New Message from Shadow Code

I was sent this to share with you Desideratum fans regarding the project!  Shadow Code wrote this up and has an email for you to talk to him about D:BB programming or feedback.

Progress? "Report"

Not much progress this month, I had a two week dev hiatus, but after that the focus was on the audio "code" for Giggle Night.

Why?

There is an outstanding bug regarding audio that is caused mainly due to the crude audio control SugarCube provides (SimpleAudio)

In simple terms, you have to manually "remember" the track you were playing when you do something like using a menu or hitting the "back" button (something that can alter the currently playing track)

If you do that in one or two places, it is OK, but managing 500+ locations is not, and if the change can happen multiple times, well... it creates a complex web of conditions that makes it almost impossible to keep track on what is being played (and knowing is not half the battle, it is mandatory for SugarCube)

So the idea is to provide a set of tools on top of SimpleAudio (bypassing SugarCube) that provides

a) The same controls currently available in SugarCube (like play, pause, stop, fadein/out, volume)

That is, without the need to KNOW that you are currently playing Clover's Theme and not Anax' theme

b) Provide an advanced form of audio queues, adding support for skipping tracks or just getting the name of the sample currently playing

This may seem obvious, but SugarCube and SimpleAudio do not track the audio being played, there is NO way to ask, all you could do is check each cached sample for a "playing" status

What is worse, with SugarCube you can set an audio sample to play, while having the same sample as part of a queue, which may break audio playback if certain conditions are met (beyond the player control). That at best will result on not playing an audio sample to at worst breaking an audio queue (aka "playlist")

c) Enhance "playlists" to function like independent audio channels (so you'd have dedicated channels like "Sound Effects", "Voice" and "Music")

So you can pause playing the "story music" channel, if you click on the "character menu" which has its own audio channel, and restoring them when you hit "back" in a less convoluted way.

d) Provide "master" controls (like a master mute for all channels, or a master volume control)

And maybe in the future provide a control where you can SET your own audio levels/volume (no promises)

All of those are mostly done (about 70-80% done right now). What is left is mostly writing the Macros that expose the new tools, testing (On different platforms/browsers, not all of them behave like they should per the HTML5 definitions) and fixing the bug that started all of this in a general way and not just "for one case" (which is not as straight forward as it seems)

So... what this means for Desideratum?

I know this seems like building a tank just to move a rock. Plain overkill, right?

Maybe for Desideratum it is too late (Updating ~3000 calls to use the new tools will probably delay Desideratum much more), but for new projects like Giggle Night it will mean a way to move forward beyond the constraints of SugarCube

It may happen at some point for Desideratum, but I seriously doubt it. So it seems like Brone & Abby's loss is Trixie's gain (at least for now)

So WTH man, Desideratum when?

I don't know.

All I can say is sorry, I know it is not what you wanted to hear, but at this time there is NO date

Beyond Audio, the time was spent squashing bugs (and setting up an automated code backup process)

Finally, now you can send comments to BlameShadowCode@gmail.com, just keep the threats/whining to a minimum ;)

Don't worry, I have a thick skin, but keeping things civil would be preferable

Bug Reports SHOULD still be informed to Anax.