Marine Aquarium 3 Rumors and Speculation

[Tiny Turtle]

Originally posted by Mith:

Ya know.... Dream Aquarium has a beta for those of us who have the license... he's ALWAYS making adjustments. Why can't Marine Aquarium do this? It can't be THAT bad as it is right now... and as far as I'm concerned, it's fun to see the progress...

Besides, if you offered it to us on the forum, you would get the sales of the program up and going! I'd LOVE to spend my money on this thing now... just reading this freek'n forum about it's release is KILLING me...LOL.  

That's not really a fair comparison for several reasons:
1. Alan (DreamAquarium) isn't "always" making adjustments. He did a major rewrite and there were no new beta versions for a *very* long time. The new betas currently being offered are the fruit of this rewrite.

2. MA3 *will* become an open beta - this is what you think of as the "released" version, but will continue to improve with major additions.

3. The current version called "alpha" is probably more of a "closed beta" at this stage, but it isn't quite ready for everybody just yet. You will surely have no problems with it as you are interested enough to look for new versions and so, but there are oh so many out there who will download the first version, not realise this is work in progress and lose interest in MA3 altogether as it wasn't *perfect* – which is isn't *at this time*.

4. The original MA was in beta for quite some time just the way you want it to be now. This was all those versions like .99f, .99h and .99k before 1.0 was finally made available.

/Tiny β

[Jim Sachs]

JB - Converting MIDI files to MP3 would be an enormous undertaking - far beyond the scope of the Aquarium. Anyway, it turns out that DirectShow won't do seamless looping, so we can't use it for the bubbles.

TT - All true.

[mZex]

if bubble volume is a problem could you not just have a range of 5 or so midi bubbles tracks with different of amplitudes to choose from? - im not a programmer i just play with flash

[TheMethod]

Please tell me if I'm missing something here.

I've mentioned before, but are you entirely sure Midi music is worth the effort? I find it almost outlandish that this is something that made it onto the shortlist of MA3 'features'.

I for one wouldn't sit there listening to music, let alone Midi music, whilst enjoying my tank.

That said if I did want music, it would be MP3 - ie, proper music from my library.

Honestly, I think it's wasted effort. And given the option of having to mess about because of Vista - I'd dump it roadside and scream on.

[SunKing]

100 PAGES!! ...and it's almost October. All signs are pointing towards a release soon.

[feldon34]

I have no problem with MIDI music. It is space efficient. If people have a problem with MIDI volume, they can adjust it under their sound card settings (Or is this removed from Vista, another one of those things they decided to just leave out?).

Because Jim is unhappy with the native MIDI library that comes with Windows (who isn't?) I always figured he would include a compact screamtracker or other X3M or IT player inside of the Aquarium and compose his default music tracks (Pachabel's Canon) in S3M format. S3M is basically MIDI + the samples (with looping, fading, and other effects possible). I know this library is small because I have seen 50kb EXEs with 10 minute songs.

I do think that since MA3 now supports mp3, the bubbles could be saved as mp3. All mp3 player software out there can play loops songs seamlessly, so there must be some example code out there on how to do it even if DirectShow won't do it natively.

[Jim Sachs]

mZex - That might be a pretty good idea. The entire bubble.wav could be one note. Playing that note at a different amplitude (velocity in MIDI-speak) could be a good way of controlling volume. It's efficient, since it always uses the same .wav file. The question is - Can it loop seamlessly?

TheMethod - Yes, MIDI is necessary because it's the only way I can efficiently package a default track with the program. A 6-minute MP3 file would more than double the size of the program.

Sunking - Yes, it's getting very close. Just chasing down a few bugs, mostly pertaining to multimonitors. If the solutions to those problems would simply make themselves known, we could release a Beta version in a matter of hours. (Or if the Microsoft DirectX team would call and say something like, "Just set the DontCrash bit of the Background Flag in the Monitor Structure for RenderUnit2, and you'll be all set").

Morgan - Can't loop MP3 seamlessly.

[rctneil]

That sounds like a great idea, having the bubbles in mp3 format by default and having all music selected be converted into mp3 before being used would just allow you to focus on getting MA3 to play 1 standard format. Then you wouldn't have to bother getting toegther a decent midi instrument set for the app.

Thanks

Neil

[Jim Sachs]

Converting MIDI to MP3 is WAY beyond the scope of the Aquarium.

[rctneil]

Sorry, Jim, I was responsing to a post on page 99, didn;t even see that page 100 was available when I replied so didn;t see all the posts on this page so I apologise for that!

Thanks

Regards,
Neil

[Wizwad]

Originally posted by Jim Sachs:

Morgan - Can't loop MP3 seamlessly.  

Do you mean you can't loop mp3s seamlessly, or that you can't loop them seamlessly yet?

(I've just been looping a neat piano track using Winamp and it appears, at least, to loop seamlessly without problem.)

(You can always count on someone to barge in and tell you you're wrong!)

[Jim Sachs]

In looping your piano track, does the last note die out to zero before the track starts again? That's the problem with a continuous form like the bubble sound. The beginning and end have to be perfectly matched at the same place in the waveform so that you don't hear a click or a silent moment.

MP3 is a compressed format, so that the end of the piece is "antialised" against the silence to follow. Those bytes would almost certianly not line up with the beginning if it started playing again instantly. Also, there is some decompression overhead that causes a slight delay at the beginning of an MP3 piece.

[feldon34]

Winamp has completely uninterrupted seamless playback. I have acquired concert recordings which are uninterrupted songs or passages which have no break but have been split into tracks for easier indexing. There is no click or dropout of any kind when it switches tracks. In this case, it actually scans the end of the file for the last quiet byte, queues up the next mp3, and does the surgery in memory so it is completely seamless. Winamp uses its own mp3 player software.

[Jim Sachs]

Sounds hard.

[Tiny Turtle]

What if the mp3 was included in the download file and the installer then convert it to a wav which perhaps could be looped? Once MA is downloaded the size isn't an issue, right?

[feldon34]

I didn't think the push for converting the bubble sound to an mp3 was for size reasons. After all the bubble sound is ~100kb and the Aquarium is now 6MB.

[Jim Sachs]

No, the conversion of the bubble sound was not for size reasons, but to create sort of a Unified Field Theory, where all the sounds that the Aquarium needs would be played through one type of player (in this case DirectShow).

I'm looking for an idea which would just reuse everything I've already got in a slightly different way. Using a sound editor to convert a waveform to a different format is minutes of work. Creating code to do the same thing on the fly (especially with a proprietary format like MP3) is weeks of work. Minutes is more what I had in mind.

[hololo]

Is MA3 support mul-languages windows system?
I can give any support for Simp-Chinese, Trad-Chinese, Japanese.

[Jim Sachs]

Prolific has people to do language conversions, but it will be a while.

[Highlander]

Can do the the dutch/flemisch translation 4 you if you like.

I did the flemisch one for Dream Aquarium