Plan for Paul Malyschko

My team and I have been developing an interactive music engine for some time now. After three months of programming in Python, I'm almost ready with editor side of things. It's kludgy, but it works. At the moment I'm having fun deciphering the complex notion of writing Python extensions. It's quite complex, certainly more complex than writing userdata for Lua, though the principles are the same. The backend engine works, the editor works, I'm just working on meshing them together.

Thankfully, Python ports to different platforms without any changes, so long as you don't do bonehead things like code mini frames with their own menus (OSX changes its menu bar depending on which frame is in focus, not a particularly desirable behaviour).

The engine itself is being coded under OSX, so a couple of weeks ago I bought a secondhand 12-inch 500 MHz iBook. It's the ultimate in portability, and I have to admit that ever since I bought it, my PC has been starved for attention. I've never been what you'd call an Apple fan - my friends and I slayed them during high school - but they've really come through with their industrial design. It's certainly better than the luminescent clam shell that came before it.

Here are some screenshots.

Headache under Windows:



Headache under OSX:



(Yes, I'm assuming it works under Linux)

Headache's format can be best described as a mix between an old school tracker and a sequencer. You write channel blocks which you can then place as many times as you like in the order list. You can also write event handlers that will alter the music depending on how it was written. These events are arbitrarily triggered from game code, and you can create and call as many as you like.

Unfortunately, the prototype is a month overdue, which I find irritating. Nothing ever seems to get done at the rate you want it done, but alas, such is the development process.

I'm hoping to begin usability testing on the editor very shortly, and perhaps testing the smoothness of implementing the Headache library within game code, perhaps in an upcoming GID. If there are any musicians interested, e-mail me at paul dot malyschko at gmail dot com, and I'll get back to you.

Cheers,
Paul.