| |
| Author |
Message |
|
| Yak |
 Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2005 2:14 am |
 |
|
|
Joined: 28 Oct 2005
Posts: 24
|
Michael: Yeah, I fully understand where you are coming from, that kind of thing has been my own experience in the "biz" for many years, and indeed MS seem like a very unlikely partner for me to be involved with in making things happen with regard to this particular project. In fact there was one guy on my forum whose two main passions were my work and a deep, passionate hatred of Microsoft. He left when I told people about what I'd done - it was his worst nightmare come true, his One True Love and his One True Hate united.
I know about how soulless it can be inside these large corporations. I had it with Atari when I was with them - once I became an employee they saw fit to push me in directions I didn't want to go and as a result years later I have people castigating me for work that wasn't my best. I *hate* all that crap with a passion. Even getting this out there I had to sit in meetings where I just cheerfully wanted to reach out and strangle the bean-counting idiot who was trying to argue to my face that what I was doing was worth less because "nobody has ever done it before, so therefore it can't be good". Good goat, it makes the veins in my temples throb just to recall that.
But the way all this started was that some guy came to one of my parties who happened at the time to be the boss of a firm that did a lot of xbox development, and he saw some of the experimental work I was doing and *understood* it. Really, deeply "got it". And he knew an MS guy - not a beancounter, not a yesman, some guy who was producer on a game and who would understand it - and got him to come and see too. And *that* guy completely understood it, and managed to get us connected to people inside who also understood. There *are* some people in there who understand even if they are obfuscated at times by the bean-counters. And it so nearly didn't happen, in a million different ways, and we had to write a good 90% of the code before we even knew it *would* get published.
But... for me this is something intensely personal. Something I have worked on for more than 20 years, something that ever since the first day was something I knew was *important* but nothing I could ever conventionally sell to anyone because never having seen it they wouldn't know to buy it, something which could only really be given away... It is to me something that is absolutely beautiful and which I know for certain I will devote the rest of my life to exploring, just as I have the last 20 years. It's something I desperately, passionately want to share with people because I truly believe it's something good. And here I had a chance to have a massively unlikely partner like Microsoft give it away to *millions* of people on my behalf.
Maybe only one in 10 will see the beauty of it, maybe only one in 100, but even so that will be worth it. I know some people *do* get it, because people are getting preview 360s now and I am starting to get mail from people who found my little "present". But given the volume they will distribute I'll get the message across to a significant amount of people, and I think the message is in part at least a bit similar to your own - for me it's "there *are* other ways to explore this medium, you *can* get together and just do something peaceful, share something that enriches you, create and play joyfully together".
I know it must seem strange from outside, but really it was just a set of circumstances that lined up, a couple of people understanding something of where I was trying to go, and then this immense opportunity to actually "speak" the stuff I've had on my mind for 20 years and actually get heard. Goat knows when I'd ever be lucky enough to ever get a shot like that again. I had to take the shot, although I know I'll be forever explaining myself for doing so  .
Sorry if I seem like a ranting nutjob here. I'm just super passionate about this particular thing. Can't help it.
I think I need to run and moo and shake my antlers for a while . |
|
|
| Back to top |
  
|
| Michael |
| Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2005 9:39 am |
|
|
Site Administrator
Joined: 07 Jun 2002
Posts: 8065
Location: Gent, Belgium
|
Gilesgoat,
We are not anti-business. Good business is in fact one of the reasons why we do not want to deal with the games industry or grow into a big company. The first seems to always be a bad deal for developers. And the latter requires a level of corporate-ness which would water down our products which would result in bad sales.
For people like us, operating a small business with less investments and thus less required profits, is a much smarter choice, from a business point of view.
I'm sure that there must be nice people within the games business. And/or people with vision, passion, etc. We have in fact met a few (very rare!). But usually they are not in a position of power where thy can make a difference. In fact, it seems like nobody is. Everybody seems to have the same spreadsheet that they will fill in so the machine gives the answer. It's quickly becoming a 1984-type of entertainment industry out there... |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| Michael |
| Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2005 9:49 am |
|
|
|
Site Administrator
Joined: 07 Jun 2002
Posts: 8065
Location: Gent, Belgium
|
Yak,
Your making me very curious about your project.
Since I'm never going to buy an XBox, could you tell a little bit about what it is going to be? Sounds like it's a lot more than the screensaver I thought it was... (since The Endless Forest is a screensaver, I guess I know how this can be...  ) |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| Yak |
| Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2005 11:52 am |
|
|
|
Joined: 28 Oct 2005
Posts: 24
|
Michael wrote: Yak,
Your making me very curious about your project.
Since I'm never going to buy an XBox, could you tell a little bit about what it is going to be? Sounds like it's a lot more than the screensaver I thought it was... (since The Endless Forest is a screensaver, I guess I know how this can be... )
Well, there's a history of it here.
Basically it's something that I started experimenting with back in 1984 out of a desire to create "something" for people to do that was playful and creative but *not* a game in the conventional sense. And in the intervening years although I worked on a lot of more "conventional" games projects I've always been developing this too, in fact I see this as my "real" work and the games as something that keep me viable enough to carry on working on it.
In its most recent incarnations it's developed into something that people do *together*, and that has made it even more special, in my opinion. We gather together at parties and simply enjoy using it together for hours. We "play" with it far more than with any game. We've been doing that for a couple of years now.
On the face of it it's "just" a very nice-looking music visualiser (and ironically enough most stuff that you see in Windows or the Mac for music visualisation is based on techniques I devised for this back in 1994). And indeed it can be used that way, but for me visualisers always mossed the main point of the whole thing which for me ha always been interactivity - creative play at which one cannot perform "badly".
Getting it into MS was "interesting" because a lot of people could only see it as just another visualiser, and they already had some of those (the crappy things that are in Media Player) so why have anything different? But as I mentioned we had a couple of people inside who did understand fully, who were evangelists who ran demos all the time in their offices and dragged people in to see, and despite long odds the evangelists prevailed and we got it in the firmware (even if, as I said before, we basically had to build it entirely without any assurance that it would actually end up being used).
We do, of course, retain the IP on it (this is something I would *never* just sell outright, any more than I would sell my soul). To me this was simply a way to bring the idea to a lot more people and at the same time fund further development of the concept (we are just now finishing off a PC version that is considerably more powerful).
And I do understand about keeping a company small. Back in the early 80s I had the chance to turn Llamasoft into a "software empire" like some of the other early people in the biz did, but I did not like what the "biz" was becoming, and I'm a maker, not a manager. And for years I had to endure hearing the bosses of the biz corporations preaching how the old spirit was gone, the days of the one man creator/designer were long gone, that effectively I had no right to exist or to operate within their "industry", but I'm a stubborn ox and I wasnt about to just give up and go away.
All I want to do is work on stuff that genuinely interests me and which doesn't compromise my own vision. And I want to make stuff that I think people will enjoy. That's all. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| Michael |
| Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2005 10:58 pm |
|
|
|
Site Administrator
Joined: 07 Jun 2002
Posts: 8065
Location: Gent, Belgium
|
Yak,
I have read through the whole history of your light synthesizers. Pretty mad how ox-like you continued to work on it.
I'm very glad for you that you finally got it published on a decent scale. I hope MS paid you well and that a good deal of the XBox players will appreciate it.
I'm looking forward to the PC version! Will you publish it yourself?
I must say that I'm personally not the biggest fan of abstract images (I'm a story-fetishist ). But some of the things you say about Neon and its predessors rang some bells with me. Auriea and I used to do a weekly online performance called Wirefire. It's also an improvisational tool for mixing visuals (and sounds) but it played entirely on the internet. And most of the imagery is figurative and often very meaningful/symbolic/heavy.
We see The Endless Forest in fact as a successor to Wirefire.
It's a small world. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| Yak |
| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 2:28 am |
|
|
|
Joined: 28 Oct 2005
Posts: 24
|
Michael wrote: Yak,
I have read through the whole history of your light synthesizers. Pretty mad how ox-like you continued to work on it.
It was just something I could never give up. And as the game biz changed from the innocent playground it had been to something that was an "industry", it was for me some kind of "light" that I could hold onto, something that to me was still somehow pure and good .
Quote:
I'm very glad for you that you finally got it published on a decent scale. I hope MS paid you well and that a good deal of the XBox players will appreciate it.
I'm looking forward to the PC version! Will you publish it yourself?
Thanks .
I can't say I was paid that well; in fact they got what they got very cheaply. But stage 1 of this thing has always been about achieving distribution rather than about getting paid, although of course we need paid enough to fund further evolution of it. But no possible self-funding of future generations would ever be possible without some kind of distributed awareness of what it actually *was*, and that could never occur without trojan-horsing it into some piece of mass-market electronics. We tried with Atari, we tried with Nuon, both of them vanished without a blip on the kind of scale we needed.
I remember I had an argument with that guy I mentioned who left in outrage when I told what we'd done - a couple of years earlier I'd said that if I could somehow get a company on the scale of Microsoft to act as a vector to get the thing out there on a large scale, I would. Just to push out the idea. Just to make people aware that there was something else... I never thought for an instant that that would ever *actually* occur, but it did.
We *haven't* made a great deal out of it - we've funded the next generation of it, and we retain the IP and have that almost ready for launch now. We have MS effectively validating and distributing the concept on a large scale for the first time by inclusion in the ox360 OS, and we have a more complete version just about ready to roll on the PC to coincide with that (hopefully) increased awareness.
We do have a plan in place for distribution of the PC version. We're aiming at massive distribution and very little cost to the end user. In truth even after all these years I *still* don't really like charging for it at all, although at the moment for us it's still a necessary evil.
Quote:
I must say that I'm personally not the biggest fan of abstract images (I'm a story-fetishist ). But some of the things you say about Neon and its predessors rang some bells with me. Auriea and I used to do a weekly online performance called Wirefire. It's also an improvisational tool for mixing visuals (and sounds) but it played entirely on the internet. And most of the imagery is figurative and often very meaningful/symbolic/heavy.
That looks excellent . For me it's always been abstract because I think my earliest synaesthesiac fantasies were when I was a kid, and I always had a habit of visualising sounds internally as abstract, geometric constructs - all that followed arose out of a desire simply to have a machine that let me express those inner visualisations externally.
The underlying principals of shared creativity are constant to both visions though... the Forest itself bears no obvious parallels to what I've been doing but I knew as soon as I saw it that there was something there I could deeply identify with, something that felt like home to me.
Oh, and when we're ready and feel it won't fall over I'll bung you a PC version of Neon to play with - any machine that can run the Forest well should be able to make a good fist of Neon .
Quote:
We see The Endless Forest in fact as a successor to Wirefire.
It's a small world.
It is that . And it's always good to meet fellow travellers on what can at times seem a lonely road . |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| gilesgoat |
| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 2:50 am |
|
|
|
Joined: 28 Oct 2005
Posts: 12
Location: UK
|
Yes, basically Yak said all, I can only add a couple of things.
I saw your story about '8' .. well .. what to say .. for MANY different reasons "it's very hard to
sell stuff, no matter what it is".
I still repeat the situation is the result of a sum of many things, "industry/business" from one
side and "end users" from the other side, it has to be said that "if people would buy things more
easely it would be more easy to sell/propose things" .. the fact is not is ALSO because "people
don't buy easely".
I come from different situations, I've not been so long as Yak into a "same sector" but I saw
quite a bit of some realities from different sides .. and even recently I was talking to some
people and there are some "universal concepts" "always valid".
The point it always and only one, you want to do stuff, you must find a way someway to
"self support yourself" that basically means "have enough money/resources to do what you
want to do with no need to ask to others" ..
The "more" you need to ask the more you are facing the fact that you have to accept some
conditions/limits/etc. and the reason is very simple, you don't have the means and you ask
someone else to give them to you so you can't deal much.
When a project is "big" in term of resources needed then the only way is to do it "by steps"
maybe at the "cost" of doing "smaller things before" to actually do it, you have to build your
house "brick by brick" .. the more you can build, the less and less you'll need to ask.
No matter how nice and such a thing can be, if you can't do it all by yourself with your own
stuff you'll end up in compromising always with those that have what you need
the fact is "never expect miracles" .. they can happen sometime but it's only because of "lady
luck" .. and nothing else ..
About people "narrow minded" is more often a matter of "people that don't want to take
risks if not absoluitely needed" .. give them 2 choiches with one is more risky than
the other and you already know what they'll chose 
It's never easy .. for no one .. it takes always time .. it takes always risk .. it takes a lot of
determination faith and convincement .. and a fuckload of hard work .. and careful planning as well ..
But on the other side "this is the only way that can lead you where YOU want to arrive".
Otherwise .. you end up being an employee of some company X .. and maybe after 8 years
or so of IT and such with fuckload of overtime and a quite strange personal life you could
find youself contemplating weird things and considering your life horrible with no hope ...
.. and maybe dreaming you'd like to be some kind of animal trotting in a quite forest .. maybe
not really a deer because you already are a billy goat .. too stinky and too strange animal to
be really liked by most people ..
Then you could arrive in front of something where you see only two ways to continue, 0 or 1 ..
Sometime little miracles do happen anyway, like a wrong google search leading to a strange
website and a 2 lines email sent "just because" ...
And then suddendly you start to believe in something and despite all that written above still
working exactly how written above you find yourself working in a project you just want to
see it completed, no matter what ..
It does not matter how time it took once is done, is done, that's what counts |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| Michael |
| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 10:20 am |
|
|
|
Site Administrator
Joined: 07 Jun 2002
Posts: 8065
Location: Gent, Belgium
|
Giles,
you sound like you're trying to console and encourage us. But we're really ok, you know. Ultimately it may have been a good thing for us to have been rejected by the games industry. It's not like we were looking forward to the huge production that 8 was going to be for us. It would indeed have turned us into managers rather than makers if we weren't careful. We already felt this when working on the second demo for the game. Much more professional with a solid team, but somehow it lacked some of the spirit that was present in the earlier demos that were made by just Auriea and I. I think we have found a compromise now by making a project that the two of us could build on our own and where we can hire outside expert help if and when we find funding for it. We have been extremely lucky with getting arts funding for our work lately. Probably thanks to a combination of (perceived?) former(?) fame as net.artists and the relatively small budgets that we're requesting, we have a full schedule until fall next year. We're not going to get rich, by no means, but we will be able to make what we want to make. Only one of those projects has direct commercial potential, really ("The Apartment"), and we will try to exploit it when the time comes.
But I assure you that we're quite happy with our current situation. Making smaller projects for a smaller audience suits us just fine. We will try and make a business out of that at some point, so we don't need to rely on the government so much, but for now it's good enough.
In fact, when we started with this whole game thing, one of our goals was to try and make games for smaller budgets. We found that it was unethical that games were starting to cost that much (given all the poverty in the world, etc). But due to lack of experience, the production budget for 8 quickly rose to well over a million Euros (and it was only that "low" because of all sorts of smart choices like using a cheap and flexible engine). Which turned out to be too much for a non-competitive game made by a rookie company in the current games industry.
And we have actually, thanks to our experience with publishing something (The Endless Forest) -which makes a big difference with just making it- learned a lot about how to design for interactive media. And we have discoverd that the design of 8 was flawed. Not as badly as most games published in this industry, in our opinion, but still flawed according to our own standards. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| Michael |
| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 10:47 am |
|
|
|
Site Administrator
Joined: 07 Jun 2002
Posts: 8065
Location: Gent, Belgium
|
Yak,
I understand the Trojan Horse principle for Neon. And I'm quite sure it will work as such as well. In fact, it probably already is working for you, opening doors, getting attention, etc. I'm a bit worried about your hopes for commercialisation because it's not very accessible. At first sight, it doesn't make a good case for non-game interaction because all screenshots and movies make it look like a music visualizer. Maybe you need a Nintendogs-like campaign for the project: don't show the game but show people playing it. Hey, now that I mention this: you really should get some Light Synthesizer on the Revolution! It seems like it would be the perfect excuse to do something cool with their new controller!! And you still have your old Unity contacts, no? Go for it!  Launch title!!!
These new media are strange and wonderful indeed. One finds friends and soulmates in strange locations. This is something that critics and government people don't get very well. Here in Belgium, the people we feel most affinity with, Foam, build high-tech artsy responsive environment installations. But the thing we have in common is a high attention for the human element in technology, the social aspect, the story-telling. And I guess we have that in common with you as well.
Often, still, critics put all new media in one box, as if "new media" would be an "-ism", a genre. But different approaches are starting to develop that tie very different practices together. Much like there is sculpture that is futurist as well as paintings and poems.
And now that I've mentioned the artsy side of new media, I would like to express my concerns with abstraction. The problem with abstraction is that all abstraction starts to look the same. While visually and aestetically, two abstract pieces (or even two different screens in Neon) might look nothing alike, because of the lack of recogizable shapes and symbols, it quickly becomes very vague. At least in my mind. And in fine arts circles, this often translates itself to the process being more important than the end result. Such that the actual work of art is in fact in the documentation of the process and not the end result (because the end results all look alike). And often this documentation requires familiarity with Deleuze, Adorno and Derrida or at least a high tolerance for excessively liberal and baroque language. But what's missing is that deep experience of art...
Not from your work, I can imagine, if only because it doesn't have these artistic pretenses. But the problem is still there: abstraction looks like abstraction and not much else. How do you feel about that?
And yes, please, I'd love to beta-test "PC-Neon" as soon as possible!
What input devices will it support? |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| gilesgoat |
| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 12:15 pm |
|
|
|
Joined: 28 Oct 2005
Posts: 12
Location: UK
|
I could start saying something bad ...
So I won't enter the discussions about "abstract VS recognizeable", I just say "you have your
style and your vision and there is another as well" and I am glad there are different visions
becuase otherwise or we'll be both making "abstract things" or we'll be both making forests.
But I don't get well the "they all look alike", for you maybe but as you said you are not into
abstract, you wish things "with a sotry" some people can be even bored about "why a game
has to have a story ?" I saw discussions in forums sometime about a subject like that.
I could say that sometime "you exactly don't want any story", you don't want a goal you
don't want "something to do" you don't want anything but "an experience".
I can see/feel "a different cultural/social background" from what you write I simply mean
a different "feeling" about relationship between man and tech that is very ok as well but is one
kind of vision, we have another vision in a different "world" no one is "better/worse" than the
other but they are different.
"Abstraction looks like abstraction", it certainly does ! And has to ! I don't want to see
"an everyday object" or "something recognizeable" into it I want to see "something I never
seen before anywhere else" I want my mind put into another "space" where it's up to me to
explore it and "build up" "a new set of feelings/emotion/personal relationship" with this totally
new and UNidentifiable with anything media.
It's not a matter of "recognition" or "find yourself in a familiar envirronement" is more like
"a travel in outer space" when you are going to see what you never seen before, when the
contact with your "common reality" is lost where there's only you and this "something different"
that .. that you don't know .. that precisely does not give you any "hook" to your everyday
reality ..
A thing like the forest .. is for when I feel I want precisely to be into a forest ...
A thing like Neon is when I feel I want to be somewhere else ... a part of me could still feel
"in the forest" .. but a part of me needs/wants to be "in a different mindstate" that the forest
can't give me or not in that form because the very structure and the very essence of what
they are are two completely different things.
Neon has "its own style" in where also some care been taken "to be its own style" avoiding
any kind of "contact/pollution" with other stuff that could have make it look "something
similar to other stuff", this stimply been done following its own vision without looking at all
what someone else was doing (as sometime some people was suggesting "why don't you put .. " ),
it could be it could "contain" some concept "already done" but if it's that
is just because "two people independently tought the same thing".
Anyway it's not that it's been "a competition to make it different", it's been only "do what we
fell to do as we feel to do" ...
And I can say (my personal opionion) "is exactly as I like to see it".
About lightsynth on the Rev ... well .. allow me to say that "you had your bad experiences
with 8, we had some not very positive experiences with others" ...
It's not so easy, deaf people are there and there .. at the time we were doing all our best to
knock all the possible doors and propose certain stuff (and we knocked all the possible doors
in many diffferent ways) we found an open and really interested door only in ONE place ...
So yes .. the controller would be lovely .. but .. we could already been there if someone
would have been more interested huh ? Mah .. maybe in the futre when the'll see better
"so what's all that about" it may happen some people will hear better .. all is possible ..
About the budget you are talking for 8 I say "wow" .. it's a BIG budget .. probably not so
big for such kind of game but it's big .. no wonder is very hard to bring on a project like that ..
Contollers supported for Neon PC (I am doing that stuff) .. well .. "what is reasonably supportable" ...
.. basically "gamepads" .. fact is I can't spend monts to "<support the universe>" also
lot of people having PC "don't have big things" .. so in fact is quite hard to "make it working"
supporting "not too complex stuff" ..
Any kind of gamepad with at least 2 analog sticks, 6 buttons and a POV ...
A copy of Neon PC to "test" ? ... hmmm .. "I am not into abstract art" ... "They all look the same" ..
... "abstract looks like abstract what you think" .. "I want a story" ...
/me thinks twice 
... but maybe you should really have one and experiment it by yourself, you could see it
a bit differently
.. but don't "poke" a billy goat, careful, it's not a deer |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| Yak |
| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 12:27 pm |
|
|
|
Joined: 28 Oct 2005
Posts: 24
|
Well, the thing with Neon is that it simply cannot be explained properly through words, or through screenshots, or indeed through videos of its output - until you *touch* it, and realise that *you* can drive it rather than just sit back and watch it, then it cannot be understood. This is part of the reason we have to Trojan it in - the only way to know what it is is to use it, and nobody would buy it not knowing what it is.
One of the things we did do when proposing the concept was exactly what you suggested, create a video if Neon (well, VLM 3.0 as it was then) in use. We did a gig at a Warp Records party where we projected the output of the lightsynth over the dancefloor, and then used 4 wireless controllers to control the visuals from on the dancefloor itself. People began to wonder why these strange people were on the dancefloor with game controllers, so we explained, and passed out the controllers to others to use . It got an excellent response, both at the time and from the people we ended up showing the video to.
Neon on the x360 is necessarily entirely abstract largely by dint of the fact that we had to fit the synthesiser and 100 effects into 250K of ROM space that we were allocated in the x360 OS. *Everything* is procedural except for one 7K literal texture (a yak logo that survived and is in the actual released version ).
For me part of the fascination with the abstract is that the parameter spaces for each of the effects are *vast*. We can use Neon as a "crew" where there are 4 of us "flying" the synthesiser at once, and every time we do, even though the starting spaces are the same, we always end up somewhere completely differenmt every time. There have been nights where we've just stood in awe in front of the projector screen seeing things emerge that none of us, even knowing how it all works, could have foreseen. Our main Crew have been playing together for a couple of years now and we each have our own speciality... it's so hard to describe in words... but it feels like being a musician playing together with other musicians in a band; it's like jamming with light and pure mathematics. It's just a remarkable feeling.
Part of the expansion of Neon will be driven by the fact that on the PC it goes out with an editing tool that allows users to design and build their own Neon effects in a way very similar to the way that existing modular audio synthesisers work. There is more than enough versatility in the editor to allow each author to generate stuff which is very distinctively "their style" - there is one Crewmember who is working with an alpha version of the Neon/PC editor and the stacks he produces are very distinctively *his*, you can tell them frommine instantly and in fact they reflect perfectly the style with which he performs when he's operating Neon in Crewed flight.
The final version of the editor is much more powerful than the one he's testing now, and what will happen is that people will start using the editor, coming up with their own effects, and an online community will emerge, sharing editing tips and, most importantly, trading stacks and effects. That to me is the most interesting part of the whole project - seeing what comes out when people get their hands on the editor and start driving Neon in the way they see fit.
Also, freed from the memory constraints imposed on Neon/360, we do allow users to introduce texture literals if they want to move away from the purely abstract. Due to the modular design of the system it is also perfectly possible to release additional modules to plug into the synth that represent more traditional, less abstract spaces, but still have the parameters that control their generation exposed to and useable by the rest of the synthesiser.
Neon/PC also supports import of live video which can also be used to add specific non-abstract input to the effects. For now we're just using the video as input to the synthesiser, but in later releases we'll actually be doing motion analysis and allowing people to control the synthesiser with gestures as well as just using the video output as a source.
Another application of Neon is as a game engine - one of the things I'm interested in doing is making games in which one uses the traditional interface and actions of "playing a game" to get players interested, and then make it so that through what is happening in response to their actions you make them unsure whether they are playing a conventional game - shooting and destroying objects for a high score - or actually engaging in an act of *creation* - orchestrating and composing a beautiful dynamic audiovisual display... hehe... again it's something almost impossible to describe in words and something that can only be "felt" .
Sometimes I wonder if I make it too hard for myself because my stuff *is* so hard to explain unless it is actually touched . But for me it's that aspect of it that makes it interesting. Screenshots have been pretty useless in explaining my work since about 1994 .
Anyway, I'll be happy to bung you a copy of Neon/PC once we get it finished. At the moment it supports up to 4 joypads for input (you can use mouse and keyboard if you have no pads, but it really isn't meant to work that way) and, of course, a video capture device for video input (can be anything that DirectShow supports, but for most purposes a simple webcam is just fine). |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| Michael |
| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 12:41 pm |
|
|
|
Site Administrator
Joined: 07 Jun 2002
Posts: 8065
Location: Gent, Belgium
|
Giles,
I was not poking. Just expressing my opinion in an attempt to help.
I can appreciate abstract art. It's just not as easy for me to understand.
The fact that I, with my art eductation, my years of experience and my enthusiasm for experiments with interactive media, already find it hard to understand, makes me think that it might be tough to win the hearts of the audience. And I do really hope you can do that. So I guess I'm just trying to help somehow.
Then again, I may be an exception, and nobody else has this problem with abstraction.
Thank you for your explanation. It does make more sense to me now. And I agree with you that being in a forest environment is a very concrete concept that you have to be in the mood for. My only argument is that being in an abstract world is sort of in danger of being equally concrete. So then it becomes a choice between wanting to be in a forest or on the moon or in a room or in a street or in an abstract world, the latter being just one thing and not a collection of many possible things, as one would be lead to think by the very nature of abstraction.
That being said, I'm quite certain that I will enjoy playing with Neon! The concept is great and your belief and dedication can only lead to a perfect execution.
I was merely trying to help by pointing out some possible stumbling blocks on your road to glory. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| gilesgoat |
| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 1:13 pm |
|
|
|
Joined: 28 Oct 2005
Posts: 12
Location: UK
|
Michael wrote: Giles,
I was not poking. Just expressing my opinion in an attempt to help.
I can appreciate abstract art. It's just not as easy for me to understand.
The fact that I, with my art eductation, my years of experience and my enthusiasm for experiments with interactive media, already find it hard to understand, makes me think that it might be tough to win the hearts of the audience. And I do really hope you can do that. So I guess I'm just trying to help somehow.
Then again, I may be an exception, and nobody else has this problem with abstraction.
Thank you for your explanation. It does make more sense to me now. And I agree with you that being in a forest environment is a very concrete concept that you have to be in the mood for. My only argument is that being in an abstract world is sort of in danger of being equally concrete. So then it becomes a choice between wanting to be in a forest or on the moon or in a room or in a street or in an abstract world, the latter being just one thing and not a collection of many possible things, as one would be lead to think by the very nature of abstraction.
That being said, I'm quite certain that I will enjoy playing with Neon! The concept is great and your belief and dedication can only lead to a perfect execution.
I was merely trying to help by pointing out some possible stumbling blocks on your road to glory.
You see .. there's no "road to glory" .. and there's no goal for that .. the only goal is "we like
this, we'd like other people could like it too" but if they would like
it or not "it does not matter at all" .. we did our thing, we love it, that's what counts ..
An abstract world does not need to be concrete .. maybe it's exactly "the opposite" is
"the total disconnection with anything concrete" .. can be fully disorienting sure .. can be
maybe "not for everyone" .. but .. can be a space allowing you to build "you own order" and/or
"your own very personal recognizeable new things" that you feel in it.
Well yeah .. "no way to really explain Neon without using it" .. and without a certain mood
as well, your "recognizeable stuff" is "more immediate" because exactly contains elements we
already know and we already have an "image" of them inside.
Neon is like .. like "to begin a new life" .. all has nothing to do with what you seen before .. yet ..
I found it while using it capable to take out some feelings/emotions of the kind "I've been there
before" .. it's .. hard to explain .. it can look like just "colored stuff" .. but .. it slowly "brings
your mind into something" .. and makes you feel like a kind of "direct connection"
betweem the screen and your mind .. then you start to feel like "there's something here I
alredy felt/seen it's already inside me .. " ...
There are some Neon modules that for me are really like "part of myself" or "part of something
I felt already I imagined it really that way" .. "The wormhole in the mind of God" is .. I don't
know how to explain it .. I think really there had to be some "magick" around when Yak built it
.. (it's a Neon module we nicknamed that way).
When you are in a certain state of mind Neon is just like a tool to "surf" into a "projection" of
your mind in that moment ..
And the "Crew experience" .. is something really really hard to explain .. the only thing can be
said is "you have to try it" .. it's .. really something that you'll never experience alone ..it's
really something I never experienced before in my life nor taught it could have been something
allowing such a kind of experience a day ..
Try it when it will be available .. you may like it you may well not like it at all and/or you could
maybe like just a part of it ...
It took me some time to understand it .. at the very beginning it was not very much clear to me
"what's this .. why ... " .. but .. then I got it .. I think because after all being for many years
into math (I am a lot into math) I was simply "rediscovering" stuff I already was trying to
visualize into my mind .. something "triggered the right switch into myself " and then
"all became perfectly clear" ..
I can say "it's a way of life" for me in a certain sense
And now back to this code, the software must go on .. damned PCs .. it's fucking hard to
code on them |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| Michael |
| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 1:16 pm |
|
|
|
Site Administrator
Joined: 07 Jun 2002
Posts: 8065
Location: Gent, Belgium
|
| But what's really more remarkable is that we feel that projects which look so vastly different as Neon and The Endless Forest do share something very essential! That is something that I would like to research a bit more. I think we'll learn a lot about our medium if we find out why navigating through a forest as a deer and flying through vast abstracted space seem so similar!... |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| Yak |
| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 1:57 pm |
|
|
|
Joined: 28 Oct 2005
Posts: 24
|
Not all sounds are words, but we still find music to be intersting and worthwhile . And music is basically mathematics shaped and structured in a particular way by the composer and the makers of instruments... I think that's how I perceive Neon and thelightsynth, as a visual equivalent to music (and indeed that is possibly why it accompanies music so well, and indeed maybe what all the constructors of "visualisers" are aiming at - although IMO passive visualisers miss the point being noninteractive).
Making people appreciative of the abstract stuff *is* a difficulty, one that I've thought about a lot over the years seeing people's reactions to each incarnation of the lightsynth. I think because the earlier versions were so crude and low-rez that they really could only be crude, distantly-abstracted versions of something far more complex that I as a tool designer was seeing in my mind when I made them. I noted two extreme responses to that work - some people simply could not understand what I was doing and why, and others "got it" straightaway and, with that understanding, were able to extrapolate from the crude representation on the screen something of what I had in mind. I got one of the most ecstatic reviews I ever had - "I find mere words too cumbersome to describe the brilliance and beauty of this" - from a chap who very obviously could see in the same direction I was looking, in a direction suggested by nothing more than a 40x25 matrix of coloured blocks.
But in the early stages it obviousl;y did need a certain kind of person with a certain kind of visual imagination to understand and appreciate the lightsynths. However over the years as graphic systems became more powerful I was able to describe more accurately onscreen what the vision in my head actually was, and more people found it easier to "get it".
Our experimentation with Neon and its use on and by lots of people over the last couple of years suggest that now we are properly over the threshold where we can have *most* people "get it". We've had nights where the Crew were working together so well that the performance stunned everybody in the room, reducing some to tears. Stepping away from artistic considerations for a moment and looking at things purely in terms of using software on a computer, I can honestly state that I have never seen people consistently using and enjoying a piece of entertainment software so thoroughly and over such a long time without losing any interest or enthusiasm for it.
A couple of weeks ago we had an American friend of mine staying, someone who has known me for the last 10 years odd and who knows previous incarnations of the lightsynth before and thought them "nice" but never really shown any great enthusiasm for using them. It was her last night here, and I was working on Neon and had the output of my lappy plugged through to the plasma. She was reading a book down the end of the room, not really paying much attention to what I was doing. At one point she looked up from her book, glanced at the plasma and was transfixed. The first I knew of it was hearing her say "Wow, that's amazing" . She spent the next hour or so learning to use the primary controller, and the next hour happily flying the synthesiser on her own .
I think I've *always* visualised music internally - I have for as long as I can remember listening to music, anyway. And again it's one of those things that you can't understand the pleasure of until you've felt it. The iterations of the lightsynths I see as progressively more accurate attempts to explain that kind of deliberate synaesthesic mode of appreciating music. Visualisers fail because the interpretation of the music is soulless. Performers using an interactive lightsynth compose their accompaniment according to how they feel - a common feeling that users report is that they no longer feel like they are using a controller to do something, it just feels like "their mind is on the screen" and the composition flows from thought alone...
mmm, it goves me goosebumps just thinking of that feeling, and makes me want to goof off work and immerse myself in Neon all day ... but we've got a deadline to release beta by the middle of the month so I must away and code .
I'm really enjoying these conversations, lots more to talk about... do you mind it taking place here? Because we're pretty far off-topic for "things to do in the forest" at this point and I don't want to annoy others on the forum with all my rambling .
anyway right now I have to code code code! |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
All times are GMT + 2 Hours
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
|
|
