Introduction 🔗
Hey, welcome the first ever State of Things (TM)!
Now that I have quite a few things that I have put out:
- there are some of them that I want to still keep working on and improve (like the game, for example),
- I also have things that might take more than one month to complete,
- And there are things (like site updates and other minor stuff) that don't necessarily warrant me creating a new article.
Which means that it might not be possible for me to put out a completed project at the end of every month as an article, and the stuff that I come up with at the end of the month also might not warrant a full, article long writeup.
I've decided to do two things about this:
- Create a series of articles (which includes the one you are reading right now), on a fortnightly-ish basis describing what I have done till that point, and
- A separate projects tab on this website that will act as a convenient hub for all the projects, and also have links to dedicated pages for those projects.
The projects page is still underway, but should be done soon, I hope. Not so much from the technical perspective but from organisational perspective.
Site Updates 🔗
RSS Feeds 🔗
They've now been here for quite a while now, but I didn't make an update on it. If you scroll down to the footer, you'll see options for an RSS feed, an ATOM and a JSON feed. So if you like using RSS for news and other things and want to keep updated on articles from this website, this would come in handy.
Disqus Comments 🔗
Each article on this website now has a Disqus Comment section. So you can add comments now, if you'd like to.
Printing 🔗
Previously you couldn't print out page from this website without it being completely botched, but now you can! I fixed the css so that you can do it now.
Header Links 🔗
Little icons will now appear aside section headers on the articles (starting from this one). So now you can link to subsections of each article.
Projects and Future Stuff 🔗
New Stuff: Bad song 🔗
So I made a new song and did the visualisations in Godot using the C++ libopenmpt bindings I made earlier. Watch it here!
Stretcherdrill 🔗
...Unfortunately I haven't done much on this front. Trying to push out something at the end of the month just to publish an article along with commitments to othe things led me to neglect the game. This is actually one of the reasons I decided to make the State of Things (TM).
Blender 🔗
I think Its about time that I take learning Blender more seriously. Having the knowledge to do stuff in it along with knowing how to extend it will greatly help in doing things faster instead of haphazardly using Godot or something to do it. Blender's focus on animation helps a lot in this case, although dealing with poor computer hardware will be a headache. You might expect python bindings for libopenmpt to use in Blender (and getting closer to animusic in a way).
Other Musings 🔗
Social Media 🔗
Man, this whole social media business is hard work. Unfortunately I'm not the type of person that likes to browse social media, follow trends or make content based on trends, or even see what other people are doing in general, so that makes the whole thing a couple of magnitudes harder. In order to advertise my projects, however (or just let people know that I exist), its something that I have to get used to doing.
The only thing I do keep up with on a regular basis and am most familiar with is Youtube. Mostly acting as a substitute for television. You could say that the content I have uploaded to Youtube till now does have effort into it, but its ultimately inert. It lacks a "personality," or doesn't have a "story", or doesn't have a "thing" going on for it. The uploads on the channel are short in length, of varying themes and types, and don't really define what "Visphort" is. It just looks like someone's personal Youtube channel for dumping videos. They don't contain any story, or cover any descriptive topic, or cover any contemporary topic. They just show a series of lights and sounds for a short period of time. While some channels can work that way (say good music channels for instance), its hard, if not impossible to have a returning audience this way. At least that's what I think is going on.
Let me see what I can come up with.
Animusic 🔗
Looks like there actually is a significant following for Animusic that I didn't realise earlier. I've seen quite a few fan animations and videos on it now and there does seem to be a good market for something like Animusic now. Just thought it was interesting enough to point out.
Also speaking of sequenced music, I've had the thought of AI based MIDI generation from a sound file (as in, approximately figuring out the instruments as well as the correct note pattern) but never really bothered to look it up. I did a search for it and came up with this website: https://ai-midi.com/. It doesn't seem to work, but the samples on the website seem to somewhat resemble what I want. Even if it doesn't exist its good to know that people are at least thinking about it now.
Closing Words 🔗
Hey, I'm still doing this! I am really glad I haven't given up on it. Sure, I probably have been talking to a wall this whole time, but its better than doing nothing. By the looks of it, a few people might have been taking notice of the local madman yelling at the wall. Its not much, it'll take a long time for the crowd to gather, if ever, but I'm glad that its happening.
Till next time. Bye!