Dev Log #43

I finished the initial implementation of the choke region recoloring effect. The way it works at the moment is by recursively generating textures for each lane starting from the bottom of each track and moving up one by one. Each texture is added to the one generated by the lane below.

Assuming each block has choke turned on, the above configuration will generate a set of choke textures that look something like this:

These textures are then passed in to the waveform shader to do the recoloring. When a block has a choke envelope configured the resulting block in the choke texture would actually be a gradient following the envelope rather than flat white, but I can't draw that in MS Paint.

There are some problems with this implementation. The main issue is that I am not currently managing the rendering order of the lanes so if the choke texture gets generated before one below it, there will be a bit of lag before it updates. This has to be fixed eventually but I might leave it for later.

I posted two videos on Twitter that generated some buzz and gained a bunch of new supporters. Hello everyone! If you didn't find it yet you can get the latest alpha build for Windows and macOS from here: Blockhead v0.12.1 alpha | Colugo on Patreon and the Discord server is here: https://discord.gg/9ZW2UXM

The v0.12.1 build is from all the way back in December as I have spent the last few months working on a large refactoring of the codebase and changing the way the audio engine works. Some of the features I demoed on Twitter are not available yet as they emerged as detours during the refactoring. The current effects system is also going to be thrown away to make way for something better.

I'm now making over half my monthly rent on Patreon which is cool because that is my biggest monthly expense. I hope we eventually get to the point where I do not have to worry so much about money!

A question was asked on Discord about whether Blockhead would be free or paid on release. I haven't really given this any thought but if I end up charging money for the final thing then I will keep track of how much people have donated on Patreon and make sure everyone gets a copy if they already paid that amount.

At this point I still do not even know what a Blockhead v1.0 will look like as everything is still evolving. There are still a number of very big and important features that I have planned and many smaller things.

Currently I am working on finally re-implementing the Fudge sampler using the new API. The API itself is still being tweaked but I am pretty happy with the general design of it now. I recently renamed it to blink because the old name was stupid and really annoying to type. I hope that this next build will finally be finished before the end of this month, assuming no more health problems!