I just started to look into libGDX and I really enjoyed it. Loading a tile map I generated with an editor was really simple. But I have in mind to work on a game where the player can modify and extend the map.
So here is my question: Is it somehow possible to add/delete/change fields in a com.badlogic.gdx.maps.tiled.TiledMap and save the result to disc?
Unfortunately, right now there is no built-in feature to store TiledMaps.
I know only the .tmx format of TilEd, but this is a pretty easy and straight-forward XML format, which is very similar to the structure of a TiledMap. Check out how TmxMapLoader loads the TiledMap and then use an XmlWriter to write your altered maps to a file in a similar way.
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Is there any software to get BVH data directly from kinect? I searched on net and found Kinect BVH MoCap(http://tech.integrate.biz/kinect_mocap.htm) , but it is not working for me.
No. There is no built in mechanism to save Kinect data at all - no matter what format you want it in. The Kinect Studio does save off stream data, but I've not looked at the files to see what they look like internally.
You could look into the Kinect Toolbox, which provides functions to save off any of the 3 streams to a file. You can save the file and then manipulate it as necessary, perhaps write a parser to translate the data. Alternatively, you could manipulate the data before you save it off.
You could also write your own parser. The Skeleton objects are serializable, which means you could save them to a List (or some other array type object) along with a time stamp. When you are ready to save to the file, serialize the List and you will get a standard XML dump of the List and the Skeleton objects inside. Again, you could write a function that just translate it into the proper format before saving it as well.
Is there a library function to normalize a sound file? I have searched around but could not find any.
I would like to be able to normalize a sound file and setting that into the sound file so it only needs to be done once rather than on the fly.
Can this be done with Core-Audio?
Yes it can be done, but not with a single function call.
The functionality you want is not in fact CoreAudio, but rather in ExtendedAudioFile.h - part of the AudioToolbox framework. This is available for both iOS and MacOSX. I can attest for this being rather hard to find.
Functions of interest in this header are ExtAudioFileOpenURL(), ExtAudioFileRead() and ExtAudioFileWrite().
In outline what you do:
Use ExtAudioFileOpenURL() to open the input file
Use ExtAudioFileGetProperty() with propertyId kExtAudioFileProperty_FileDataFormat to obtain an AudioStreamBasicDescription describing the file.
Possibly set the ASBD to get the format you want. AudioToolBox on MacOSX seems rather more amenable to this than on iOS.
Calculate an allocate a buffer large enough to hold the entire audio file
Read the entire file with ExtAudioFileRead() - NB: this call might not read it all in one go - operating in much the same was as POSIX read()
Perform normalisation
Use ExtAudioFileCreateWithURL() to create the output file
Use ExtAudioFileWrite() to write the normalised samples out.
Dispose of both audio files.
The documentation links to several example projects that can act as donors of working code. You'll find doing normalisation much easier with the samples as floats, but in iOS, I could never get the conversion to work automatically, so you might have to format convert yourself.
My app currently reads a script containing instructions on what the app should do next. Think of it this way ---> My app is like an orchestra, and when it is passed sheet music (the script), it knows what to do. The sheet defines what different parts of the orchestra do at different times.
Currently, writing the script by hand is tedious. I want to be able to define chunks, which I can drag and drop from my gui to the script. I was wondering if there already is tools which let you do something like this, or if I should write my own tool.
Basically, when I click on something in the gui, it should insert a template into my plist, which I can tweak.
EDIT: It looks like the ability to create "Property list Structure Definitions" is what I am after. I have tried searching the apple site, but I can't find any documentation.
Two things come to mind:
You don't mention what format the input is in, nor what you want the GUI tool to do beyond letting you "drag chunks". But if you can define your format into an XML schema, then you can use any number of XML authoring tools that customize their interface based on schema. Also gives you the ability to make it easy to let the UI enter parameters/customization, which your script language likely has. Final bonus: you might be able to convert script directly into a plist with a simple XSLT file.
Check out Briefs, which is a prototyping application for iOS apps that has a similar architecture.
I resort to your expertly advice because I am sort of "new" to Objective-C, I have read a couple of books and docs (namely Aaron Hillegass & Stephen G. Kochan's books), but some things are still unclear to me, for lack of practise.
To put you in context, I have a NSDocument project that uses Core Data for storage.
I struggle with 2 things right now: reading/writing to files, and table views ^^
So my first question is about Core Data : is it only able to save in SQL, XML or Binary format ?
Or can I use core data to read/write in any format, according to what I declared in the plist file ?
I am trying to work with .po files, and I want to display the translations in a table view containing 2 columns (1 for the msgid and the other for the msgstr).
To read and write files in the po format and display lines in my table view, I most likely need to parse the files using line endings and characters such as "#"as delimiters.
I haven't gotten around to doing that yet (I have no idea how to do that yet!), but I would like to know if it is possible or if I need to restart my project that doesn't use Core Data...
Please DO NOT just throw links to the apple documentation at me, it's the most confusing thing ever, and feels like it's made for experts only! I need me some human-readable explanations :)
Thanks a bunch for any help and advice you can give me!
It is possible to write a different storage format for Core Data, but it is not easy and it sounds like you are not at a level where that is a possibility (no shame there, I'm not either).
If you are only displaying data from the .po files then there is no need to use CoreData. CoreData is meant to provide a file storage solution. You create/edit data and save it using coredata. If you have no intention to create and edit data then get rid of coredata, it will only get in the way.
I'm writing a quick front end to display guitar tablature. The front end is in Flash but I want to store the tab in some human-readable format. Anyone know of something that already exists? Any suggestions on how to go about it? One idea I got from reading some stackoverflow posts was to use a strict ASCII tab format like so:
e||-1------3--------------0--|----2-------0---
B||--1-----3------------1----|----3-------0---
G||---2----0----------0------|----2-------1---
D||----3---0--------2--------|----0-------2---
A||----3---2------3----------|------------2---
E||----1---3----3------------|------------0---
It has advantages. I can gain a lot of info from the structure (how many strings, their tunings, the relative placement of notes) but it is a bit verbose. I'm guessing the '-'s will compress away pretty well when sent over the wire.
If anyone knows of an existing data-format for describing guitar tab I'll take a look as well.
edit:
I should note that this format is 90% for me and may not ever been seen by anyone other than myself. I want an easy way to write tab files that will be displayed eventually as graphics in a Flash front-end and I don't want to have to write an editor front end.
Check out the ASCII tab format. Also great description of the format is here:
http://www.howtoreadguitartabs.net/
ASCII export would be a great feature, but using ASCII as internal data format is not a good idea. For example, note durations would be extremely hard to express (hou would you store 32nds or even 16ths?, not to mention triplets...), so parsing those files would be extremely difficult. Moreover, users would be tempted to load ASCII files created outside your app, which will be likely to fail.
To sum up, i'd recommend to either try to reuse existing format or invent your own if that's not feasible. You may try to use XML for that.
EDIT: Beside DGuitar, i know of TuxGuitar and KGuitar, which support Guitar Pro files. You can look into their sources or ask their authors about file formats. I think there is also open source PowerTab-to-ASCII converter.
See Supported file formats in TuxGuitar.
TuxGuitar is open-source multiplatform software for reading, writing and playing the guitar tabs.
It supports the mentioned Guitar Pro and PowerTab format, and it also has its own TuxGuitar (.tg) format.
If you need the backend data structure to remain in human readable form I would probably stick it in a CDATA inside of XML. That could be inserted into a relational database with song/artist/title information and become searchable. Another option is to save it as zipped text files and insert links to those files in a database with the main artist info still searchable by sql.
These are not human readable:
Most common formats are Guitar Pro (proprietary) and PowerTab (freeware). DGuitar and TuxGuitar are open source viewers for Guitar Pro format. I'm sure that they have documentation for the format somewhere (at least in the code).
Advantage for using a common format would be the easiness of making tabs with those programs.
The Guitar Pro 4 format is described here http://dguitar.sourceforge.net/GP4format.html
I wrote a quick utility for displaying tab. For personal use. You can happily take the internal format I used.
I use a very simple string based format. There are three important structures.
Column, a vertical column in the output tab - all notes played simultaneously.
Bar, a collection of Columns
Motif, a collection of Bars
A Column looks like ':#|:#|*:#' where each * is a string number and each # is a fret number. If you are playing a chord you separate each string:fret with a '|'
A Bar looks like '[,,-,*]' where each * is a Column. A - indicates an empty column where no notes are played.
A Motif looks is just many Bars running back to back. For instance
"[1:5,-,3:7,-,3:5,-,3:7,-,-,3:5,3:7,-,1:8,-,1:5]"
e||---------------|---------------||
B||---------------|---------------||
G||---------------|---------------||
D||--7-5-7--57----|--7-5-7--57----||
A||---------------|---------------||
E||5-----------8-5|5-----------8-5||
"[-,-,1:3|2:2|3:0|4:0|5:3|6:3,-,-][-,-,3:0|4:2|5:3|6:2,-,-]"
e||--3--|--2--||
B||--3--|--3--||
G||--0--|--2--||
D||--0--|--0--||
A||--2--|-----||
E||--3--|-----||