The Paranormal audio visualization library homepage!
 Navigation
news
about
download
documentation
screenshots
 Site Update 8/31/01 
It's been a while since I updated this site, but I haven't been completely idle. I've got a working version of the rewritten Paranormal, and expect to release the first version of it soon. Right now only the XMMS plugin exists, but a GStreamer plugin is almost complete. I'm putting up the API reference manual built from the CVS sources, to give anyone interested a better idea of what's there (and perhaps encourage some contributions).

I'm also updating the cvs installation instructions, which can be found on the download page, so go give it a try and tell me about all the wonderful problems you have ;)

 One step forward, two steps back, and a giant leap for mankind 5/28/01 
Well, I've decided to make some major changes (a complete rewrite actually) to Paranormal. Rather than conforming to various plugin specs, the new Paranormal will be a general audio visualization library. There will be various other executables/plugins that depend upon the library to provide the actual image rendering. This makes it easier to interface with different plugin architectures and allows for the plugins to be maintained separately. I'm taking this opportunity to make some other improvements:
  • Moving from indexed color to RGB color
  • New 'scripting' engine / language (unsure how extensive)
  • Ability to create new 'image contexts' in which the image is not affected by actuators outside of the context
  • GObject based architecture (that means GLib 2.0)
  • Flexible actuator registry, allowing additional actuators to be added by a plugin (e.g. the XMMS plugin may add an actuator to display the song title)
  • No more GTK+ dependency; Compiling with GTK+ 2.0 will include a configuration widget that applications can use to allow users to create their own actuator trees
I'm planning on writing interfaces to the following programs:
 Version 0.2.0 released 5/14/01 
Well, here it is... this one should be a little easier to swallow than the last (which I forgot to announce here). Here's a run down of the major changes:
  • Added a GUI actuator configuration (no more writing .pna files by hand!) :)
  • Added container_cycle and xform_bump_spin actuators
  • Added multi-channel support to wave_* actuators (by Sam Vaughn)
  • Renamed some of the actuators
  • Fixed the huge memory leak when changing actuators
  • Numerous other fixes and minor tweaks
 Sourceforge Debut! 4/21/01 
This is the Internet debut of Paranormal! Right now it doesn't do all that much, but it's definitely getting there. I'm just now starting to work on the actuators ( ?) now. In fact, today is the first day that Paranormal has actually done something. So right now, it's probably only of interest to people who want to contribute to it, but it should be ready for end users to play around with very soon. If there's actually any interest in contributing, I'll write some developer docs. I've taken great care to ensure that adding an actuator is simple (you only need to write 1 function).

SourceForge Logo