out there who are even younger than myself). You could fart around in gm_construct for about 5 minutes and assemble yourself a dopey l'il bathtub car that you could control with the numpad. All sorts of things could be made, like forts, ships, and giant robots, all collaged out of props from your wide selection. You could take these things, modify them, smash them around like a mindless idiot, blow them up, it was the perfect outlet!
Later on, the LUA scripting integration paved the way for a pretty diverse world of user plugins. You had all sorts of game-modes like Spacebuild (Build spaceships out of props, build life support systems, and fly between different "planets"). There were others like Roleplaying, which remarkably still sees activity to this day. All of this stuff was janky in its own charming way due to the community-driven nature of it all, and the old beleaguered Source game engine doing things it wasn't designed for.
One of said plugins was a thing called Wiremod. It allowed you to place all these little logic gates around whatever contraption you'd built, and control things with logic values, rather than the numpad. You had sound emitters (Like the sine or saw audio modules), constant values (stored values like Int/Float arrays), 7 segment displays, nors, nands, switches, display screens (ingame oscilloscopes, anyone?) , the whole works. You even had a special chip called "Expression 2" which pulled up a field in which you could code your own components (like a Ruby module!).
All of this would get "wired" together with a special toolgun. Point, choose output, shoot, point at next object, choose input, shoot. (Kinda like a virtual wirewrap gun now that I think of it!).
[End explanation of gmod, here's the point]
So, with this going on, now add the fact that I got bitten by the Hammond bug. Hard. Spent a lot of time on The Organ Forum soaking up any tidbit I could find about them. The wiremod contraptions below were what resulted from that time (I was blissfully unaware of SM's existence back then, somehow). These pictures are also all that remain; all associated save files are completely lost to time, I'm afraid.
(Got into some trouble figuring thumbnails out, so I will link the images for now.)
https://i.imgur.com/7bdgn2V.jpg
This was the first general design I played with. Each of those "tin cans" were individual sound emitters whose pitch inputs were governed by the velocity picked up from the spinning gear by a sensor, and multiplied by a unique constant value for each note. The spinning gear was a novelty thing, only really providing a global pitch bend effect.
https://i.imgur.com/Op7zelP.jpg
This was a later design, which actually starts to uncannily represent what was being imitated. Now you had multiple wheels governing pitches, likely governing top octaves (It never really saw completion, and the details are fuzzy). It was a neat piece because I'd finally started to use Expression 2 chips for various things, including fully animated keys and stoptabs.
At any rate E2 was becoming a necessity to make the generator work. I'd toiled for a while on it, but the game's physics simulation was coming short in a few ways. The tonewheels were just ordinary physics props with a motor constraint, using Euler rotation calculations which routinely ran into gimbal-lock. The wheels just wouldn't rotate at a constant enough speed to be on-pitch and usable.
A friend I'd made there helped me out, developing a new tonewheel that used an ApplyTorque method, allowing for quaternion rotations. I recall that working well, but it was all starting to get a bit complex at that point. You also really couldn't play these instruments worth a damn either when your only input method was pointing your ingame crosshairs to a key, and mashing the use button.
This, along with physics weirdness ultimately killed interest, at least for doing so in garry's mod. At any rate we'd moved on to this hip new thing called Minecraft, but I met a lot of good people there who got me through a typically tumultuous adolescence. One of which actually went out of their way to buy, and send me my first arduino (the conversation actually going "Here, you should check this thing out, it's like expression 2 but in real life!")
Despite making good headway in analog electronics, I was recently actually looking to get back into making virtual instruments, and Flowstone struck me as a way to do it infinitely better, without having to deal with an actual video game running on top of it, bogging things down.
Lurking for a bit, I found a post from Spogg, talking of the simple fascination of seeing these little seemingly magical components sitting on a board doing their job. That was the point where I decided that you all seem to be pretty cool people (To say nothing of Hugh, I went down the VDGG rabbit hole back in 2019, so there's a level of sheer geeking out I have to contain). Would've posted something like this in Offtopic, but that seems to have turned into a de facto spambot flypaper.
At any rate, once I stick my nose in the books, I hope to offset my babble with some form of contribution. May not happen for a while, but it's too good a job to rush
Hell, it's kind of a cursed situation now. Doesn't matter what you start, it won't get finished until 2021