niallmoody.com

13/01/10 - I came 11th overall in Ludum Dare!

In other news, I made a game for the TIGSource Assemblee competition. It's called Tile Massacre SHMUP, and it's an attempt to create a game where you have to create a level then play through it, all the time under pressure from enemies, collisions etc.

15/12/09 - So it was Ludum Dare this weekend and I made another game; For Queen and Country. It's a turn-based four person strategy game where the aim is to explore an island while screwing over the other players so they can't do the same. It's more like a board game than a video game really. I'm really pleased with the visuals, here's hoping it gets rated highly...

29/11/09 - A new game! The Future Will Only Be Dystopian If Capitalism Remains Undefeated is a short game about the future. It came about because I've had to endure some really crappy temp jobs lately, and needed to get it off my chest. It's probably more of a sketch than a fully-fledged game.

You'll also notice some things are missing from the site now. That's because I was running out of space, and got rid of the older, more pointless stuff.

05/09/09 - I've got a big update today:

04/07/09 - So I've finally got round to releasing a first version of my graphical roguelike, Plort. This is a game I intend to continue working on for a long time (it's already a year or so since I started on it), and in its current state it's definitely lacking the depth and complexity of the established roguelikes. I figure by releasing it as it is though I'll be to get some useful feedback. And the visuals alone already make it pretty unique, imo.

I've also added a games section to the forum, given that's what I'm most interested in at the moment.

06/06/09 - Following some feedback from the TIGSource forums, I've uploaded a small update to This is the Way. As usual, you can get it from the games page.

02/06/09 - I've released another game; a short platformer inspired by Hans Richter and Joy Division. You can get it from the games page.

26/04/09 - It's slightly after-the-fact now, but last weekend I took part in Ludum Dare 14. The game I made is called Die, you Stupid Hurdlers!, and you can get it from the games page. You can also see my Ludum Dare journal here.

01/04/09 - I've just added a new game to the games page, Stop Killing Each Other! The aim is to stop two sides killing each other by dropping bricks in the way of their bullets. Like most of my games, it's an idea that was better in my head than it turned out in reality, and the walls give it a bit of a dodgy subtext - suggesting segregation is the only way people can live with each other. Hopefully you can see what I was trying to do though...

23/03/09 - If anyone's still interested, I've done a quick maintenance release for Twindy so it'll build on recent systems.

01/02/09 - It took me a while, but finally, the video of my performance with Ashitaka at Sound Thought in November:

03/09/08 - Sorry it's been such a while since my last update, but I created a wee audiovisual instrument recently, called snowflakes, and I just uploaded it. It's kind of derived from disintegrate, using the same sine tones and falling visuals, and it's meant to be played with a gamepad, but I think it's a bit more successful than disintegrate was. Here's a video of it (in HD!):

You can get it from the new audiovisual things page. I've got a basic code framework for these kind of things now, so there will hopefully be similar things in the future. I've also got a couple of other programs I've been working on which will hopefully appear here eventually (both of them have been in the works far longer than snowflakes was); a graphical roguelike, and a branching text editor.

14/03/08 - Here's some more videos of Ashitaka, a couple of improvisations I did to submit to ars electronica. The instrument's pretty much finished now. The first one's taken from a camcorder, and you can see how my gestures with the physical interface relate to the sound/visuals.


The second one gives you a better view of the visuals.


Vimeo's compression messes the trails up though. I'm wondering if it would be worth doing a widescreen HD version to take advantage of Vimeo's high quality mode, but the widescreen aspect ratio might leave too much empty space at the sides...

19/12/07 - Continuing my slightly erratic posting of videos documenting my progress with Ashitaka, here's what it currently looks like. My first impression was that YouTube's compression was fairly brutal this time, but I still haven't quite figured out how to create really nice videos with mencoder myself, and it should be good enough to give you an idea of what's going on (maybe?). Anyway, there's a 1024x768 version over here if you want more detail, though even that's not free of compression artifacts (again, go easy on the downloads of this one - I can't really afford to have too many people downloading a 12MB file).

I'm not playing the instrument in this one - it's basically at rest, apart from a couple of GravityObjects being split off at about 6s and 12s in. I probably went a bit overboard with the particles...

16/12/07 - I've got a games-related update today :-) First, I finally got roud to uploading an old(-ish) two player game I wrote this summer(?), called Space Archer. It's not particularly good, but I'm quite pleased with the visual aesthetic. Second, I've uploaded a more recent shootemup I did called disintegrate. Gameplay-wise it has a couple of unique features, but again, I'm happier with the visual (and aural) aesthetic than the actual gameplay. Anyway, they're there if you want to try them out, complete with GPL'ed source code.

Oh, and you can maybe tell from the available disintegrate downloads that I upgraded my mac to Leopard, so I can make universal binaries now. Accordingly, there may be some updates to other apps etc. in the future...

05/10/07 - So I realise the last thing the world needs is another music player app, but I couldn't find one with the exact combination of features I wanted, so I wrote my own; NiallTunes (sorry about the unimaginative name). My exact combination of features being: a 'sandbox'-type capability for playing songs without having to add them to your library; a basic folder-based music library - no need for big databases or anything fancy; an album art display. It's still a bit rough around the edges, but it does everything I need it to (almost - I still need to add support for streaming via m3u playlists and CD playing, and it would be nice if I could optimise it a bit better). I don't know if anyone else has any use for it, but it's there if you want it, and is my first app released under the GPL v3 (all my future apps will be v3).

20/09/07 - I just realised I should probably be documenting the prototypes I'm making of my Ashitaka audiovisual instrument for my PhD, so I've uploaded a couple of videos to YouTube, along with high-res versions on this site.

This is the earlier one. The main object you see moving around is the main part of the instrument, controlled by a custom-built interface connecting to the computer via bluetooth (the motion of the object is obtained from accelerometer data). My original idea with the visuals for this prototype was for the objects (which are additive-blended) to draw their colour on the background, so that, as the performance progressed, the whole field would eventually turn entirely white. That didn't turn out as good as I was thinking though (as you can probably see for yourselves),so the next prototype is:

There's no sound on this one, as that's also going to change. I'm thinking this visual aesthetic is probably more like what the final instrument's going to be. I don't know what I'm going to do about the background - I don't want the objects to exist in a vacuum, but I'm not entirely convinced about the weird combination of 2D (background) and 3D (objects) in the previous prototype. Maybe if I have the objects drawing on multiple/parallax 2D backgrounds.

Sorry they both cut off so abruptly - I rendered them on my machine at uni, which has some kernel(?) bug that causes it to hang indefinitely when it has a high cpu load for any length of time.

You can see the full size (1024x768) videos and read about my PhD here (don't go crazy though - I'm not made of bandwidth ;-). I'm afraid it doesn't currently explain what form Ashitaka is actually going to take - I'll try and add a proper explanation of what's happening in those videos sometime next week.

03/04/07 - Sorry, while uploading that last post I accidentally broke my website. It should be okay now, though I'm not sure about the forum...

02/04/07 - I've added a new program called Motion Composition Tool to the other programs page. It's a quick app I made for creating simple abstract animations. It uses X3D for its file format, so you can also view the results in Heilan (and save them as a video). It's deliberately very simplistic and limited - I wanted something that would let me play with motion and colour without any distractions, as I feel I need more experience of making visual art for my PhD.

20/02/07 - A picture of my recent DIY endeavours:
That's an Atari Punk Console (the bear - you twiddle his ears to play him), 3 circuit-bent Behringer guitar pedals (clockwise from top: Bass Graphic EQ, Tremolo, Phaser), and an Open Sound Control fader box I made with the help of an Arduino board (it's USB powered!).

31/01/07 - Following on from that last post, lower-quality versions those videos are now on youtube too:

18/12/06 - In case you're interested, I've now got a couple of videos of Heilan in action, here. The first one's an audiovisual piece I did for a concert at the university, while the second (and more impressive, imo) one is a simple example of what's possible with Heilan when you connect a MIDI fader box to it via OSC.

27/11/06 - As you can see from the links on the left, I've finally got around to releasing the software I've been developing for my PhD. You can get a full explanation of what it does on the page itself, but Heilan's basically an X3D browser aimed at audio work (hence low latency sound, OSC support etc.). For now it's probably most useful as a way of doing Ambisonic spatialisation in realtime via OSC, but you could use it to display simple 3d scenes too (Blender can export to X3D, btw).

13/7/06 - I've just posted an update to Mouse To OSC to let it handle MIDI CCs as input, meaning it can act as a basic MIDI CC to OSC message converter now. No mac version I'm afraid though, as I couldn't get XCode to play nice, and to be honest, I couldn't really be bothered to try and work out what the problem was (for some reason, of the three platforms I tend to work on, OSX always seems to be the most hassle to develop for...). I figured since I can't make universal binaries anyway, it probably wouldn't matter...

I've also had to change the forum rules so that I now have to approve new members, as I was getting a few too many bots/spam for my liking. I'm going to have to go through the member list and remove any suspicious-looking members too, as there are a quite a few. If I remove you by accident, let me know.

17/6/06 - It's maybe only noticeable at first from the title text, but I've completely re-written the code for this site so it doesn't rely on tables anymore, and uses a lot more css. This should mean everything's a lot tidier now, and it also means I can include (meaningful) alternative stylesheets for those of you whose browsers support them...

12/3/06 - Sorry, a quick update for Mouse To OSC - it wasn't storing the sliders' values correctly, but I've fixed it now.

21/2/06 - To help with my PhD, I've written a simple mouse-based control panel for sending Open Sound Control messages. It's pretty basic, just sending OSC float messages, but it can be quite useful for certain tasks. I'm afraid I haven't spent too much time on it, so there's no icon for it, and the source code's slightly different in each download (the OSX version's the newest/most compatible).

15/2/06 - I've finally got around to updating Phil to build against JUCE v1.25, so you can get it from it's page. This version also includes a couple of bug fixes, and an extra command line option which lets you set it's colours from a .tracktionscheme file.

6/2/06 - As you should be able to see on the left, I've added a forum to my site, so you can ask questions about or discuss the various programs/plugins I've made there now.

31/10/05 - Sorry, I just realised I'd broken the delete functionality in Phil before I uploaded v0.5, so I've uploaded a fixed version.

28/10/05 - I've finally got some news to post here! I've just uploaded a simple file browser I wrote, called Phil (see the link on the left). I wrote it because I needed a file chooser for Twindy, and JUCE doesn't currently have one under linux. As such, it's probably of most interest to JUCE programmers running linux - as a file browser it's nothing particularly special, although it does complement twindy nicely...

10/8/05 - If you're interested, I've released a new version of Twindy. It's now pretty stable, and almost complete in terms of functionality (the only significant thing missing is the dialogs to set the colours and the application buttons/menus). I'm quite proud of it - I don't know if anyone will ever use it, but it seems to do pretty much everything I wanted it to do fairly well.

30/7/05 - Oops! I hadn't realised the OSX version of Bobbley Bop was dynamically linked to the SDL framework. It won't have run if you didn't have SDL.framework installed. I've uploaded a new version which has the framework in the Frameworks fork of the executable now, so it should run if you don't already have it installed.

28/7/05 - I've just written a very cheap and rubbish rip-off of Jeff Minter's fantastic Gridrunner++(see games). I basically wrote it to get a handle on SDL, and get an idea of the issues involved in writing games. In the process I also discovered Apple's fantastic Shark profiler, which I promptly fell in love with (if only it was available for Windows and Linux...). Anyway, it's not a great game, but all the sounds are synthesised in real-time, rather than using the boring sample-based approach most games use (although this doesn't mean the sounds are actually any good...). Like pngStitch previously, it's available for Windows, OSX, and Linux.

18/7/05 - I've just got round to updating pngStitch, to make it a bit easier to use. There's also an OS X version now, so get it while it's hot...

29/6/05 - Right, as you can see I've updated the site design, partly because I reckoned it was about time, but mainly because I've got Twindy to a release-able state, and I figured it probably deserved a page of it's own, rather than being bundled onto the increasingly crowded programs page. You'll note my pedal board also got it's own page.

Anyway, you can read more about Twindy on it's page, but you should be able to run it without too much hassle on any linux system. The only dependencies are the usual X libs and freetype (iirc) - it comes with a slightly modified version of JUCE, so you don't need to get it separately.

21/6/05 - Okay, it seems that my Pedal Board's working with the ASIO4All drivers now, so it's been upgraded to v1.26, although no actual changes have been made since v1.25b.