M4G Tracker -- GBA tracker by Smiker (and iLKke) (Page 6 of 31)

EZ flash IV... you can't go wrong

Is that emulator output? It sounds horrible.
By looking at the interface I can already come up with some suggestions.

- Make a key combination to go to the next track, like on a tracker on a computer, when you press TAB. going through all columns of each track to reach the next will easily get to someone's nerves (musicians are a crazy bunch, remember )

- A new font for notes. It's a bit weird to read (when you change to (D?)#8, for example).

- (What are those numbers going crazy on the top left?)

- What are the top "VU-like" things for? If it is each channel's volume meter as I suspect, I think it might be more useful to have a master level too, or exchange that for a master level. I wouldn't have it at all, but that's a preference (I would have more space for the song part and add pattern transposition to the song part)

This is looking really good man, god job to you and ILkke on the tracker. Keep it up!

The GAMEBOY LOGO at the begining!
It's completely inaccurate.
I didn't know Visualboy Advance had such a lame sound output.
It sounds like absolute shit.
As long as you are checking the sound with a real unit, we can forget about this

There's a load of charsets available already out there. What are the specifications? I can go through some of them.
You could use one of the Amiga tracker fonts, too! I could dump those to you right away and ILKke won't have to suffer designing one from scratch

Well I would consider transpose option in SONG sectr, instead of those VUs.

Thanks for listening!

I agree with you about the logo. It is from the original gba bios file but  it sound completely different on every emulator you try, i.e. in noSgba it sound accurate, but there, the tracker doesnt sound like in the gba (then we have to trust vba better). Yeah. That sounds like a mess .
Of course im testing it on the gba hardware : ) I would be shit if i did release a rom without testing it for real!
About the fonts...thank you for the help offering, that means a lot for me, but i gave the gfx task to iLKke, so that-s not my duty now, tell him if you wanna help, but I dont think it ll be necessary. Anyway, thank you very much : )
TSP...i`ll discuss it later with the gfx artist/layout designer.
cheers!

There are DS carts able to boot Gba homebrew : ]

Last edited by smiker (Jan 20, 2010 8:42 pm)

Oh my, that video is magnificent - cannot wait for the next release.

akira^8GB, transpose in arranger is a solid idea and it will probably feature in the dedicated arranger screen. In the tracker screen it would double the arranger's space and I don't think it is a good tradeoff. Perhaps transpose could be visible/editable when you have a position in the arranger selected. Guess it's best to wait until we have the basic blocks rock solid, since more ideas are bound to come in the meantime. Thank you for your feedback so far, keep it coming!

About the rest...
First of all, yes the font will be changed, you can see that it's different in the mockups. In fact, the font is already in the new tileset, but I am waiting until more stuff is final so smiker doesn't have to remap tile usage every time I decide to change the order of tiles.

Skipping to next/prev track is also planned (L, R comes to mind). The same keys would be used to jump between 'boxes' in the instrument screen. I hope to eliminate 'cursor-crawling' as much as possible.
I was planning to let smiker make a 'usable' beta so that all the keyboard shortcuts can be tested. I've given this topic a lot of consideration, and although I have come with several ideas for a control scheme (not at all hard given GBA's plethora of buttons), I think that perhaps it would be most practical to keep it as close to LSDJ and take it from there. Most people are already used to that scheme, but I think that certain things can be vastly improved, for example copy/paste. On the other hand, it would be silly not to use the GBA button layout to the max, so I'm thinking of maybe being able to switch from 'LSDJ' (legacy) controls to 'M4G' controls. There are heaps of unexplored possibilities for easy control, such as context-sensitive pop-ups. Anyway, I think it is wise to wait until we can play with most of the features before committing to a control scheme.
Furthermore, unfortunately, I do not yet own a GBA, so I am sitting with my PS2 controller and imagine what it would be like

About VUmeters and such...
Currently we have plenty of screen space to spare. The layout we are going for at the moment uses that space either for eye-candy (VUmeters) or readability.
It is quite easy to imagine that we will need that space in the future for more useful stuff. For me, VUmeters are useful because they provide a visual feedback for the song so you can get around easier. I am not sure what would be the use for a master vumeter, tho? If the VUmeters prove to eat too much CPU, they will be dropped altogether.

In the meantime, it would be nice to hear from you guys if you think that going with a control scheme similar to LSDJ makes sense, or if we should forget about it and focus on what's best for M4G?