Sonic Screwed Up Driver

It was a Doctor Who weekend - meaning, I didn't exactly get a great deal done.  That is to say, I got an immense amount of "research" done, but not a lot else.

I did listen to a few of the bits of music I put together last week several times.  It's vitally important to listen to things you've been recording at 2:00am with fresh ears in the cold light of day.  While I like some of them quite a bit, it will be a while before they're a proper track.

I put what I have into the engine today anyway.  As predicted, horns and strings by themselves show up nicely in the spectrum, while guitar, bass and drums are all kind of squashed into the same frequency band, and drown out everything else.  I will need to play with the EQ to see if I can find something that both looks and sounds good.

In any case, I started doing the script to spawn a few asteroids in time with the music.  That's working OK, except for being slightly out of sync.  The big problem is that the texture scroll and the object motion seem to be slightly out of phase.  Motion in games is inherently jittery, but they're not jittering at the same time, which kind of stands out.  This probably has something to do with the texture being updated based on when new audio buffers become available, and the physics is just updated off the system timer.  I've been meaning to run the game update time off of the audio play cursor, which will probably help, but I imagine there will be some wrangling to make that work.

Also, the whole thing could hardly be called "frantic" at this point... which is fine for the first level of trying to ease the player into the game, but will need to be worked out at some point.  I had some old gameplay tests with a different camera angle and objects moving faster, I'll need to give that a try.

Which will happen shortly after I stop finding interesting* stuff on the internet and actually focus for five minutes.

Which makes game development kind of like a Doctor Who episode.  All running about and getting distracted by nonsense, and then five minutes of brilliance saves the day.  Most of the time.



*not actually interesting, so why is it distracting?