We've been completely unable to access the internet since Tuesday morning (our time). Since then, we've spent days chasing up the problem, which of course turned out to be at the ISP's end.
It's now approximately 10am on Saturday and have cleared the backlog of orders.
Unfortunately there's still a pile of unread emails, so if you're awaiting a reply, then you'll have to wait a bit longer.
Pooyan V1.05 Released
By Kevin Picone 14,Nov,2012
Pooyan is a remake of classic 1980's arcade game. The players goal is to protect Pooyan from a collection of pesky bad guys, ranging from those ever-so-nasty fire breathing foxes, pesky spiders through to falling rocks. Who all want to knock Pooyan from his safety cage. Pooyans no push over though and is packing from pretty mean crossbow fire power, but you'll have to fast on the mouse button to keep him safe.
New Features
* Sound & Music Controls.
* Windowed and Full Screen exclusive support.
* Pause mode during game play.
* Optimized performance for older computers.
* Improved visual presentation.
* plus the odd bug fix.
The Dtab V1.03c upgrade is now available. Dtab V1.03c continues to improve the Drum Tab importing parser. The latest changes are the inclusion of 'Row Repeats". The import parser supports two conventions at this time, those being the "REPEAT" and "PLAY" convention. The parser expects these statements to be used at end of the row that's going to repeat. Following the statement, the parser expects to see a repeat multiplier either on directly following the tag or on the row bellow it. The parser supports the x, X and * multiplier conventions. There's a few other contentions in use that may need tweaking, but this will allow you import them with minimal effort.
Some example rows with repeats in them,
|--- repeat x2 --|
C |----------------|----------------|----------------|----------------|
HH |xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx|xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx|xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx|xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx| repeat * 2
SN |----------------|------------o---|----------------|----------------|
BD |o---o---o---o---|o---o---o-o-o---|o---o---o---o---|o---o---o---o---|
C |----------------|----------------|----------------|----------------|
H |xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx|xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx|xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx|xxxxxxxxxxxxx---| repeat
S |----o-------o---|----o-------o---|----o-------o---|----o-------o-oo| *2
B |o-------o-------|o-------o-------|o-------o-------|o-------o-------|
C |----------------|----------------|----------------|----------------|
H |xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx|xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx|xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx|xxxxxxxxxxxxx---| play
S |----o-------o---|----o-------o---|----o-------o---|----o-------o-oo| 2x
B |o-------o-------|o-------o-------|o-------o-------|o-------o-------|
So we highly recommend updating !
History
Changes since the last major release.
*
Added
Note Hover is updated on Mouse click
Note Hover is updated on scroll wheel
Importer now supports REPEAT and PLAY row tags appended to the end of the bar. REPEAT row statements are treated as "repeat row X more times". PLAY row statements are treated as "play row X times in total".
Row repeats support three multipliers X, x and * with the number of repeat count can be on either side of the multiplier.
Added extra staff line remappers to the default set of remappers bd: maps to bass drum, sn: maps to snare, hh: maps to hihat.
*
Fixes
Import parser was dropping the last character from cut'n pasted links into the importer text.
Improved the check for update timer, it was bit dodgy when projecting the next query date. It's set to check at about 1 month intervals.
Upgrading For Registered Users
If you've already a registered DTAB user, simply download the new version and install it over your current install. If you're upgrading from a version older than Dtab V1.00, just be warned that DTAB V1.03c doesn't automatically use your old preferences. So you'll have enter your tabber name & registration information again.
A Decade of DTAB (GALLERY)
Since DTAB has been around a long time, 10 years in fact. Making it the oldest automated Drum TAB editor on the PC, most likely any platform for that matter. To celebrate this, I've posted a bit of gallery on my facebook page.
This past few weeks we've been taking a retrospective look at some of our heritage software on the Amiga platform. The Amiga was an incredible system for it's time, packing a punch far exceeding it's price tag. It's considering by many, as the system responsible for bringing many now standard operating system features to modern home computers. Unfortunately though, the parent company died before the platform could reach it's full potential. Which is an all too common story in this industry.
During the mid 1990's Underware Design was focused on developing Amiga software, primarily Amiga Video games. As an Indie developer, this was tough time trying to compete with the radically evolving 2D to 3D industry. With various projects being caught up in the hysteria of the 'Doom' shockwaves on the rival PC platform. A good example for us would be, our Thesius XII project. Thesius was side scrolling shooter, built out of a personal love of such game genres at the time, still do. But in 1994 / 1995, 2D games were quickly being labeled as the past, dead even in the 3D era.
To further set the scene, not only was the PC landscape rapidly making it's transition to 3D texture mapped games, but arcade franchises like Sega's Virtual Fighter and Daytona were going gang busters. Then comes the introduction of first generation of 3D capable home consoles. So you soon find yourself caught become a rock and hard place, were you make the transition to 3D or die, at least that's what it felt like then. Today, I think it was probably a mistake to try and compete with them on the same terms. But we live and learn.
Making the jump into the 3D realm on the Amiga was tough, very tough. Information was scarce, and just much like the 2D era, programmers tended to hold onto their secrets. Which meant getting even the simplest things off the ground, felt like climbing Mount Everest. One of the hurdles when doing software texture mapping on Amiga, wasn't just clock speed of the cpu, but rather how the video hardware represents the screen. Amiga chip sets use bit planes. While bit planes are efficient in terms of memory, they're not ideal for rendering texture mapped pixels. To counter this, programmers would render 3D scenes in chunky (byte per pixel) format, then convert this data into bit planes (planar) on the fly, commonly referred to as C2P. As efficient as the process can be, it placed a sizable bottle neck of what the low end Amiga systems could achieve.
Thus started a long journey of discovery for us, which in can summarized into two engine tech demo's, the first was called Reality and the second was Metal Combat. The Reality project was our attempt to bring a hybrid Wolf 3D / Blane Stone styled engine with polygon characters on the Amiga A1200/68020 machines with fast memory. At that time, this was perhaps the most ambitious (ie. see insane) thing I've ever attempted. Setting the bar so high meant that failure was not only likely, but virtually guaranteed. That didn't stop me from trying though. Bellow is a short video of an older version of Reality running under WinUAE.
Unfortunately, it's been so long since I was actively working upon this project some key files have been lost. So unless I can find them, or another more update version of the demo surfaces, then this is perhaps the only glimpse to it's existence. While not in this version of the demo, the objective was to have texture mapped walls and floors, and use the 1D wall z buffer, to clip the the flat shaded triangles into. Which meant drawing the polygons in vertical, but was a fairly easy to cull objects from the scene.
While Reality wall about texture mapping, another concept we'd spoken about internally was the idea of doing a Street Fighter clone for AGA Amigas a year or so before. Fighting games were hot and it seemed that if you render a pair of low polygon flat shaded characters, it might be feasible to game a 3D fighting game on for AGA Amigas. This is where the Metal Combat tech demo originated from, much like the Reality engine, it was series of render tests trying to hit minimum polygon count at playable rate, on the bare bones Amiga A1200 system. The render engine is CPU based, rendering only flat shaded triangles. The scene is drawn in 16 colour planar to a fast memory buffer, which is copying into chip memory. The idea was to use dual playfield for the backdrops/ground. So the characters would have been 3D, but the scene was to be mish mash of 2d/3D.
Seeing this demo again, I can't help but feel this was an area where we should have tried to exploit more, given everybody else was trying to make a better Doom game. But it was the 90's and tools and information just weren't what they are today. A version of the tech demo's source code is available on the our Amiga Source Codes page. Perhaps somebody will take it and make something cool out it one day.
A lot of byproducts occurs either directly or indirectly during the development of such projects. Such as a number support tools and libraries. If you're going to create a 3D game, then you need a way to edit 3D models. There was no tool chains like today, so we knocked a simple conversion / colouring tool for Imagine 3D. The tool let the user import / colour / set normals etc of the model. Along with that came some libraries that were released on Aminet, things like the AGE & PllbC2P come to mind. The latter is a library of precalc based routines to convert chunky to planar on 68020 cpu's.
PllC2p has been re-released. The code was originally written in AsmOne V1.20 (or there abouts), but it couldn't really be used in modern assemblers due to various syntax issues, like case sensitivity. So that library has been updated to assembly with the PhxASS assembler. While there are no doubt superior C2p methods today, hopefully the concept will be useful for somebody. Here's some tech demos that use it.
PllC2p has been re-released. The code was originally written in AsmOne V1.20 (or there abouts), but it couldn't really be used in modern assemblers due to various syntax issues, like case sensitivity. So that library has been updated to assembly with the PhxASS assembler. While there are no doubt superior C2p methods today, hopefully the concept will be useful for somebody. Here's some tech demos that use it.
A.G.E was a flown on project from the all the previous work. It's a graphic library that can be wrapped from high level languages, namely AMOS BASIC. The library supports AGA chipset, therefore given AMOS users long awaited AGA support. The idea for the project came from a previous Amos example written to demo how to display AGA pictures with just standard Amos. The library was originally released in 2000, but that version was almost impossible for users to decipher. So what i've done, is clean up the Amos wrapper to simplify the process for you. The library isn't a perfect though, there's a number of niggles, but even so, you can certainly have some fun with it. For example, here's a gouraud shaded demo written in little old Amos with AGE for rendering.
Well, that about completes our round of nostalgia, thanks for indulging me :). Sadly my real Amiga 1200 died long ago, and all the remains is an image from my hard drive. If you're an Amiga fan at heart, then I'd absolutely recommend firing up WinUAE sometime and have a mess around. It's amazing how much fun programming those machines actually is, and if you tire of that, then check out what we're doing with www.PlayBASIC.com for a Windows fun..
Pooyan is a single player remake of classic 1980's video game. The players aim is to protect Pooyan from a collection of pesky bad guys, ranging from those ever-so-nasty fire breathing foxes, pesky spiders through to falling rocks. Who all want to knock Pooyan from his safety cage. Pooyans no push over though and is packing from pretty mean crossbow fire power, but you'll have to fast on the mouse button to keep him safe.
Regular visitors will have no doubt noticed some slight changes to the sites appearance this last week or so, our focus thus has been upgrading the site backend. Nothing too major, just want to make sure everything's working as easily as it should be, or even working for that matter. It turns out, the News Letter subscription form was broken, so that's been simplified and replaced.
The News Letter has been reset also (for the time being) so if you're on the original list, then you should think about signing up again. Our news letter is very low volume and contains articles on our products and from fellows users ! - If you're into facebook, then we're also started a Underware Design page and could use the support.
DTAB V1.03 Update Released
By Kevin Picone 26,Jun,2011
DTAB V1.03 Update Released
The Dtab V1.03 upgrade is finally released, as you can no doubt tell from the history bellow, there's lots of new additions and functionality tweaks. Our focus for V1.03 has been on improving the feel of the editing environment, the Doc's and the Drum Tab importation features just to name a few.
So we highly recommend updating !
History
Changes since the last major release.
*
Added
Scroll Wheel Note selection in main editor. Scroll up/down to step through the available note heads for each staff line.
Scroll Wheel navigation, scroll up/down through song (When not over current bar)
Basic Scroll Wheel support to Some windows
Added tempo value to the title of the tempo edit form
Fixed the ugly resizing, so the main form smoothly clips when reaching its min width and height
Added user preference to define the direction of the scroll wheel when scrolling through the note heads.
Added a note hover feature to the edit window
Added external staff line and note head names
Added option to disable/enable note head hovering
Snare Rim Shots now have double the snare hit during playback, so its thicker than an a regular accented hit.
Included DTAB Script Engine and hooked it into the web import process
Importer Rule Set Parsing. Users can insert special tags in to Drum Tabs to control how the Dtab Importer is to remake the Staff Line and note heads which allows the user to save the Tab (with rules) and import it later at will.
Added form for user to define rule set.
Added some support for the importer to accept colon characters as bar dividers as some tabs use colons in the staff line header/ row end and pipes for any middle bars. The importer now just has better logic for deal with such rows. You can
remap the colons as pipes | using the rules.
Added solo section name to the import section detection.
Replace section name detection with faster version
imported songs automatically clip to the physical bar length.
support to decodes single spaced 1/8th note triplets in 4/4 time during import.
Importer removes loaded/download tabs containing ASCII tab character. The formatter assumes that tab characters are aligned to 8 character bounds as per NOTEPAD
Importer can attempt to guess the timing on bars the don't include a count and exceed the expected bar size by one.
Importer supports the dash song name convention. Ie Band-SomeBand Tabber-Bill
Importer uses its own default rule set when none appear in the tab.
Importer can detect "play X times" tags above bars.
Importer detects played as triplet tags. This makes the bar decoder remap any 3/4 sized bars (without counting) as 4/4 triplets.
Importer turns player off when importing
Import Rules now support a pre-processing Replace function. This allows users to replace strings in the tab body prior to importing. The replace occurs inside the import, not in tab import text window.
Import can detect repeats blocks wrapped within the {} chrs
Beta Test versions can now have a built in expire date.
Added some Short cut labels to the ADD section dialog. Intro, Verse, Chorus, Solo, Bridge, End
Added click on section headers to edit them.
Added click on the song details to pop the edit info dialog
Download Page to the import Tab
Save tab adds the tab to the file history
Save tab perform and pre-scan of the tab looking for a possible Song & Artist name
Tempo dialog has some quick tempo suggestions
Delete wasn't fully hooked up on the rule window.
Added net connection detection, if no connection is found the download and auto update features default to off.
Edit section was sizable for some bizarre reason
Added a Remove from history button to the Reload dialog. It doesn't delete the file, just the file listing in the history.
Dragging a Tab onto the main window is now added to the history
*
New Features
Web Upgrade Checker Defaults to Monthly
Web Importer Form + Script Engine.
ESC key can toggle the editor dialogs on/off, Giving a full screen mode edit area.
*
Changes
The bar edit and play back controls now center in the form when its resized.
The Key mapping form is now wider so it handle all the different sounds.
*
Fixes
The Second bass drum/hi hat foot line had a typo in it.. Dunno how long that's been there.. :(
Tempo search could overflow if a new track was imported and current bar was beyond the song length
Importer could overflow the temp song buffer when writing repeated bars from the temp buffer to the song output buffer
Importer could skip the opening bar dividers on some multi bar repeats
Various forms weren't being closed, if the main window was.
Edit Section has a typo on the cancel button.
Edit Section didn't refresh the render view port.
Time Sig selection was using combos rather and list boxes
Cut and pasting on the Import Tab window would trip a download query if a link was in the text
The current bar label was black on win7 machine, replace it with a picture box
The loader didn't init the default tempo when loading old DTAB format 0 files. So they would default to 120bpm.
Import didn't always activate the correct staff lines in the edit window.
Upgrading For Registered Users
If you've already a registered DTAB user, simply download the new version and install it over your current install. If you're upgrading from a version older than Dtab V1.00, just be warned that DTAB V1.03 doesn't automatically use your old preferences. So you'll have enter your tabber name & registration information again.
A Decade of DTAB (GALLERY)
Since DTAB has been around a long time, 10 years in fact. Making it the oldest automated Drum TAB editor on the PC, most likely any platform for that matter. To celebrate this, I've posted a bit of gallery on my facebook page.
Today we're moving from beta into the final Release candidate testing for DTAB V1.03, meaning that we're only focusing on testing the new sections of functionality. So make sure you download and get testing it... I'm expecting this to be pretty close to the final though... Have fun
You can download the current beta from our forums or the DTAB facebook page.
Work is progressing nicely on the next upgrade of DTAB. Our focus for V1.03, is improving the user friendliness of the application. One of area that's needed work is the mouse interface in the tab editor. Which now supporst for the scroll wheel. The wheels action is context driven, so it'll respond differently depending upon where you use it. The current implementation sees the wheel acting not only as a navigation tool through the drum tab, but as an alternative note selection tool. Selecting notes is as easy as moving the mouse over a staff line then rolling it forward / back through the available note heads. A simple change, but one that's improved the mouse interface dramatically.
Some other additions are note head tool tips, new staff lines and some more tweaks the drum tab playback engine. The note head tool tips help address one of the issues with Drum Tabs for new users, that being it can be difficult to work out what the various note heads mean at first glance. The tips give a short description about note head under the mouse. These can be turned off in the preferences, but they should help new users get up to speed.
One of the biggest new features on the horizon will be the introduction of some web support to dtab, starting with some simple things to help people keep up to date, through to the more complex tab downloader feature. The download feature is an extension drum tab importing frame work. The purpose of the downloader is to fetch a tab from a remote site. The fetching process attempts to get any extra information that may have been removed from the tab body and insert it back. Unfortunately sites often remove the song name and artist information from drum tabs, which just adds another little chore for the user when importing, or just download in general. This just makes it easier!
Hopefully, that's give you some insights on what you'll find in the next Dtab upgrade. Make sure you drop by the DTAB facebook page or check our forums all the latest info on the upgrade.
