Matt Simmonds is something of a legend in the Amiga/demoscene world. Under the pseudonym “4mat” he composed hundreds of famous music tracks for cracktros, demos and games. You can find over 500 of them on the Amiga Music Preservation site. MobyGames also keeps a relatively accurate list of his commercial and freeware audio work.
Today he released his album “Decades”. All of the 14 tracks on the album were created using the same tools he had available “back in the day”, namely ProTracker and FastTracker 2. I just bought the album from Amazon after having a listen on-line, and I’m really pleased at the mix of styles and raw chip sound that shines through. Some tracks carry better than others, but my personal favourite has to be “Virginia”. You can listen to the tracks below:
Read more about its production on Matt’s blog: I Hear the Sound of Waves. There is also a great interview with him on IndieGames.com. And if like me, you really enjoy what you hear, then Amazon MP3 has the goods.
Fellow Photon Stormer Ilija was saying just the other day that Matt has been in contact with him quite a bit recently. Perhaps a graphic/audio collab is on the cards? We’ll keep you posted … and Matt, if you’re up for it, we certainly have a couple of games we’d love to have your audio input on
Christian threw a new beta of Flod 3 at me today, and the list of playable module formats just keeps on getting better and better! New in this beta is support for SoundFX 1 & 2 and all variants of the David Whittaker format. It brings the list of total supported formats to 18 (listed below).
He plans on adding support for Rob Hubbard, TFMX and TFMX 7 Voices formats – and I think that will complete the set for Flod 3! It will quite simply be the best mod/chip replayer in AS3. Heck, the replay quality of standard mods is already well beyond the likes of ModPlug. All it really needs is someone to wrap it up in a sexy AIR app shell, and we’ve got ourselves an incredible new multi-format mod/chip player.
Download the Beta 2 demo (550Kb) which includes 5 tunes: Another World Intro (SoundFX), Leonardo Intro (SoundFX 2), Shadow of the Beast Title, Wrath of the Demo and Xenon 2 Megablast (all DW variants). Needless to say it’s Flash Player 10 only.
The full list of formats supported by Flod 3 currently stands at:
Today I released my FlxBitmapFont package to Google Code. This allows you to use bitmap fonts directly in your Flixel 2 games:
The bitmap fonts are just an extension of a Flixel Sprite, meaning you can throw them around, collide with them, scale them, rotate them and generally cause havoc. Or of course they could just be UI elements, proving a score/lives count. But at least the choice is yours
11 fonts are included, 2 sample programs and comprehensive documentation in the form of a PDF file. I’ve also published that here on my blog: http://www.photonstorm.com/flxbitmapfont and I will update both my blog and the Google Code archive as needed.
Anyway I hope you have fonty fun with this! Look out for a number of new Flixel classes from me in the coming months, or catch me on the flixel forums where I help moderate the place.
If you were a real gamer back in the early 90′s you owned an Atari ST or an Amiga (and some poor freaks also owned PCs). But all of you would have been aware of the game developer Silmarils. Renowned for an almost Cinemaware-like level of graphics and attention to detail in their games. Most of them are classic fantasy based such as the Ishar series. This isn’t surprising given that the company were named after the symbolic jewels central in JRR Tolkein’s work The Silmarillion. This love of fantasy was evident in their games, graphics and stunning box artwork.
I was pleased to read today that DotEmu will be releasing the Silmarils Collection for the PC on March the 10th. This includes 16 games. You can make out most of them from the box shots above. Personally I always thought the Ishar trilogy and the concepts of Robinson’s Requiem were superb, so as long as this collection is keenly priced I’ll be there. Hopefully DotEmu will have done as good a job on these titles as it did on R-Type and Street Fighter.
You can sign-up to their mailing list here: http://www.silmarils-collection.com and once released (March 10th) this site will probably also contain full details of the games. For now here is a link to their newsletter announcement.
Christian has been busy! FlodPro was already the best Amiga module replay library available for AS3. But not content with that he went and added support for 3 new chip-tune formats: SidMon, Future Composer and BP SoundMod.
As a special Christmas present for those who visit this blog I whipped up this little demo, showcasing 6 tunes, 2 of each newly supported format.
As the AS3 Soundtracker replay library Flod gains traction, so I have been receiving more emails saying “Help!”. Apparently people are having trouble dissecting just the replay sections from FlodPro (the full player interface). So to address this I have created the Beginners Guide to Flod. This download offers you source code that does nothing but replay a mod file. No file browser, no FlodPro, no UI, no hassle!
The guide includes source for both FlexSDK + FlashDevelop users, and also for Flash CS4 (if you really must code on the timeline.) I have included examples for plain vanilla replay, and also replay with the flectrum active: the funky looking vu-meter seen in the screen shot above. Pick whichever is most useful for your production.
You can download the Beginners Guide from the updated Flod page.
Away3D is an awesome 3D library for Flash. Flod is an awesome library for replaying tracker music in Flash. Throw those two things together with my inner-geek upbringing of the 80s and you get DarkCubes. I grew up drip-fed on ST/Amiga demo effects, and this random little 3D game is what I banged out during a couple of lunch breaks and some hours last night.
I actually wrote DarkCubes back in 2000 on the PC/Windows using DarkBASIC (hence the title of the game). So I had the code and figured it would make a good first experiment for Away3D. A bit of messing around, a bit of swearing, and lots of fiddling later and this tiny puzzler was born.
The logo is from the original PC game and was made by Yann ‘Kohai‘ Parmentier. The music is by Adam Sikorski (DSX of TRSI), 505 of Checkpoint and Toodeloo of the Dead Hackers Society. The rest by yours truly.
Lots of keys do stuff in-game, so have a fiddle! (1-5 changes the music for example, D turns on Debug info, 7-9 change texture, etc. Read the scroller for the full list).
I make no apologies for this beating shitty spec Netbooks / PCs over the head with a giant CPU grinding axe. Deal with it. It’s hardly the end of the world.
I’m pleased to announce that Christian Corti has now released v1.0 of the FlodPro Soundtracker replay package. FlodPro extends upon the work done with Flod and adds a bunch of new features, better support for the harder to replay mods, and a brand new ProTracker style replay interface. You get the full source to this awesome player including the flectrum, so you can now learn how to sync with beat events, use stereo separation, change the volume, loop through the samples and more.
Grab the v1.0 download of FlodPro from the Flod page.
Christian Corti has been hard at work on the Flod Replay library, and Flod Pro incorporates the latest version and a whole lot more, wrapped up in a sexy ProTracker style interface! He gave me permission to show you a demo of it, so have a play with this:
Click “Browse” and select a soundtracker module (.mod file) then hit “Play“. Some features work, some don’t. The two sliders on the bottom right are for volume and stereo separation. The numbers 1-4 at the top enable/disable the channels. Clicking through the sample names often reveal hidden messages from the composers
Just check out the replay quality! It’s now playing back a lot of mods better than even ModPlug can, all from AS3 / FP10.
If you don’t have any soundtracker modules to load into it then here is a little zip (655KB) with 5 classic Amiga tunes and the FlodPro SWF. Or you can downloads thousands of tunes from sites like Amiga Music Preservation.
In the immortal words of the BudBrains: Check dis out:
Now Amiga mod replay has been done in AS3 before, most famously by Joa and Andre in the 8BitBoy Popforge library. And more recently in Flash Mod Player by Badsectoracula (although that is written in haXe it still compiles to AS3). But today I was blown away to receive a tiny zip package from the talented Christian Corti, lead developer at TrinityEffects. It contained a little test swf and a few class files named “flod”.
Flod is his native AS3/FP10 Amiga Module playing library. And as you can hear, it plays very well!
It has full support for 15/31 instruments and all the effects up to Protracker 2.3 including Inverse Loop (latest version, not the Funky Repeat), it also supports both Amiga A500 and A1200 filters. It adds less than 10Kb to your SWF file size (excluding the mod itself of course), but more importantly the CPU impact is minimal.
Christian has released it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3 (Unsupported) License, which basically means you are pretty much free to use it however you want, for whatever you want. It requires Flash Player 10, which at it’s current adoption rate of 76% and growing, shouldn’t be a big issue for anyone these days.
I fully intend to integrate this with the FP10 branch of PixelBlitz. He also has a set of SoundSpectrum classes for generating beautiful VU meters (and also extremely useful if you wish to link the music to in-game events or effects). They are being tidied up at the moment, so hopefully they’ll be released soon. I’ll post about it here when they are.
I just had to write something to say that the oh-so-excellent MindCandy Volume 2 DVD has been released! Volume 2 is all about Amiga demos and contains 30 full productions spanning the range of the Amiga scene, from the Red Sector megademo and Enigma, right up to Fat Fits Karma by MadWizards, and Silkcut by The Black Lotus.
All of the demos were captured and rendered using genuine Amiga hardware, and then painstakingly stitched together for the best possible viewing on DVD. There are loads of extras as well, so for just €15 I urge you to consider buying this – I just ordered 3 copies (1 for me, 2 to give to friends at the forthcoming TGC Convention)
Christian threw a new beta of Flod 3 at me today, and the list of playable module formats just keeps on getting better and better! New in this beta is support for SoundFX 1 & 2 and all variants of the David Whittaker format. It brings the list of total supported formats to 18 (listed below).
