Tuesday 25 March 2008

Inkscape 0.46

I'm a bit late with this blog post, but now that Inkscape 0.46 is out, all these nice features I've worked on are available in a release version of Inkscape, not just in SVN and nightly builds.

Of course there's also plenty of other great features: paint bucket tool, 3D box tool, new grids... Way too many to describe here, so check out release notes for more info.

Inkscape 0.46 is available at your nearest package management system (well, hopefully) or at inkscape.org

Thursday 20 March 2008

Timing tool

Since getting myself a copy of In The Groove and a carrying bag for my dance mats, I've played dance games quite a lot. Both at my home by myself and at university with some friends.

A couple days ago, while listening to a song, I felt that I had an idea, what kind of steps it should have. I tried making those steps with the StepMania editor. Well, it proved to be nearly impossible to sync the arrows with the music, as the song was recorded by a live band and thus the beat rate wasn't exactly constant. So, I built a program to make the synching easier. It took around ten to fifteen hours to make a fairly usable program, and that time included plenty of testing and playing around with different versions.

So, if anyone wants to give it a shot, the program is available here: smsync.tar.gz. It's a source package, so you'll have to compile it yourself. I've built it on Linux, but I'd believe, it could be usable on other platforms, too.

And the stepfile I wanted to create? Well, it din't turn out nearly as good as this program, so I don't think I'll be publishing it any time soon.