what if I made a little visual programming language for my synthesizer 🤔

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

I'm not really making good use of multitouch because I've been developing this using a mouse. I'd like to have it so I can touch two things to hear what they sound like connected or disconnected; and then double tap to connect or disconnect that connection when a quick connection is possible. Mouse mode will need to work differently.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

Another verb I would like to implement is the ability to disconnect a wire and connect a new wire in the same frame. The current flow for disconnecting a wire and connecting a new wire is too long even with a touch screen, but I think anything where it is not one action would be.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

Being able to suspend/resume updating the patch that is playing while making edits is also a thing I want to implement for similar reasons, but I think being able to splice parts quickly is useful in different ways.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

I added a flip/flop instruction. It's mostly a toy, but it's helped me clarify how I want to handle envelopes.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

here's what that patch sounds like

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

I'm sorry everyone but I have to confess to a sin. See that chain of flip flops up there two posts ago? That's a number. That's a number where every bit is a double precision float 😎

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

I came up with a pretty good approximation of a dial tone on accident while implementing a mixing node. #mollytime

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

and here's the patch for that sound

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

Also now that I have tile types with multiple inputs and/or multiple outputs, I went and cleaned up manual connect mode to make it a little more clear what's going on.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

today I added an envelope generator and some basic midi functionality. and then I made this absolute dog shit patch :3 #mollytime

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

it'll be a bit of work to do, but I want to eventually add a convolution verb to my synthesizer so I don't have to run it as a separate program. I'll probably also end up rewriting it to be a FFT because it would be nice to be able to have longer samples and maybe run several convolutions simultaneously. That might be "get a better computer" territory though.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

I had this really great ambinet patch going where it was these washes of noise convolved with a short clip from the chrono cross chronopolis bgm, and I recorded 3 minutes of it but audacity just totally mangled it. There's this part that sounded like a storm rumbling in the distance but it was just the patch clipping, and that seems to be the danger zone for recording and playback I guess.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

so you're just going to have to pretend you're hovering gently in a vast warm expanse of sky and ocean with no obvious notion of down, as a storm roils off in the distance, during an endless sunset. the moment is fleeting, yet lasts forever

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

saving and loading is probably going to be the next highest priority feature now. you can do a lot with simple patches, but it would be nice to be able to save the more interesting ones

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

I've got saving and loading patches working 😎 that was easy

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

I've been very careful so far to make it impossible to construct an invalid program, but I'm eventually going to add a reciprocal instruction (1/x), and was pondering what to do about the (1/0) case and I had a great idea which is instead of emitting infinity or crashing, what if it just started playing a sound sample as an easter egg. I'd have to add another register to the instruction to track the progress through the sample though.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

I haven't picked out a good sample yet for the (1/0) case. A farting sound is too obvious and puerile. The most hilarious idea would be to start playing a Beatles song on the theory that if you messed up the copyright autotrolls would kill your stream, but I don't want the RIAA coming after my ass.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

I might just have the rcp component explode if you feed it a zero.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

ok it's less sensational than stuffing an easter egg in here, but I realized I can simply have it refuse to tell you the answer if you try to divide by zero

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

I'm thinking of adding a tile type that could be used to construct sequences. It would take an input for its reset value, a clock input, and an input for its update value. It outputs the reset value until the clock goes from low to high, at which point it copies the current update value to its output. This would let you build stuff like repeating note sequences with two tiles per note + a shared clock source, and you could use flipflops to switch out sections.