GMU:I and my Max/Felix Geith: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 12:39, 3 February 2021

THE PROJECT

The game "Catch Yourself If You Can"

The idea of my project was to create a simple game in Max MSP, that will be played by only one player using both hands to play against each other. So one hand is the others opponent. The player has to decide to let one hand win over the other, or try to balance the game. Both works.

To make this difference between the hands a bit clearer I decided to use two different interfaces/controllers. For the left hand piezo sensors track the tipping of each individual finger, on the other hand (literally) there's a slider on a OSC application on a mobile phone that's sending values to the Max Application.

The gameplay is pretty classic, oldschool you could say, it's heavily inspired by old Nokia games like Space Impact or Snake. The right hand steers a purple square (it's a spaceship of course), and has to catch incoming red squares, that are generated by the tipping fingers of the left hand. If the right hand fails to catch less than 5 enemy-squares, the game's over.

It's possible to count the score, to reset/restart the game at any moment and to choose from three different levels of difficulty, easy, normal and hard, changing the speed of the incoming values.

To make it easy to try out the patch quickly, without having to setup the sensors etc., I added five bang objects and a slider to simulate the sensors. These can only be used by one hand and not simultaneously, so you can test the patch with them, but the idea of playing against yourself doesn't work out this way.

Here's a video of me playing.

In the video below, you can find a detailed explanation on the patch, and how you setup the data inputs

To setup the piezo sensors, you need to connect them to your Max apllication using an Arduino and USB serial. You'll need the following

- 1 Arduino Uno (or Mega etc.) including USB connection - 5 piezo sensors - 5 resistors each ~100 ohms - 10 jumper wires (male) - some tape to attach the piezos to a surface like your desk

You will have to connect them like this: (made with tinkercad.com)

The positive wire of the piezo has to be put to the A0-4 inputs, the negative wire to the ground.

It should look like this in the end

For the slider control (for the purple square) you will need an OSC application on your mobile phone. I used the "Mrmr OSC Controller" app by "10base-t interactive", made for OS. You can find it here https://apps.apple.com/de/app/mrmr-osc-controller/id294296343

Weekly Tasks:

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-== Project ==
+== THE PROJECT ==
-My goal this semester is to further develop the Max MSP game I made in Task 3, but to make certain factors in the game be controlled by some random process or variable in our everyday environment. For example the current weather/temperature or a dripping sink.
+'''The game "Catch Yourself If You Can"'''
-I found a nice patch online, that gets weather information from the "McDonald Observatory" at Mt. Locke in Texas website.
+The idea of my project was to create a simple game in Max MSP, that will be played by only one player using both hands to play against each other. So one hand is the others opponent. The player has to decide to let one hand win over the other, or try to balance the game. Both works.
-find the website: http://weather.as.utexas.edu/cgi-bin/latest_5min.cgi
-find the patch: https://cycling74.com/forums/how-to-input-weather-data-in-max/
-It works quite well and you get changing data you can use for anything. The problem is, even if the weather information is updated quite often, compared to other weather stations or websites, it's still updated only every five minutes and sometimes the received data isn't altered for an hour or longer. So this might be a bit unfitting to interfere with such a fast going thing like a game, you would need to play for half a day to see any changes.
+To make this difference between the hands a bit clearer I decided to use two different interfaces/controllers. For the left hand piezo sensors track the tipping of each individual finger, on the other hand (literally) there's a slider on a OSC application on a mobile phone that's sending values to the Max Application.
-An idea would be that the weather data changes the way the interface or the opponent looks. This could be a funny surprise every time you open the game. But still, there may be a lot more potential in other ideas.
+The gameplay is pretty classic, oldschool you could say, it's heavily inspired by old Nokia games like Space Impact or Snake. The right hand steers a purple square (it's a spaceship of course), and has to catch incoming red squares, that are generated by the tipping fingers of the left hand. If the right hand fails to catch less than 5 enemy-squares, the game's over.
-A dripping sink could also be used to control or alter something in the game. I found a nice sensor that reacts to water being poured on it. It may arrive in the next 1-2 days s let's see what we can do with that!
+It's possible to count the score, to reset/restart the game at any moment and to choose from three different levels of difficulty, easy, normal and hard, changing the speed of the incoming values.
-An idea would for example be, to give a second person a water pistol, and every time they manage to aim and hit the water sensor the game get's harder, so they can both play against each other, but in two very different ways, one digital and the other one analog, but still they can play alongside each other.
+To make it easy to try out the patch quickly, without having to setup the sensors etc., I added five bang objects and a slider to simulate the sensors. These can only be used by one hand and not simultaneously, so you can test the patch with them, but the idea of playing against yourself doesn't work out this way.
-== Updates ==
+Here's a video of me playing.
-The Weather Sensor arrived, but after some testing I had to scrap the idea.
+{{#ev:youtube|youtu.be/Md7uMxYgF60}}
-Even though the sensor is capable of collecting data based on water, the data flow is pretty unreliable and not as dynamic as I hoped. Also, the manual that came with it strongly suggested to only measure data every 5 minutes, or the sensor could break. This means I get the same amount of data at the same rate es before. And idea would be to collect data for a day or so, and to have the game be influenced by it to be played afterwards. But this could also be simulated or faked and would make the data collection kind of obsolete I guess.
-I'll come back with a new way of controlling the game later.
+In the video below, you can find a detailed explanation on the patch, and how you setup the data inputs
+{{#ev:youtube|youtu.be/5jJLMSbgWjs}}
+To setup the piezo sensors, you need to connect them to your Max apllication using an Arduino and USB serial. You'll need the following
+- 1 Arduino Uno (or Mega etc.) including USB connection
+- 5 piezo sensors
+- 5 resistors each ~100 ohms
+- 10 jumper wires (male)
+- some tape to attach the piezos to a surface like your desk
+You will have to connect them like this: (made with tinkercad.com)
+[[File:Circuit2.jpg|400px]]
+The positive wire of the piezo has to be put to the A0-4 inputs, the negative wire to the ground.
+It should look like this in the end
+[[File:Bildschirmfoto 2021-02-03 um 13.38.44.png|400px]]
+For the slider control (for the purple square) you will need an OSC application on your mobile phone. I used the "Mrmr OSC Controller" app by "10base-t interactive", made for OS. You can find it here https://apps.apple.com/de/app/mrmr-osc-controller/id294296343
 == Weekly Tasks: ==
@@ Line 33: / Line 52: @@
 [[Artworks I like]]
+[[Semester Progress]]