2017-04-03 20:55:07

Hi folks,

Many of you may have heard of an incredible 3d audio library written by my good friend Camlorn.
If you haven't, check out https://GitHub.com/libaudioverse/libaudioverse
This library really is the future of audiogames, giving us far more realistic 3d audio and effects than we even had back in the good old Windows xp days.
Camlorn is looking to spend a good amount of time finishing up the library and basically getting it ready to sit at the core of your next masterpiece, but he needs some money to do this.
If you are at all someone who enjoys quality audiogames, please, please donate to this GoFundMe. A completed LibAudioverse will usher in the next generation of audiogames, but only if we fund it.
I just contributed myself, so please go right now, check out the campaign, and contribute if you can!
You can find the campaign at https://www.gofundme.com/fund-libaudioverse-development

This won't happen without your help, so let's go build the future!

2017-04-03 21:54:02

I am now monitoring this thread, for anyone who has questions.

I was going to start one of my own shortly.  I am writing a graphing calculator prototype.  It will be able to do 90% of what the current ones do, except that mine is free and Libaudioverse plus the Python science stack means that it's only taking me around 4 hours to do it.  My plan was to get the blog post on this up, then come here and link that as our working demo.  I personally know at least 2 blind people who will benefit immediately from this.  It'd have happened yesterday, but I got interrupted by the family.

And to anyone who had crackling, this ended up being an absurdly intricate bug.  It's fixed now.  There should be no more crackling unless you crank down the latency settings or overload the system.

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2017-04-03 22:02:52

Shouldn't this be in general?
By the name I thought we'd be talking about kickstarting infrastructure which would help murge accessibility into the mainstream. I'd have been literally the first person to jump in and back that haha.

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2017-04-03 22:12:44

I would have put it in general, yeah, and probably added Libaudioverse in the title. Not only developers can donate.  Maybe I'll open one there once I have the blog post plus graphing calculator prototype going.

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2017-04-03 22:39:19

Hi.
It sounds very interesting. I'm not a developer, and I have pretty much given up on learning to code. So it's kind of difficult for me to get an idea on how awesome this project is. I mean, it's fantastic that you've made the possibility of making 3D audio in games. But what if the developers won't use this for whatever reason? I'm not trying to say any bad things about the project. It's just kind of difficult for me to understand how great this project is and how easy it is to implement in games when I'm not a developer. It would be interesting to hear other developers thoughts on this.
I have an suggestion: Would it be possible to make a small program with a few controls so people can play around with the tool and hear what it can do? That is, if people donate and the project succeed. Or can you make some great sound examples to show what people are getting if the goal is reached? I think that'll make people more excited, and hopefully give people who aren't developers a better idea of what's possible with this thing.

Best regards SLJ.
Feel free to contact me privately if you have something in mind. If you do so, then please send me a mail instead of using the private message on the forum, since I don't check those very often.
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2017-04-03 22:51:34

@slj yeah, was thinking the same thing. As a developer I understand what this is about, but it might be difficult to sell something to non-developers that isn't tangible to them or that they can't relate to.
I think you should make a teny tiny little game or something that would serve as a concept demo, like a simple space invaders but using 3d audio.
I was also thinking that you might have some success marketing this to people outside the vi community as well, as your problem domain extends into 3d game and audio application development in general. You never know, you might generate some mainstream interest (like Elias did). Plus I'm not sure that there are enough people here alone to bring you to your goal.
Myself I want to contribute. Gofundme insists on a postal code and I'm not sure how I feel about publishing that for all to see.

Official server host for vgstorm.com and developer of the Manamon 2 netplay server.
PSA: sending unsolicited PMs or emails to people you don't know asking them to buy you stuff is disrespectful. You'll just be ignored, so don't waste your time.

2017-04-04 00:01:39

I am not targeting only the blindness community.  Plans are underway to get money from sighted people, but the tricky part is that this initial goal needs to be met in order for me to hire a programmer who can do graphics.  The graphing calculator prototype (now with a repository) will get me penetration into the sighted accessibility community, and may itself be a fundable project.  There is at least one other marketing thing in this regard, but I can't talk about it yet.

Libaudioverse powered Ctoth's FPS that was posted around here like a year ago now, give or take.  The thread I have a link to is this one, but I'm not sure if that's the latest thing about it or not.  Libaudioverse has fixed some bugs since then that means it probably runs better if it's upgraded, for one thing the aforementioned obscure audio backend thing.  There's a few others around who are doing projects with it, but I don't know what the state of those projects is or who they are on here, only that people keep asking questions on the mailing list.

I may put together a demo game of my own.  This isn't hard, but I'm busy until the weekend.  The catch 22 here is that I am trying to fund myself so that I can make Libaudioverse top priority but, in order to do so, Libaudioverse has to be top priority.

And one thought for you all: this has been basically my life as a programmer for around 4 years or so.  $17000 is cheap; funding a developer to do this from scratch would have cost at least $100000.

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2017-04-04 13:56:03 (edited by Phil 2017-04-04 22:21:30)

camlorn

I did post a topic in the general section on Libaudioverse
http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?id=21579

I hope you can produce a small demonstration demo showing how games sound better in 3d.
I know David Greenwood spent a lot of time getting the sounds in Shades of Doom to sound like they did using DirectX .
Something as simple as a type of super egg hunt where you walk around a grid picking up sound producing eggs would demonstrate the way it works. I did this using the GMA game engine and called it Super Dog's bone hunt wher my dog walked around the yard picking up and eating dog bones.

2017-04-04 15:52:51

I'm not quite sure if the example provided by Chris Toth was ever compiled, but I do remember playing it and it was a truly high quality example of LibAudioVerse. I do agree though, a compiled 2 or 3d example would be great, with as many of the affects (occlusion, environments, etc).

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2017-04-04 20:07:42

Ctoth's thing was compiled via Py2exe at some point, yes.  You can probably still get it in that form from somewhere.  I think one version of it (I don't know if it was ever public) did the occlusion calculations.

We'll see what I can do about a game once I'm done seeing what I can do about a graphing calculator.  That's almost done, and is still under 300 lines.  My week is busy until Thursday, so I'm working around distractions.

A game that shows off all the features of Libaudioverse needs to be a full-on FPS with an engine more advanced than anything the audiogaming community has thus far produced.  Libaudioverse can do everything anyone around here is already doing, but it also does more.  Even then, the features used by the graphing calculator prototype are almost entirely distinct.  people think of this as a gaming library.  It's not.  It's a library that happens to have applications to gaming.

Respectfully, can we please stop changing the name of my project because we like it to sound better with synths?  Only this forum will call it that, and I will not personally participate in that trend.

I will be moving us to an official thread at some point in the next couple days.  Please refrain from starting more.  I know people are trying to help, but what this is going to lead to on my end is a requirement to monitor all of them and answer questions on all of them, as opposed to just having it in one place.

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2017-04-04 22:27:45 (edited by The Dwarfer 2017-04-04 22:28:40)

Hi Camlorn,
Firstly I apologize for changing the name of your library, - I thought Libaudioverse was actually meant to be spread out into three words originally, and that libaudioverse in that spelling was simply derived from the Git Hub link or something.
Secondly though, I've always longed for a way that blind people could view weather radar, I believe the technical term for it is Doppler radar. I would have to do more research on how that information is presented - perhaps it's a graph, perhaps it's something completely different, but I do know they will use color codes to represent certain weather conditions. I wonder if that sort of information would be able to be ported to audio using this library? Just a thought.

If you have issues with Scramble, please contact support at the link below. I check here at least once a day, so this is the best avenue for submitting your issues and bug reports.
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2017-04-04 23:17:22

4 years? Just, wow...
You could maybe make a small game where you fly a helicopter, where other helicopters are flying around both above and below you to show what the project can do regarding to sounds. I don't know how difficult it'll be to make this, but I could imagine it being less difficult than coding a full FPS with maps and other stuff. I mean, the point is not to make a cool game, but rather a small game to demonstrate the sound. So no complex game like a FPS is needed, I think, but a small game where the sounds, or things are coming from all directions around you including above and below. The only thing I can think about is a helicopter. Or maybe more simple, a bird. A small game where you're flying a bird, and listening to all the sounds from the birds perspective. Sounds crazy, but why not? Lol.

Best regards SLJ.
Feel free to contact me privately if you have something in mind. If you do so, then please send me a mail instead of using the private message on the forum, since I don't check those very often.
Facebook: https://facebook.com/sorenjensen1988
Twitter: https://twitter.com/soerenjensen

2017-04-05 00:21:30

@severestormsteve1
If this were a project for the blind, I'd have used that name instead.  but having a mismatch between the code and the documentation, especially when there is code in the documentation...that's annoying.

I've considered doing the weather thing.  SO have others.  I'm not sure why no one has actually tried yet, but I've seen this idea many times.  It's likely to be doable if you do it from the perspective of someone standing outside.  In the long run--post-1.0, requiring rather deep and interesting mathematics, and not part of this funding, but eventually possible--I want to have sources where you can hear their shape and size as you do in the real world.  A few packages can do it, but no one publishes their techniques because it's the kind of thing where it's worth a lot of money.  The mathematics for it is something I'm only just beginning to understand, and it's well beyond calculus.  But it could let you tell how "big" a storm is, perhaps.

@slj
yeah, probably something like that.  The problem is that if the goal is to also include occlusion, the game or whatever has to have a reason to occlude.

What I might do is get something to the point where you can walk around in a virtual environment.  I really don't want to do a full-on shades of doom clone at this time.  Libaudioverse isn't my only project.  I've also got somewhat time sensitive work going on on the Rust compiler, and I'm putting it aside so that I can produce these demos.  Abandoning that for a couple weeks isn't something I want to end up doing--it's almost finished and incredibly impressive on the resume doesn't actually cover how incredibly impressive it is on the resume.

I did this because it was fun and I had the time, originally.  The first commit in the repository was April 12, 2014, so almost exactly 3 years today.  I was leading into it with some stuff before that, probably by an additional 6-8 months, various prototypes and things, plus reading a bunch of textbooks that I managed to find.  Camlorn_audio used someone else's mixer and I got interested in how it worked, so I started studying and clawed my way into expertise as a blind person.  When it became evident that camlorn_audio couldn't be made to work as well as is needed, I was in a position to just do my own.  I thought it would take 6 weeks and make a cool summer project; if I'm being honest it could have, but all we would have had at the end of that is a stereo panner that happens to be HRTF, whereas what we have instead is a library that can do just about any realtime synthesis task for just about any domain you want to name (occlusion? Hah. Reverb? Sure thing...).  As an interesting sidenote, it would be possible for someone to reimplement Libaudioverse's source and environment using lower-level Libaudioverse components.  I'm not sure why you would.  But you could.

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2017-04-05 00:22:42

It occurs to me that no one has yet linked the manual.  A skim of the node reference in there gives you a pretty good idea just what all we have at the moment.

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2017-04-05 03:40:41

That's a good point, I am also grateful that you have provided such an extensive documentation for this library.
As per the weather radar thing, yes I suppose that would be majorly tricky, probably a multi year project all on its own, assuming Libaudioverse was already complete enough that no changes ever needed to be made to it or anything.

If you have issues with Scramble, please contact support at the link below. I check here at least once a day, so this is the best avenue for submitting your issues and bug reports.
https://stevend.net/scramble/support

2017-04-05 07:05:02

Hello Camlorn.
I haven't seen you on this forum in a long, long time! I'm a huge fan of your work. Your blog is very interesting! I'm sure you don't remember but you got me on track to teach myself how to code. But that was ages ago. I really wish you would come back to this forum. I've learned so much just from reading your posts.
Anyway, I would be happy to fund libaudioverse. This is something that we have needed for years. I'd give you all the money if I had it lol. Obviously I can't do that but I will contribute what I can since I'll probably be using libaudioverse at some point in the future.

Guitarman.
What has been created in the laws of nature holds true in the laws of magic as well. Where there is light, there is darkness,  and where there is life, there is also death.
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2017-04-11 23:32:35

I'll be consolidating threads momentarily, so I'm sort of closing this one off.

We have a graphing calculator prototype.  All sounds it makes are synthesized in realtime.  It's roughly 400-something lines of Python.  That post mentions some HRTF improvements that can be made; the GoFundMe has now topped $1000, so I'm going to try to move in that direction rapidly and repost the calculator in a couple weeks with the new model.

@The Dwarfer
Doing a weather radar is doable.  We don't need volumetric sources for it, they just maybe make it more impressive.  Doing a weather radar is the next thing on my to do list.  Everyone eventually brings up this idea, but it keeps not happening.  Literally the hardest part is that we may not be able to conveniently get weather data, but I don't actually know how hard this is because I haven't looked at it yet.  You really just need some sort of position and relative size for storms.

But it's probably smaller than the graphing calculator.  The hardest part in terms of audio design is getting recordings of storms, but I've got some audio friends and one of them probably has something in their library.

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2017-04-12 00:11:35

The consolidated thread is here.  If we can do questions there so I don't have to answer duplicates, that'd be appreciated.

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