mariosioan wrote: ↑07 Jan 2022 17:30
Grouping shapes to make the blending smoothly (as described in 4th solution) would be great in many cases.
Maybe a good idea would be for a free-coupling architecture both in the data model and the behavior/logic.
That means that two different parts, one being the area or group of areas and the other being the content that will be emitted/activated, to be united in one entity that will guide the way Echotopia understands and calculates sound propagation and the acoustics that are received by the Explorer object.
As a user experience, the designer would group a bunch of geometric shapes together and define the same content for all of them.
The nice part about this architectural approach is that when you move the Explorer between shapes that belong to the same group there will be no switching of emissions from those shapes, which is a more optimized approach and also provides the smoothest experience possible.
Of course, this has to be tested under the microscope of Manolis Benetos our software engineer because right now the discussion is theoretical.
But I like the way it goes!
Something that is not yet ready but will be soon enough, is the ability for the designer to define some areas as special areas for a scene. We are kicking the ball around the lab with this for some weeks now.
The idea is to provide two areas that will not be actual areas on the scene but global scene areas, the one will play when there is no other area present, and the other will play always, even together with other areas present. Those areas will have no main or fade zones and they will be assigned to the whole scene. That way, in maps with a dominant sound you will be able to cover them without even drawing shapes, i.e. a dungeon. This makes it even easier to cover the complete scene with sound without the need to draw shapes to follow any map feature. An extension of this though would be to have three special/global scene areas in each scene: One that plays only where there are no areas, one everywhere but it doesn't get affected by the occlusion simulation, and finally, one everywhere that gets affected by the occlusion simulation. The last two would give the designer the ability to better define what is indoors and what is outdoors in a complex acoustic environment with many layers of overlapping areas.
We will have some of the preliminary architecture in place in about 6-7 weeks, probably implement the extra global scene areas first, because they are a big time-saver (and also provide better realism, because now it's easier to leave empty areas in the map), and then see how we will proceed with the shapes as they depend on all the architectural features I describe above.
We will release a public roadmap soon, but for the Insiders, we can say that Echotopia is planned to be out by the end of this quarter.