Oct 06
This is the blog for our thoughts, ideas and progress with The Organism project. The brief is to create a Digital Organism that will live and respond to various inputs. This is a joint task in which I will be teaming up with Rob Deacon and our inital design ideas and thoughts will be posted up on ths site for reference and to track our progress.
DAN
18 Responses to “Organism project blog”
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October 6th, 2005 at 9:34 pm
Ok, I’ve come up with a few ideas for the project…Not sure how good they’ll be but hey!
Body Systems
It’s kinda’ like a game where different Shockwave applications are set up on different computers to represent different organs or vital systems of the body, like the heart, lungs, etc.. They each randomly beep or alert the ‘player’ some how when something goes wrong with them so the player has to rush over and ‘fix’ them. So for example, the ‘Brain’ one might get a headache and you’d have to give it pain killers or something. Meanwhile, the others are going off…If you fail to help them, they die.
Hard-Disk Pet
Program detects the size of the computers hard-disk, free space and used space (all in GB) and then spawns an ant for each free GB every 10 secs until the free space GB’s = the ant no.. Then, every 10 secs, you lose a GB of used space as the ants destroy their environment to make more room for their colony. Each time a GB is lost in this way, another ant is spawned. This happens until the max disk space has been equalled, thus is filled up with ants! Argh!
Web Tamagotchi (spelling?!?!)
I found a plug in for IE which reads text on websites when you mouse over it. It only works for certain ‘plug-in enabled’ sites but all is not lost! We can use that to build a webpage which is filled with little pics to represent actions like speaking to the organism, playing with it, making it count to 10, etc. so we can interact with it. Only problem is…it’s a tad too rigid and pre-set. The thing wouldn’t seem ‘alive’ and there wouldn’t be a random factor to it, like the chance of it dying.
October 6th, 2005 at 10:51 pm
An idea ive come up with is to use sound as a kind of sustainance for the organism, in which it will die if it doesnt have any sound input be it from external sond from a microphone or from an MP3. That way you can control how the organism lives and how healthy it is and play god! I think we can get xtras for director to grab sound ect. Dont know how we will implement this fully yet but watch this space!
DAN
October 7th, 2005 at 12:59 pm
Sounds good. The other ideas are a bit scratchy and flawed but I like the sound one. I’ve found a few images and things we might be able to use. I’ll play with Director a bit and work out some code. Maybe if we had some kind of animation to represent a wave or something and sped it up or slowed it depending on how alive it was…
October 8th, 2005 at 10:03 pm
I’ve started playing with the graphics a little. I was thinking of trying to overlay a load of the wave gifs and change their properties. Perhaps the sound Xtra could register other things like tempo, pitch, etc. and they could be associated with different version of the gif.
I’ll keep fiddling…
October 11th, 2005 at 2:39 pm
Sounds like a good idea…think it will look really effective. Ive tracked down a sound grabbing Xtra for director, just waiting for conformation…will let you know!
October 21st, 2005 at 10:03 am
I’ve changed some of the organisms properties and things to make it look a little more 3D and organic, like Chris suggested. I’ll start adding some dummy code in so that when we finally unravel the mysteries of asFTT, we can bolt it on without too much work.
I’ll whack the organism visuals on my site soon.
October 22nd, 2005 at 2:17 pm
Hey Dan, put this in the message window in Director…
put getSamples(gFFT, gNbSamples, 47.)
Keep entering it over the course of an MP3 or whatever and bang your mic around or turn up the volume so the Xtra volume bar goes into the red.
The numbers change but I don’t know why…possibly because of the volume level. They never go above 47 though. You can change the 3rd parameter to anything you like and it’s the same; the won’t go above it. I think it’s a readout of the volume at one moment in time across 256 samples (I counted…).
October 22nd, 2005 at 2:20 pm
I think the gFFT bit in getSamples defines the source…
The gNbSamples defines how many (the equation is at the top of the main script page - 4*gTimeSmooth*gNbBins - which is 4*1*64 = 256)…
The 47 part defines the max value perhaps…
October 22nd, 2005 at 2:24 pm
Awesome, just cracked the general volume I think…
Enter ‘put getVolume(gFFT)’ in the message window.
Gives a reading between 0 and 1, like the documentation says…
…could have this wrapped and ready for fine tuning soon…
October 22nd, 2005 at 2:37 pm
put getSamples(gFFT, 64, 10.) will work for both versions of the Xtra, both numbers can be changed too.
put getVolume(gFFT) likewise.
October 24th, 2005 at 2:23 pm
Top Notch work mate…ive tried it all out and it works! I think you may have saved many hours of head scratching (which is what i have been doing all weekend trying to work it out!) Im looking foward to what this is going to look like now!!
October 30th, 2005 at 6:50 pm
I’ve been giving the randomisation thing a bit of thought lately and I think I can add a bit of randomness to the degree to which the Organism changes shape/colour/etc., i.e. say sprite 1 changes its width depending on the volume of the mic input, I can make it so that the width still correlates to the volume but with a random number added to its width as well. No idea how this will make it look but we’ll see. It might make it fluctuate a bit more and look cooler but I guess we won’t know ’til I set it up…
It’d be good to make each sprite randomly do different things but I’m no Director buff and I think it’s a tad beyond my ability.
Any luck with getting a decent mic?
November 1st, 2005 at 11:55 am
Yes i have…got us a ‘SHURE SM58-LC’ if you know what that is…I dont but its a damn good mic aparently. Plus i got a mahoosive lead for interegating people with and a stereo jack converter to put it into the computer. Just need to test it now.
November 1st, 2005 at 10:21 pm
I’ve been playing with the sprite properties and I managed to make something funky happen. It’s really weird…I’ll show you when we next meet up. Some of the code has been implemented but I don’t think I can show you properly on the macs or PCs because of the lack of the Xtra. I can show you some of it though.
November 2nd, 2005 at 10:00 pm
I have come up with a name for our wonderfull creation…pending your approval obviously! After staring at the organsm for about an hour (in some kind of trance!) trying to come up with a word or description for it, I just drew a blank! I had an idea of using a foreign language for the name and looked into translating words that are associated with the project like ’sound’ or ‘wave’ and even ‘purple’. It suddenly came to me to translate the word ‘organism’ as this is what it is! I tried it in many different languages but i feel the coolest translation has to be in chinese…pronounced ‘Yo Jee Tee’. Its chinese symbols look pretty cool aswell. Have a look at the banner I made here for the site and tell me what you think
November 3rd, 2005 at 2:43 pm
That’s pretty cool. Not sure where the Chinese link came from but hey, it looks good so we can run with that!
About to email you the screen shots…
I’ll bring my desktop mic as a backup tomorrow incase your mic with the uber-lead decides it doesn’t want to be friendly.
November 3rd, 2005 at 9:52 pm
Ok thats cool. Ive got the screen shots and they are up on the site ready for the presentation. Take a look at the site here. Just got to sort out the licence or a way of having it up on the web for all to bask in its glory!!
November 3rd, 2005 at 11:06 pm
The site for Yo Jee Tee is all up and running with all its ammendments ect ect. Cross everything you have to cross that it all works with no hicups and Chriss Speed likes it!!