@FoxBlitzz:
You can bundle the VM with the program (the same thing needs to be done with Python and other interpreted languages) and make a launcher program in C that uses this VM to run it instead of a global VM. This is what people who don't want to use the global VM do. Of course this is only the case with Windows systems since Mac systems have Java preinstalled and Linux systems are usually used by people who know how to install the Java VM without breaking anything.

But they are notes, not hex values.

In traditional music theory pitch classes are represented by the first seven letters of the Latin alphabet (A, B, C, D, E, F and G) (some countries use other names as in the table below).

(Full article with more details)

There are hex values, but those are the instrument numbers and effects. Some trackers (like ModPlug Tracker i think) provide combo boxes and more "nice looking" interfaces to edit these values, so this isn't an issue either. Using a piano roll is possible and in fact easy to implement i think (it'll eat more space in screen though). I believe that the fact that trackers don't use it is that its not asked much and most people who use trackers are familiar with using the letters.

Actually Sun does the port to OS X and Apple takes care of the details. Or at least some of the key Java people are involved in the port, since James Gosling had a blog entry about his experience in porting Java to back-then new x86-based OS X.

Also currently Mac OS X has the latest release of Java available (1.6), introduced in the last update of Mac OS X. Although, the major difference between 1.5 and 1.6 is in the API and if you are careful enough, your program can run in 1.5 machines with no problem (1.6 includes scripting support via JavaScript though, which is a nice feature - although you can always put a scripting engine in your 1.5 program).

I never heard about the speed difference before. Can you point me to some source for that? I'm be interested about what and how is slower in Java on Mac OS X, since i'm working on a Java-based 3D game engine and world editor and i would like to know what to watch out for.

EDIT: btw i doubt Java is slower than Python in Mac OS X though. Python is an interpreted language after all and even if there is a JIT out there that is up to date with the latest Python version, i highly doubt that is as efficient as HotSpot.

I'd use Java instead of Python, mostly because its much faster (the HotSpot VM has one of the best JIT compilers), type safe and -above all- comes with Swing, which in my opinion is the best designed GUI toolkit (although not always the easiest) and this project needs a strong GUI foundation. Also Java has a shitload of extremely good programming environments, such as NetBeans and Eclipse (personally i prefer NetBeans for Java, but others might prefer Eclipse).

Depends on how to look at it. If you look at it as playing music, yes it is unintuitive. However if you think about it, you're not playing music but instructing your computer to play music. In other words, you're editing the music score, much like how you would edit a text in your word processor for an article by adding bold, italic, underline, changing fonts, etc so the printer will know how to produce what you want (basically "instructing the word processor how to show your text").

Also not every tracker is keyboard based. In fact, the most known tracker, Fast Tracker II, and it's multiplatform remake, MilkyTracker, use the mouse for almost everything (except adding notes - for this you do use the typing keyboard or a MIDI keyboard).

it doesnt have module suppporrt cant believe your one of them one of those purists. there's nothing remotely intuitive about scantrons and i dont have acess to midi keyboard to write song on so its like zero fun trying to do that.

In the classic vertical tracker view you basically set up the computer to play a tune. You make the tune by saying when a note will play, for how long, etc. Basically you make a musical timeline.

I'm not sure about the "other" method you suggested. I thought it was some sort of replace the letters with keyboard keys or something. I haven't tried Pxtone, but from what i've seen the way you make notes isn't really different: the major difference is that notes are written from left to right in a 'chart' way and you edit a single instrument a time with an order list for each instrument, where in a tracker the notes are written from up to down using letters and you use channels to say when an instrument is used in time. Also in trackers time is relative to the pattern instead of to the song and you use a separate one dimensional order list for the patters (this is done to save space for repeating patterns probably).

I'm not purist, there are things i would like to change in a tracker (like getting rid of the order list and using a "grand pattern" screen where you put single or multi-column patterns in it), but i would keep the method you use to enter notes since i'm used to it.

Basically i think that's the trick: what you're used to.

Note that the fruity loops comment was because earlier versions of fruity loops worked similar to a tracker but instead of using vertical columns with letters they used horizontal rows with piano keyboards.

Too many to remember, but...

- All of Knee Deep in the Dead from Doom 1, as previously said. Also the first city level of the Doom 2 map with the arachnotrons.
- All of Dimension of the Doomed (Ziggurat Vertigo!) from Quake 1.
- The alien-like spaceship levels of Duke Nukem 3D.
- Bluff Eversmoking from Unreal 1 (the level with the bell tower, the green slime/water at the bottom, a castle on the top of a huge hill and prison cells inside it, the ghost nalis and other stuff i can't remember - this level is basically the definition of the epicness in this game). Also Sunspire (although the internals are a little maze-y), The Trench (the outside of ISV-Kran's crash site), NyLeve's Falls (with probably the first game to use a dedicated programmer for fire and water effects, its hard to find someone who wasn't stunned by the falls :-), Noork's Elbow and others. This is a huge game basically, i have a hard time remembering everything from it.
- The free hospital/clinic from Deus Ex. I really like the emptyness and gloomyness of this place, especially the entrance. It reminds me of some old dystopian sci-fi films (well the game has such a setting, but in many cases its not shown in the environment).
- Do boss levels count? If so, the first huge-boss level from Painkiller (the graveyard one). Although its probably the combination of huge boss/flat environment that makes it stand out and not the level alone.

I don't play multiplayer games much, so i cannot think any level from such a game.

@Annabelle Kennedy:
But then it's not a tracker, but "fruity loops" :-P

Anyway, i think most tracker musicians use a MIDI keyboard (at least most of those i know do use one, although not all).

Some of my favourite games are Unreal, UT99 and recently Deus Ex. These games include awesome music, which is in module formats (XM and IT mostly) and has a distinct feeling to them due to the module nature. This feeling can be used in favour of the song or abused, trying to make something that modules by nature are weak for (like trying to make metal/rock music - although possible and with some very good examples, modules are best for electronic, beat-y music). Not only these games used module music, however, but also many games from the 90s (like most Epic games, almost all Amiga games, many indie games including Bud Redhead and DX-Ball, etc) and a whole scene around module music exists - although in these days i feel that mods are mostly used for chiptunes, which while being a nice music style, are only a single side of what can be done with mods.

Personally i love module music and i believe its one of the greatest formats to use for game music, especially where size does matter (you can't have a quality 7mins track in less than 1MB with MP3/OGG - and with vorbis encoding for samples, the size becomes even smaller). Because of this i made a MOD player for Flash, although this post isn't about it.

It's sad to see that not many game musicians these days make modules. I think module music is underappreciated and it is becoming something like a lost art - much like pixel art, but while currently pixel art has some commercial value given all the mobile phone and browser games, module music has not. Some modern musicians even consider module music a mundane 'programming-style' method to compose (which isn't a surprise actually since it was developed in an era when computer game musicians were also programmers - although i think it has more to do with the vertical sequential representation of the tracks and usage of letters for notes and 'effects commands', than anything else).

I don't know much about music. I've got a MIDI keyboard (a M-AUDIO Axiom 25) with the intent to learn music and write modules, although currently i pretty much suck :-P. I hope to become better over time.

I wonder however, what is your view on module files? And if you like it, which modules do you consider to be of 'awesome quality' showing off what can be done with module music?

I suppose I should get around to picking up Unreal anyway. Still haven't played it (only Tournament) and I seem to be going through an FPS period now...

I've got Unreal twice: the first time was bundled with my father's Voodoo graphics card back back when these cards were good and the second time was recently when i got it from Steam (i still have the Unreal 1 CD -i hope- but Steam has the 'Gold' version that includes the expansion pack, which if you ignore the lame voice acting in intermission screens, has more levels -and some nice weapons, although a little out of place considering the rest of the game's style- more music and concludes the 'story' - in a lame way, but that should be expected given that it was made by the same company that made Unreal 2... - no it was not epic).

Epic Megagames was cool, but they became less cool when they lost the 'Mega' part, which happened sometimes after Unreal. It makes sense though, Unreal was a 'mega game' - probably the biggest 'straight' FPS i have played so far - and everything after was was dwarfed in comparison.

Well, yeah, it wouldn't be free but it would at least be cheaper. You'd have to pay to have the CD:s printed anyway. Again, I'm not saying it's the coolest thing in the world and something I want to do, but it's nice to see a big company like Sony releasing their retired hardware to the public instead of just leaving it as-is.

The thing is, they're not actually releasing to the public. Instead they just drop the gatekeeping process. You still need devkits and you still need to make special disks. And lets not forget the distribution and -of course- promotion costs for a game. Most of these are outside the range of an indie developer, unless some sort of company is made which does this work for smaller studios. In this case however, you get your gatekeeper back (since a company wouldn't go through all that effort just to sell one disk - printing disks is only profitable when done in masses - so they will filter the games). The only difference is who keeps the gates now :-)

Who is going to print your CDs to be unchipped-PS2-friendly? Wont that cost?

Well, most of my free programs' and games' licenses allow that :-). I don't lose anything if you do it anyway.

But.

Since there seems to be demand for this, i will add an option for 'non-commercial' usage. However i'm not much concerned about those who REALLY REALLY want to restrict their sprites. I don't believe that those are many. I'm more concerned about those who will select 'non-commercial' "just because" or because they're not really informed or, well, for many invalid reasons (always according to my beliefs). So ok, i'll put this feature.

But those who select it will suffer a great lecture from me before accepting it

See? Sometimes discussion works 

EDIT: ok, now we solved this, can i get some more comments about the database's features? Also is anyone interested in designing the site (it would be fun if it was like in a game i think)?

How does it makes an artist's life easier if someone who was going to use his sprite if it was restriction-free now is restricted in not being able to use it?

I really have a difficulty understanding this and i'm someone who makes all his sprites himself and even worked for a while as a freelancer and i AM willing to not restrict the usage of my work. In fact i already have the sprites of Nikwi available for anyone since two years now for any use, including commercial (and btw thanks to doing that i got a few requests for making some pixels for others).

As i said, i know what CC is and the problem isn't the wording but the restrictions they can impose. Not having restrictions is so bad or my english is so bad that people don't understand what i'm writing?

Also i never said anything about it being public domain. Its different, i never said give up the copyright or anything (which, btw, is not always possible since some countries - like Germany i think - does not allow a person to give up copyright, thus legally saying something like this doesn't stand there). You get full copyrights, full credits, full recognition (if the site becomes popular), full everything AND no usage restrictions.

Here is a thread to post tools -any kind of tools- that saved the day! That is tools which actually helped you get out from a situation that seemed lost.

My case is with Artistic Style a source code formatting tool. Whats so special about source code format tools you may ask? Well, the problem begins once you start using development tools which not only generate code but they don't allow you to edit the generated code, but allow you to edit code around their code and at the same time support multiple styles. For most who used it, this will bring you NetBeans in mind because that's what i'm talking about. As you probably don't know, i released Slashstone Mapas yesterday, but i develop the program for around three years now. Since i started the development i changed many versions of NetBeans, including a lot of beta versions, which had different style configurations, different editors (version 6 at least has a new editor as far as i know), and personally i changed my own coding style since then a couple of times. The generated code of NetBeans tries to use the code style you specify in the options, but it seems if many styles are mixed the parser it has gets confused and starts breaking stuff to the point the project won't compile. Beyond that, of course, the project looks bad being made with many styles.

While NetBeans includes a source code formatter that does the job correctly, it doesn't touch its own generated code and there is no option to unlock the code editor. This would be ok for big blocks of generated code (like the initComponents() function), but becomes a problem with smaller functions like event handlers in which only the header of the function declaration and the brackets are locked and you are supposed to edit the middle. To make it more clear, here are some generated functions:



See where the event handling functions begin when compared to the function above (which is properly aligned).

So i decided to use an external formatting tool. After looking around for a while - and it took a while because there aren't many free and good Java formatting tools that support Java 6 - i found Artistic Style (or astyle). After reading the documentation (and doing a SVN commit just in case something goes wrong) i used the tool and in less than one second everything was properly formatted, including the sacred-for-netbeans generated source code.

This tool really made and saved my day :-)

I didn't ruled out CC but its not a single license you know. Its more like a "license generator" and if i used CC i would only specify a single license.

Using a single license making things simpler, that's all about it. What exactly license text i will use is something i'm not interested about right now (btw i thought something like zlib too).

However don't get it wrong: the license won't be commercial-only. Presenting it this way sounds like restricting the uses of the site while i want the opposite: a restriction-free license. Yes someone can take the sprites in there and use it in a game and yes she can make money from it. So? This is done everyday in other cases too, like in opensource software. You say that i seem to respect more programmers than artists (note: i consider everyone working in making a game as a 'game developer' regardless of working on art, sound or code). But what i see is that more developers are actually willing to give their work of months for free (i just did so a few hours ago by releasing my tilemap editor on which i worked for three years) than anyone else. I believe the reason for this is that there are not enough outlets. Yes one can take a sprite of yours (that you have probably spent at maximum one week making it - but usually its less) and use it in your game but at the same time one can take Irrlicht (that is under development many years now) and make a commercial game too.

SourceForge requires people to have specific licenses which all must allow commercial use of the projects. By your logic, programmers should feel less respected than whoever uses these projects and is not a programmer. Yet the site has hundreds of thousands of projects by a similar number of programmers.

Adding stuff in the database isn't something you are forced to do. Nobody forces programmers to put their projects in SourceForce if they don't want. Similarly if some artist doesn't want to put some of his work in the database, he can just ignore the submit link.


Anyway, we're getting a little off now. I prefer to stick to the database itself actually. The database will only contain sprites which are restriction-free: that is one can use it without any kind of usage restrictions. I really believe that this is the best thing to do. I will start a new discussion later on the license topic however when the site is beginning to take some shape and i will post the text here for review and fixes, but right now i believe its too early for this and i don't want this to be mixed with other more improtant to the implementation and features of the site.


So, any other comments or suggestions? :-)

- Forcing artists to let their work be used in products that other people will make money off of would really alienate the artist crowd. I don't want people to make money with my sprites. You should do something like Newgrounds Audio Portal (which does an awesome job at bringing musicians and developers together, as this project also should with artists and developers) and let the artists post their work under the Creative Commons License, which gives other people the freedom to use their work but it also lets the artists decide whether or not they want people using their work in commercial products, if they want to let people to remix their work, etc., and then you could include search options for people that want to search for sprites that they can use in commercial works and other things.

The idea is to give people a jumpstart with their games, being free or not. For commercial uses, i don't really expect people to come and grab sprites that everyone else uses unless they don't have enough money to hire an artist. So in either case the artist won't see a dime. The scenario i have in my mind is like this:

1. Kiddie Bee has a nice idea for a puzzle/platform/action/shooter/whatever game but her art looks like stomped ants. That would be fine for a whack-an-ant game but its not what she wants to make. She also has $0 to spend because she is a starving student in some place you never want to ever walk outside of.
2. So she visits the sprite db, grabs some sprites maybe changes one or two colors and she uses them to make a flash game.
3. She gets a couple of hundreds back from her game and she is ready to make a new one. She really liked the sprites she used so now that she has some extra money she contacts the artist who made the sprites to hire him make some more.

Thats the idea. Besides nobody will force any artist to put all of his sprites in there. He could leverage the medium to put some sprites (say from a commercial collection of sprites he has made) as a free advertisement. The downside of course is that people could use the sprites as they need.

Also i believe its simpler in general to say that "everything in this site is free for you to use as you like" instead of "its nice if you want to use these sprites -and thank you really- but MAKE SURE YOU READ THESE BOLDFACEDITALICTOTALLYUPPERCASEDLETTERSTHATSAY DONT EVER MAKE THE MISTAKE TO FORGET CHECKING THE USAGE RESTRICTIONS -um sorry, rights- OR WE WILL GET YOUR ASS SUED -that is only if you are in the same country and same area as we are thus being practical to do so". Besides focusing on one single things is better.

Plus, I think people would be a lot more comfortable distributing their work under a popular, proven open license instead of a license custom-made by you consisting of merely "Everything should be free to use in commercial and non-commercial and people should be free to modify the sprites to fit their needs."  

I haven't thought much about the license but as a known opensource laywer said in a book about licenses, even a single line of text can be used as a license. I will check to see if there are existing licenses which are readable, small (no more than 10-15 lines of text) and fit what i want.

You should add an option for developers to add their game or work or whatever in a list under the individual sprites they used. It'd give artists a nice thing to look at and feel happy about themselves that people are using their work, and other people might want to look at a list to see how the sprites could be used effectively and to see how many works have already been made with it (some people might not want to use a sprite that's already in every other Flash game on the internet). This could be administered by the individual artists.

That is a very good idea actually! :-)

Instead of making it permission-based, I think you should just add a 'Report' button. Permission-based submission systems can be kind of troublesome, for everyone. And instead of preventing all nude and penis sprites to be submitted in the site, you should just add a registered 'Mature' option to let people see them like in deviantART. Also, what's wrong with mspaint? A huge number of professional sprite artists enjoy using mspaint.

Well as i said i'll add a report button. Maybe permission isn't required then? I'll think about it. I was going to add a mature option btw.

I think a rating system would be nice. It'd let new visitors instantly see the top works in the database and hook them before they leave after a couple clicks. Plus it'd give the artists some friendly competition, eh?

Yes i was thinking about this too.

- You should not put ads on the site. You do not deserve money for your hard work!  Nah, I'm playing, but I it's just a neat thing to think about. If you're making artists contribute their work for free, you should do the same, eh?

I'm going to put ads but not something big or flashy, just some google adsense. Based from my experience so far fmo adsense in my own site i don't expect to make heaps though, but even getting half the expenses of the server could be nice (yes it could be nice to make $2 per month :-).

Maybe, just maybe, and I know this is a very ambitious thought, but this may be what keeps pixel art from becoming a dead art.

Since when pixel art is dead art? ;-)

Question, though, where you planning on accepting tiles, and if so, will there be a comprehensive sorting system for sizes, palettes, environments and grouping of "building blocks" to create certain kinds of terrain?

I will use a base category and tags. So people can use the 'nes' tag for example for NES-like sprites.

And were you thinking of having everything submitted being public domain, a certain license or is it up to the creator?

Everything should be free to use in commercial and non-commercial and people should be free to modify the sprites to fit their needs. Every entry will also have an optional "based on" link that if a sprite Foo is based on sprite Bar (that is Bar was used as the base) then it will be possible to say so.

The artist pages will have information about the artist and one of it will be about if he is willing to make additional sprites as a freelancer. However i will not provide anything more than this information and the artist will be responsible for giving a valid email address.

Also there will be comments in entries and a mark feature for inappropriate or copyrighted material. So if someone thinks some entry infridges someone's copyright or contains inappropriate material will be able to use this feature so the entry will be inspected for removal.

Thank you for your responses. If you have any comments or suggestions about these please say so. I haven't yet started developing the site so now its a good time to suggest things :-). Also if someone can contribute some (very simple) layout/theme i would be glad to use it.