Trapped in the bureaucratic spiral

(copied from lucera blog)

The last week there have been no news because we were involved in bureaucratic issues and we are attending an intensive course in management and business administration that will finalize the next week.

This has prevented us from making great advances in recent days, despite of that, we have been making some small internal changes and we have been testing some of our latest features added.

Unify blogs

As you know we started with 3 blogs, one per each engine (MindShake 2D engine and BrainWave sound engine) and one for the project. We have realized that it is not comfortable for the users to see our progresses. For this reason we have decided to unify all the blogs.


All the next post will be on lucera-project.blogspot.com.

See you there!!

Embedded Tremor

Today we embedded a reduced subset of Tremor library, an optimized integer-only implementation of the OGG Vorbis decoder, thought for embedded devices.

Then, now we have our fourth optional library:

• With OGG Vorbis embedded.
• With Tremor embedded.
• Without OGG Vorbis nor Tremor embedded, that permits you to link with the original libraries or your own implementation.
• Other one without any OGG Vorbis support (small size).

This version takes only 97 KB in size.

Embedded OGG Vorbis

We are noticed that there are some people who are bothered with the fact of have to link with multiple libraries (libogg, libvorbis and libvorbisfile) only for have support for another audio format.

 

For this reason we made a reduced ogg vorbis library subset only for decode it. And then we included this code inside BrainWave. We said reduced because it is only 135 kb in size.

 

Note that the sizes of these libraries are (MinGW GCC 4.4.1):

• libogg_static: 15 KB
• libvorbis_static: 1313KB
• libvorbisfile_static: 28 KB

Total: 1356 KB

 

Due to the fact that there can be some people that maybe want to use these 3 libs for his own purposes, or because there will be some people that maybe don’t want ogg support at all, we made three separated libraries:

• One with OGG Vorbis embedded
• Other one without OGG Vorbis embedded that permits you to link with the original libraries.
• Other one without any OGG Vorbis support.

In this way, the BrainWave users can select the best choice for his app.

Added OGG Vorbis sound file format

Today we added support for a new file container (OGG) and for a new codec (Vorbis).

With this codec you can add great quality sounds with small size to your games or applications.

There are some people who loves this audio codec because its high compression ratio, up to 10:1, and for its great sound quality. Read the Vorbis FAQ to know more about this codec here:

Improved codec system

As promised we have improved our codec system.

Now all parsers & codecs have less lines and more clearer source code and they are simplest to understand. Furthermore, we can easily add more file formats to parse or add more audio formats to decode.

Added .AU sound file format

We are noticed about some people needs support for .AU files on MACOS (or .SND files on NeXT or some *NIX systems). For this reason we added support for this file format.

Adding this format we have realized that the system of codecs could be improved, shortly we will update it.

Congratulations! Now we have another common audio file format for BrainWave and we will have an easiest audio codec system.