[Performous-commit] Lasse Karkkainen : The first blog post about the editor

[Lasse Kärkkäi. <tr...@us...>]

Module: web
Branch: master
Commit: 409a690b91b434184f0852e52dc8116718e0e107

Author: Lasse Karkkainen <tro...@tr...>
Date:   Wed Feb  9 13:34:00 2011 +0100

The first blog post about the editor

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 News
 
+:h2:2011-02-09 - A song editor in progress
+
+An often requested feature for Performous is a song editor, especially considering that there are no editors that could handle vocals, band mode and dance notes together in the same song. We finally got a chance at implementing one once a Swedish company offered to fund the development by hiring two of the Performous core developers to the project. Since there are a few promising open source song editors, we started by reviewing them and seeing if we could build on top of existing software. <a href="http://code.google.com/p/editor-on-fire/" target="_blank">Editor on Fire</a> ended up being the top candidate. Unfortunately it had a very different workflow than what we needed and also the custom UI and being written in C (rather than C++) were major drawbacks.
+
+Another big question was whether to implement it as a feature of Performous or as a separate application based on Qt. On Performous it could benefit from all the existing infrastructure (OpenGL, audio playback and so on) but also it wouldn't be able to easily use existing widgets and dialogs that are very important for an editor. Also we wanted the editor to be easily usable by everybody instead of tying it down to the game, so we decided to use Qt. Using Qt as the library was a no-brainer as it is the only truely cross-platform solution (native Windows, Gtk and OS X widgets and dialogs) besides wxWidgets and the latter is horribly bad.
+
+<img src="imgs/editor-zoom-thumb.png" alt="Editor screenshot"/>
+
+So, now we are on the sixth week of development and all the basic functionality is in place but there is still a lot of work to be done. There is a getting started wizard in the editor to make you familiar with the workflow where a large part of the process is automated via pitch detection and other means, making song creation easy. Only vocals are supported for now but other modes are going to be available at a later time.
+
+In case you wish to have a sneak peek, you can use the git version, otherwise wait for a release in the coming weeks.
+
+<code>git clone git://git.performous.org/gitroot/performous/editor</code>
+
+
 :h2:2010-12-09 - Website redesigned
 
 For long have we attempted to summon a web developer to create us a new site but that never happened. That feeling of deep shame every time I displayed the site to someone finally overcame me and I decided to do the job myself since no-one else was doing it. What you are looking at is just that. The new one boosts a lot of bleeding edge web technology and there could be some bugs as we only tested Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and my mobile phone (all of which worked fine with reasonably high performance).