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A Truly UserFriendly Game Audio Engine?
dallen writes "Do you wonder what Illiad of UserFriendly does when he's not coming up with comics? This article at GlobeAndMail.com reveals that his company, Condition30, is working on multiple videogame-related engines which create unpredictable but recognizable content. The company is working 'to polish its game-engine technology', but its public demo, a music creation engine, makes 'random' music that sounds much like music, not noise, potentially for games and other interactive products. Says their website: 'Our principal product, ZenStrings, is a music-generation engine that composes music and audio in real-time without taxing memory or processing power'."
The space-sim 'Elite' did this in the mid 80's.
They didn't just do it for the novelty, however.. they had to have the computer generate stuff randomly, as they had no memory to store stuff permanently!
There's a cute article about how they developed it, and how the random engine created some pretty funny outcomes, including planet 'Arse'.
mogorific carpentry experiments
The public demo is samples, not a runnable demo. According to the article, they're seeking patents. I think I'd rather try to get Boodler running, or Looching, which preceded that. (Or Tranquility, which someone else mentioned.)
Isn't this what the original Beatnik engine Thomas Dolby designed was supposed to do? I remember Dolby giving a lecture at a Music and Multimedia event in SF (around 1996). This was back in the CD-ROM days. Headspace would later dissolve and Beatnik looks to be more focused on phone ringtones.