Very nice! Vertical placement is a great visual pitch cue. Looking at this, I guess it'd be possible to have motorised stave that advances a set amount, keeping rythmn, and a spawned note-construct who's height could be adjusted. The trick would be to have one lever raise or lower whatever note position it was at. I don't know if the logic (in the beta) can manage that.
Now on to my observations regards PSEye and user object creation, where I tried capturing hand-written labels and a whiteboard marker sketch - It's a joke!
The camera can't capture sharp images. It exposes white paper to mid-grey of course, so captures are dull. And they are low res and with some bizarre colour dithering going on, almost like Moire patterns. You also can't capture a texture - you can only paste an immediate image onto a surface.
This makes it impossible to get good artwork into the game or build up a personal library of textures. Everything needs be crafted from the in-game pieces, which forces a particular style into levels. My idea for piecing together characters from cutouts sculpted around scans is looking iffy. I can't use my own drawings for features, and would have to use the in-game ones. (Incidentally my cutout test showed that sculpting with a cylinder to produce smooth curves as deepbrown suggested when talking about race-courses doesn't truly happen. The engine approximates slight curves into a straight edge. My curvaceous hat brim was reduced to three edges on the first attempt, and my shoes were given a flat bottom. Scale of motion may affect this somewhat.)
It's clear to me that Sony/MM have decided against broad freedoms for creators in denying user meshes, textures, etc. At the moment everything is set to come from MM and any artistic vision we might have will have to be pieced together from their components, or the style abandoned for a MM style. This is a disappointment, and we need the amount of content to be staggering to cover a lot of art styles. Note I'm not talking the LBP engine looking like Gears or anything extreme. Only that notices, text, characters are being limited. If you wanting a Warning sign in your level, you'll be limited to whatever fonts and textures are in game. If you want a digital font, and there's none in game, either abandond the idea or slave through drawing your sign manually.
I was also running some scientific investigation into the creation side. A reference level with scientific setups to gauge materials and mechanics seems like a good idea, but I didn't get very far. My findings so far -
The Medium Grid is sized in 5 x 5 in-game units - a length of 5 on a rod equates to one medium square in length. Weighing blocks of 1 medium square x 1 z-plane, I found these relative weights :
Code:
[B]Material Relative weight[/B]
Cardboard 1
Polystyrene 1
Dissolve 4/3 (1.333...)
Sponge 2
Wood 10
Rubber 10
Glass 10
Stone 20
Metal 20
Float (pink) 0
Float (orange) -1An alternative chart compares the amount of material needed to be the same as one block of the heaviest material...
Code:
Material Relative weight
Stone 1
Metal 1
Wood 2
Rubber 2
Glass 2
Sponge 10
Dissolve 15
Cardboard 20
Polystyrene 20
Float (orange) -1/20 (-0.05)Frictionwise, tested as a piston-push along a wooden path, they're all much of a like, except glass that has a far lower friction, and rubber that has almost absolute friction on the wood, tumbling into a roll without sliding. I didn't give this a proper test though. Ramps of known inclination (calculated from known lengths of sides, as there's no way to set angular rotation. Actually that gives an idea for a range of 'setsquares' for specific angulars...) would be a better way to determine friction values, but I'm not in a scinetific mood at present!
Finally all the custom flavours of material are identical in properties.
