Sorted

Got the sound to work properly now. The problem was the gain and the reduceAmp method.

Here it is:

http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=26891

hold down left mouse button to create balls.
right click on a ball to explode it.

More Problems and More Development

Problems:

-Hooray, I got the sound to turn off. But now it rarely turns on. It turns on on the first bounce but seldom after that. No idea why this is happening. Will have to quickly work it out.
-The program is only moderately entertaining and, much worse, is not really transforming anything but the screen. This is solved further down the post.
-The Arrays were annoying me so I made them ArrayLists. Easier to add things and can remove things at will. Brilliant.
-Too many sounds. Solution, reduce the number of possible sounds from 100 to 8.

Developments:

-Big Balls. We need larger balls on the screen. The current ones are too small and boring. So I made the balls bigger.
- Color, increased the range of possible colors and reduced the overall 'blueness'. some of the balls were getting too dark to see well against the black background.
-Interactivity. The program lacks more advanced interactivity and transformation. Cue my great(ish) idea:

My Idea:

-To add more fun and pure awesomeness to my program I now have larger balls. (But they were being added to the screen so fast it was ridiculous. So I created a delay to when they should be added to the screen. But now when you right click on them they explode into smaller balls. This adds not only more interactivity to the program but adds more transformation, which is what the project is all about.

Where to now?

-Fixing the sound problem. Then we are all done.

Another session down. This one was filled with me trying to get the sound added to the program. Ran into a few bumps along the way. I have got the sound being created but i can't get it to stop. So once about 10 balls have bounced it just sounds awful. Ben said I should look at making an array of Oscillators rather then having the program create a new sound every time a ball bounces. This is an excellent idea and will begin to look into this.

Also chatted to Luke about the color and we both agree that a muted palette of colors looks nicer then just random colors.

Further Developments

After another chat with Ben, Ive thought about the following things

-Adding color: I want some neutral colors for the balls, maybe blue or something similar. I don't want to use random number generator for each color as it would look awful. I'm thinking along the lines of connecting the color choice to either the changeY variable or the changeX variable. Maybe not the changeY as that changes over time.

-Adding sound: When the balls bounce on the bottom of the screen I want a generated sound to occur. Having the same sound each time could get boring and repetitive, not to mention that if there are lots of balls bouncing at the same time it would sound bad. Ben suggested maybe looking at connecting the pitch to the velocity that the balls is travelling at that time. I shall look into this more.

Where to now?

So after a few hours of thinking and looking around. Ive gone back to my ball game. Not the game itself but just the general principles of it. I have removed the line element to it and made the balls appear from the mouse positions (also giving them a changeX value, allowing them sideways movement), adding a new level of interactivity. From here I will develop sound and more elements into the original idea to make the whole thing more interesting.

Some more Ideas

After todays lecture with Ben and Fridays Interim, I have had some thought about how I can add more interaction and make the program more exciting for the user. This is causing plenty of problems as I cant seem to get passed the original idea. The only things I can think of are either using particles which move 'somehow' when the wave is created, or interacting with the wave in general. I will have a look for some inspiration on Open Processing today and try and develop this idea more. If all else fails I can go back to square one and start again.

Beginning Ideas for Project 2

My first ideas for project two were inspired from a guitar. I wanted to have 6 lines or 'strings' across the screen and if you clicked on them they would vibrate in a sine wave pattern and give of a sound depending on the wavelength of the wave generated.

This was too literal for this project so I took the idea which I liked the most. This was the sine wave part. I developed this by removing the 6 strings. Adding more interaction was tricky, but I thought about adding a function where you clicked and dragged the mouse it would create a line at those points. Then when clicked on it would vibrate with a wave and again release a sound depending on the wavelength and the lines length.