Author Archives: skooter500

Unknown's avatar

About skooter500

I am a lecturer in the School of Computer Science, TU Dublin teaching courses on games, VR and creative coding. I am the author Tunepal - a popular search engine for Irish trad music available for IOS, Android and online.

Success for TU Dublin @ Games Fleadh 2024

TU Dublin computer science students and game design students competed in Games Fleadh, the national, intervarsity console and PC games development competition in March, winning:

  • Best Game Made with a Game Engine
  • Best Use of AI
  • Best Trailer
  • Highly Commended for VR. 

The prize winning games were all made in Godot!

Now in its 21st year, the competition finals took place in TUS Thurles Campus, on March 6th, 2024. This years theme was “Start With Nothing”. Teams began work on their projects in November 2023, developing all the design, programming, art and music themselves. The games were all made using the free, open-source Godot Game Engine, marking this the first time a game made with Godot wins Best Game. The teams were mentored by Dr Bryan Duggan from the School of Computer Science, TU Dublin and Dr John Healy from the School of Media.

Creating Musical Instruments in Godot

My first year students made musical instruments in Godot this semester. As research, we attended musical performances in the Concert Hall in East Quad and also trad sessions in The Cobblestone. Then the students created musical instruments with unique user interfaces, sounds and designs. Students did a live performance with their their instruments as the demo of the assignment.

Check out the assignment brief on github.

Berlin Artist Adam John Williams visits TU Dublin

Pictures from the visit of Berlin artist Adam John Williams to TU Dublin School of Computer Science in April as part of a TU Dublin Growthhub funded project. During Adams visit, he meet with composers and musicians, saw the work of computer science creative coding and game design students and had planning meetings for a planned music hacking workshop and algorave in TU Dublin in October 2024.

i.am.dani @MSXGOTO40 live VJ stream

This is a re-recording my VJ performance for MSX composer Tadahiro Nitta at MSXGOTO40 in Amsterdam in December 2023 Featuring:

– i.am.dani – The AI Chatbot from 1987 that comes to life in 2023 to make art and write poetry
– MIDI controlled, sound generated algorithmic art
– Creative coding projects made by TU Dublin Computer Science and Game Design students inspired by the story of MSX
– Gameplay of MSX games from which the music is taken

All music made and performed by Tadahiro Nitta on MSX computers

GAZZEL INTRO
GG TROIS
BACKFLOW WAVE – Raging Blitz
BOSS BGM – Raging Blitz
STAGE CLEAR– Raging Blitz
STAFF ROLL – Raging Blitz
CAR NO 52 IT SEQUENCE
XAK 2 INTROSCREEN
XAK 1 WATERDRAGON
FRAY Last Boss –
DARKMAZE ILLUSION CITY – theme A

Source code for i.am.dani https://github.com/skooter500/iamdani

Tunepal being rebuilt in GODOT

Tunepal has served traditional musicians faithfully since 2009 and is beloved by a generation of traditional musicians. WIth around 100K lifetime users who have performed millions of searches, each search represents a tune identified and maybe a new tune learned by a musician somewhere.

In recent years it has become harder are harder to maintain Tunepal due to increasing load on the old technology stack that makes Tunepal work.

With that in mind, I am proud to announce that I am now officially working a totally new version of Tunepal!

The new Tunepal will be 100% free, and built with the Open Source Godot Game Engine. It will work offline, with no dependancy on a back-end server and in time will support many new features, better tune recognition and the ability to load in tune collections, share tunes, organise tunes into sets. The source code will be freely available for anyone to take, modify and improve on. There is a prototype developed and I will share more details and a github repo to which anyone can contribute, in the coming days. I am excited fot the next chapter in Tunepal and look forward to welcoming collaborators to help bring this project forward! If you are a coder and you know Godot or C++ and have time to give this important project, then star the repo or fork it and start working!

Update: The build in the repo now has many of the essential elements. Transcription, matching, tune database. It compiles and runs on Windows and Android. Still a lot of work to do so please consider helping

VJ’ing with i.am.dani for Tadahiro Nitta @ MSXGOTO40

What an honour to VJ for Tadahiro Nitta, the composer for many well known games on my beloved MSX platform at MSXGOTO40 in Amsterdam on December 9, 2023.

This performance merged footage of the games with i.am.dani created algorithmic visuals, poetry and code. In additition students from BA Game Design first year created art work using Python and Processing inspired by the story of MSX. Full video coming soon.

Abstract Visual Story of a Song

This assignment challenges computer science students to apply the programming they are learning, to a creative project that they work on in a team, over the course of one semester. It is given to around 140 students in the second semester of their second year. The students form teams and submit their teams and proposals around week 5. Final submission and demos are around week 13. Students track and document their progress by making documented commits in a github repository that they submit at the end. There is a template for the readme.md file they submit, where they declare their individual contributions. They also submit a youtube video demonstration and do a live demo.

The assignment is designed to develop many important transferrable skills:

  • Teamwork
  • Design
  • Collaboration
  • Project Management
  • Self directed learning
  • Understanding of colour and sound
  • Use of version control system
  • Design of an object oriented system

Students use VS Code, GitHub, Java, the Processing Libraries. The assignment is fun, both for the students and me to grade! Many students report that it was the most enjoyable assignment they did in college.

Here is a link to the full brief that goes into more detail.