Music Visualization for MPD

Delta VU is a simple audio visualization tool designed to monitor the audio signal level being output by MPD.

According to their project home page, “Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music. Through plugins and libraries it can play a variety of sound files while being controlled by its network protocol.” MPD has no visualization capability on its own, but provides access to audio being played using a FIFO buffer mounted in filespace. Delta VU reads this buffer and displays the data as an animated VU-style graph that follows the volume of whatever is being played.

Features:

• Nifty VU-style level meter displayed using OpenGL/SDL
• Configurable color schemes

Delta VU has been tested on Debian Linux (32 and 64 bit versions) and is available as source code only.

Click here to go to the Delta VU project page on GitHub. 

HTC EVO Skin for Android Emulator

I’ve put together an HTC EVO skin for the Android emulator (the emulator is part of the Android SDK). The four buttons below the screen are working, but I didn’t include definitions for the volume control buttons in the layout. I’ve packed the files in to a .tar.gz archive. If you’re using windows, I believe 7Zip can unpack the archive for you. Let me know if you find this useful! Oh and yes, that is a screenshot of the emulator displaying this page displaying the emulator displaying this page displaying the emulator displaying this page displaying the emulator displaying the home screen.

Download WVGA800-EVO.tar.gz

Game Template for Ludum Dare

I’ve spent a little time creating some template code for the next Ludum Dare event, after failing at LD #17. I wanted to share this, in case any other Linux devs can benefit. I made this template using Linux (x86),  C++, CMake, SFML, GLee, OpenGL, and OpenAL.

My template doesn’t do much, which is sort of the point given the nature of Ludum Dare. I wanted to gather up some basic functionality that I consider to be fair to use, and probably already available to many other LD’ers using existing game engines like OGRE, etc. Using this I hope to be able to get a quicker start during the events. Current features include:

• Get a window up on the screen. Admittedly, this isn’t too hard thanks to SFML.
• Load music / sound files from disk, and play them.
• Load UV texture-mapped 3D objects exported from Blender 2.49 and display them using OpenGL VBOs. The Blender export script I’ve created is included.
• Render bitmapped fonts using image files loaded from disk.
• Build either a Linux or Windows executable by changing a CMake flag (I have a mingw32 cross compilation set up, installed).

You can download my template here: ld48_template.tar.gz

If you can use this, or have time to build the sample app and give me some feedback, that would be awesome. Thanks!

-Windsor

P.S. I just read PoV’s post about packaging Linux applications. I’ll have to put some of those techniques to use in the next version of my template.

Android Apps

Pxlr

Nothing more than a simple ‘hello world’ at the moment. A test to see if I could get an application to download and install over the web. Hoorah!

download .apk or use QR code:

Cowlendar

A cowlendar is what you get when you combine two Linux command line programs, cowsay and pal. Both of these are in the Debian repositories. Here’s an example command:

pal --nocolor | cowsay -n

And the result:

 ________________________________________
/      Su   Mo   Tu   We   Th   Fr   Sa  \
| Sep  19   20   21   22   23   24   25  |
| Oct  26   27   28  @29@  30   01   02  |
|      03   04   05   06  *07*  08   09  |
|      10   11   12   13  *14*  15   16  |
|      17   18   19   20   21   22   23  |
|                                        |
| * 09/29 call counselor                 |
| * 09/29 pay Laney $50                  |
| * 09/29 buy D. Hacker book             |
| * 10/07 ENGL1A: essay #2 due           |
| * 10/07 MATH3C: exam #2                |
\ * 10/14 ENGL1A: essay #3 in class      /
 ----------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

I have this command in my ~/.bashrc so I see my cowlendar every time I open a terminal.