Dancer

Dancer is a special .ogg and .wav file player, featuring a dancing puppet.

This fun app is part of (or example to) a tutorial I want to post soon, about the lesser known or used ACEs of the XAudio2 object, mainly Peak and RMS.

Play around with Dancer, it really makes fun!

The puppet has no premade animations or anything else premade. It simply reacts to Peak and RMS in various combinations!

F1 toggles a context help.

If you don't have some .ogg music at hand, here is one of my own songs. Please don't use it in any way other than listening to:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/d6a4tcx5a808nqj/When_I_think_of_you.ogg

There are some sources for .ogg music, e.g. http://www.01audio-video.com/download_ogg.htm

And you could convert some of your mp3's to ogg. Audacity does a good job.

Download Dancer: http://www.mediafire.com/file/b3vw5whkvb1fnji/Dancer.rar

EDIT: Just wanted to mention that the level meter are absolutely professional in resolution and display, including dynamic range meter...

This is hilarious! Much, much better than spirals, dots and such in other music players. I think you could make it commercial, it's fun. Maybe it's an old thing, but this is first time I've seen anything like it. There is a lot of room to improve it, like different puppets according to music genre played with presets. When I played a rock song, in one moment the puppet kneeled on one knee into a rock pose, great! I'm thinking about home parties where you play songs from hd and on monitor screen there are only hallucinogenous patterns, this'd make it more interesting.

Can't mess with it now...but what's rms?

This is one of the most original things I have ever seen made with Construct! <img src="smileys/smiley3.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

tulamide, you are a genius.

Can't mess with it now...but what's rms?

I believe RMS is power which relates to volume

This is brilliant !

Is there any way to change the brightness/contrast settings ?

WOW! I played about 5-6 songs and always something unique. It would be nice to incorporate this into a game where the monsters/game actions change based on the music.

Very nice.

I fed him some Lamb of god, some Machinae Supremacy, some house of pain, some dubstep and even some Venetian Snare (Szam�r Mad�r) with pretty high sensitivity and he liked them all.

I was able to use the power of the amplifier on some rehersal footage that needed it and he liked it too ^^

The background is a bit empty imo. I'd love to see some directionnal (on the horizontal axis) stuff (like the impression of moving to the right, or to the left) in a nice "psychedelic" way, following the moves of the dancer (sometimes it seems he his moving sideways, the background would follow/reinforce this impression)

And eventually, mixing the gradient of the shapes of the dancer with actual sprites.

Can't mess with it now...but what's rms?

RMS stands for Root Mean Squared, so I think it represents the average volume level.

For electrical terms it can be the average current, voltage, or power produced from an alternating current source (it is calculated as the maximum value divided by the square root of 2).

Not 100% sure it means the same thing in this case though.

Also, the program is great Tulamide!

Jayjay Yep pretty much, but it's more about the signal than volume.

Ah yes root mean squared, isn't it a legal requirement now all amps are quoted RMS and not watts now?

Great work man! It's really way better than those visualizers in Winamp.

PS Try playing the 'Still Alive' radio song from Portal. :D

EDIT: If you set both Sensitivity and Activity to max and try minimizing other windows or applications, it messes up the figure for some reason.

Don't know if this is a bug or not, just wanted to mention it.

Thank you all very much <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

Dancer definitely isn't polished. But I wanted it posted, so I can go on with the tut.

• My vision for the dancer was a nice designed convincing character (does anyone remember lucid's perfectly animated praying mantis?). Bad news, I suck at drawing. <img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle" />
• I created Dancer to show the potential, that lies behind 2 pretty unremarkable expressions. Imagine an r-type like shooter where the patterns are created based on the music, or an underwater adventure where the background warps smooth related to the music, or a player character whose weapon strength is dependent on the music's power, etc.
• I will have a look at all your ideas for improving Dancer, hopefully I can implement some of them. But the tut comes first.

RMS stands for Root Mean Squared, so I think it represents the average volume level.

For electrical terms it can be the average current, voltage, or power produced from an alternating current source (it is calculated as the maximum value divided by the square root of 2).eplace 'volume' by 'signal' in the first sentence, and you have a perfect description (well, I guess no need for a tutorial anymore then?)

EDIT: If you set both Sensitivity and Activity to max and try minimizing other windows or applications, it messes up the figure for some reason.

Don't know if this is a bug or not, just wanted to mention it.

This will also happen under some other circumstances, even if sensitivity and activity are not at their max level. The problem are the physics here. It seems that when Construct apps get no processing time for a shorter or longer period, the physics try to interpolate based on the time passed - but it leads to unwanted results. Maybe I can set the strength to zero while Dancer's window doesn't have the focus.

Thanks again to all for the warm words <img src="smileys/smiley9.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

Damn! I also wanted to do it, but you beat me. That's always the case. <img src="smileys/smiley7.gif" border="0" align="middle" /> <img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

WELL DONE!

1. How did you use the custom colors?

<img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle" /> <img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle" /> <img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle" /> <img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle" />