I currently own a Blackstar ID Core 10w Amp. It has a lot of built in guitar effects such as Reverb, Delay and Modulation, all of which have various depths and levels. By connecting a USB cable from the amp to my computer, I'm able to use Blackstar's Insider software, which allows me to save these effects settings and switch to any of them with just a double click. However, the need for a double click makes it impossible for you to play your guitar and change effects during a song (which is what a pedal does).
However, I wanted to know if it's possible to use C++ to do something more ambitious than the manufacturer allows: I wanted to create a software that would play a backing track (voice+drums but no guitar) of a song and allow the user to set where during that song he wants his effects changed, and to what. This way, one would be able to play a song from start to end, not needing to worry about having to change effects.
This would also be a school project, so it can't really be a "mouse manager" or anything of this sort. It would need to be something more robust.
FYI, as far as I'm concerned, Blackstar does not give us any API we could work with. So I'd like to know if this project is even possible and, if so, where I should start.
Thank you!
This existing project is likely to help provide clues for you to reverse engineer what Insider does and rewrite that in C++.
https://github.com/jonathanunderwood/outsider
I feel your pain regarding Blackstar's awful Insider software.
To answer your question, is this project even possible, of course it is, the Insider software obviously is able to control the amp via USB. You just have to figure out what its protocol is.
You can use a USB sniffer like this one to see what commands Insider sends to the amp when you perform actions. With enough experimentation you should be able to reverse-engineer the protocol.
It's probably easier than you think. As evidence I offer the Insider software itself, which is not very sophisticated. The settings are probably modeled more or less as a struct.
I was looking at MeVisLab and I wondered if anyone knows a good framework for making a user interface similar to the one they use. I like the designing flow with boxes and arrows thing.
What I would really like is to able to integrate with C++ using Qt, and perhaps export the graph to xml of something like that.
There is another example of the interface here:
I hope someone knows something
Qt's Graphics View is a "framework" which does a good bit of the handling for the kind of scenario you describe. It doesn't take much code to get off the ground and within striking range of what you're looking for:
http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest/graphicsview-diagramscene.html
http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest/graphicsview-elasticnodes.html
I'm not aware of any open-source Qt-based programs that offer exactly what you want already written. Just noticed IBM did open source "DataExplorer", which is interesting to me...I might go take a look at that myself:
http://www.research.ibm.com/dx/
I've been working in C++ in embedded environments for a number of years, developing navigation applications. There is a gaming company in my hometown that I like the look of, but I don't have game development experience. You could consider a navigation app as a type of game, depending on who you are running from.
My question is, what steps should I take to enter the industry? Is it a bad idea to enter the industry at this stage (I'm 30)?
Being 30 doesn't really matter, you can enter the games industry at any age assuming you have the drive and ability.
Start reading about gaming topics, and game development websites (gamedev, gamasutra etc.)
Start writing games. Clones of games you like, your own original ideas, tech demos, anything that you can point to and say "I wrote that, and along the way I learned these things, and solved these problems."
If there is a specific area of interest to you, AI, Rendering, Frontend, Tools & Pipelines, Audio, focus on building game/demo/sample projects that challenge you in that area. "Yeah, I've done that" sounds a lot better in an interview than "yeah I've heard of that".
Get to know people in the industry if you can, through online forums, friends of friends, etc... One good contact can do more for your chances than weeks of demo coding or months of sending resumes out. Game companies may have open houses or job fairs.
The "entry level" jobs in game development are likely to be Frontend or Tools. If you've done navigation apps, sounds like that might be a decent fit for you. If that has included more low level work and optimization on embedded platforms, you might also look at Systems roles.
I'd suggest you start trying to write some games in your spare time. Having some demos is always a good start when you go to an interview and it'll give you some insights into what your job is going to be.
Gamedev.net has an excellent set of tutorials to work through to get a grip of a lot of game-coding concepts.
Do they have any job offerings? If so, look at what they ask for in the CV and start educating yourself in those concepts / technologies.
Contacting them and asking if they have any jobs for an excellent software engineer can't hurt either :)
I see you already accepted an answer, but I'll throw in my two cents:
If the company does console (e.g. Xbox360, PS3) or handheld (e.g. DS, iPhone) games, you should definitely emphasize the embedded aspect of your resume. A few anecdotes about how you optimized the memory layout of a class, or sped up some code by taking advantage of an obscure feature of the chipset will show that you can think like a console programmer. Also, if you did any sort of AI for the navigation apps (e.g. A*, Djikstra), it's good to mention that.
A few people recommended writing games - that's not a bad long term plan if you know you want to get into the industry, but I don't think you should let that stop you from applying to this particular company in the meantime. However you should definitely pick up a copy of one of their recent games, play it for a few hours over the weekend, and be able to say what you liked about it.
As for websites, I second the Gamasutra recommendation, along with Kotaku.
Good luck!
"game industry" is a broad question. There are:
AI programming
Graphic programming.
Sound programming.
Tool programming.
Scripting.
Physics programming.
Network programming.
You probably already can deal with #7, #5 and #4.
As for the rest - mostly it is a dealing with some kind of API, plus you need a very good understanding of 3D math (unless you make 2D game, that is).
For 3d math I cannot help you. I picked info in various non-english sources, and most of them aren't available anymore. However, I think this resource might contain info of interest.
For general 3d graphic info you need to study DirectX SDK and NVidia SDKs (both DirectX and OpenGL), plus there are OpenGL books you HAVE to read:
1. Francis s Hill, "Computer Graphics using OpenGL".
2. OpenGL programming guide aka "Red Book"
3. OpenGL shading language (aka "Orange Book")
4. And you might want to take a look at OpenGL reference manucal ("Blue Book")
I'm talking about OpenGL because while it doesn't offer same level of control for hardware resources, it is easier to get started with than DirectX, and available on larger selection of platforms and have a same power as DirectX. Plus GLSL isn't that different from HLSL (except that GLSL doesn't have remnants of assembly shader programming like HLSL), close enough to C++, so it is relatively easy to get started.
One important thing - if you seriously want to deal with 3D, you have to be able to easily imagine 3d operations in your mind. I.e. how to rotate object, scale object, move object, what matrix means, what is reflection vectors, how to cut polygon with planes, how to find intersection of two meshes, etc, and you should have at least basic understanding of more complex thing like boolean operations on polygonal meshes. I have no idea how to develop this skill (it is very close to "mechanical drawing"), but you'll get a lot of difficulties without it.
Just putting "experienced C++ dev" on your CV will probably get you in the door. The (UK at least) games industry is dominated by graduates and inexperienced programmers - the older ones either burn out or get promoted into management.
A lot of games programming is just programming - the skills are entirely transferable. And your navigation software experience probably puts you in for an AI-related role.
If someone with your background applied to me, I'd certainly give them an interview.
Well I started at 16 with (paid) game development. Search for jobs on websites. Make your own low-budget games and then publish them in a way or another.
If you are good people will search for you, otherwise you have to struggle a bit.
I'm a design student currently dabbling with Arduino code (based on c/c++) and flash AS3. What I want to do is to be able to write a program with a voice control input.
So, program prompts user to spell a word. The user spells out the word. The program recognizes if this is right, adds one to a score if it's correct, and corrects the user if it's wrong. So I'm seeing a big list of words, each with an audio file of the word being read out, with the voice recognition part checking to see if the reply matches the input.
Ideally i'd like to be able to interface this with an Arduino microcontroller so that a physical output with a motor could be achieved in reaction also.
Thing is i'm not sure if I can make this program in flash, in Processing (associated with arduino) or if I need another C program-making-program. I guess I need to download a good voice recognizing program, but how can I interface this with anything else? Also, I'm on a mac. (not sure if this makes a difference)
I apologize for my cluelessness, any hints would be great!
-Susan
What you need is most likely not a speech recognition program. You are looking for a speech recognition library. You're probably not that familiar with programming yet, so the term may be unfamiliar. Basically, a library is an intermediate step between source code and a whole program.
In your case, you are really asking for a library that (1) does vocie recognition and (2) works with Adobe Flash. Unfortunately, I can't find one of them with Google. Furthermore, I've found people who've tried, and their experiments (while short of what you need) are described by others as impressive. That suggests the technology isn't there yet.
It is probably easier to move the voice recognition to the Arduino. "Voice recognition Arduino" provides a lot of good hits in Google.
This is my first time asking here but I've been a reader for ages! A fantastic place to learn!
I was asked to design a simple board game as a programming project this semester (using C++) and to implement GUI for a bonus mark. I was rather lost reading through tens of possible GUI toolkits and not knowing which one to use. I'm rather a beginner and this is my first big project!
My requirements for GUI are very very basic. All I want is to allow the user to pick from between two options at the start of the game. Those options determine which character the user will pick in the game to play with. This is the only input I want from the user. The console program would receive this input, interpret it and do all the logic of the game in the console window.
Currently, the console window displays a numbered list of options for the user who then picks a number and based off that character input, the console knows what to do through some if-statements.
Up till now, I've been told that GTK+ is a good option and I've been advised to check out wxWidgets and QT4. I'm confused on which one to use since I want something fast to learn and simple to implement because the purpose I want it for is also simple. I was also rather reluctant to start learning a GUI toolkit from its basics then realizing it might not have my simple requirement.
Thank you in advance fellas and sorry for the rather long post!
If you want something pretty basic as far as a GUI goes, it might be worth looking into some sample applications from any of the named projects. See what you can find in a sample application that is most similar to what you have, and try to get that working. Then once you have it working, and tweaked to your liking, maybe play around with things a bit more then for a further/better understanding.
My previous experience is with WxWidgets and Qt. My advice would be to check out Qt because of the great documentation for the project as well as the QAssistant.
Good Luck, GUIs can be really fun to incrementally learn!