Hi.

Myself and one artist have created a 2D puzzle game (similar to puzzle bubble in some regards). its complete except for music and sound. Ive had an idea. i want to make the different colour bubbles light up/vibrate/pulse on the beat of the music and im planning on using tracker ("keygen") music. Im planning on using OpenAl but i havent touched it yet so i dont know what it can or cannot do. basicly i want to create a "visualizer". it wont affect the gameplay at all. Ive been doing graphics programming for a while but i havent touched sound yet so my question is: Is this feasible? How hard would it be to retrieve the information i need from the sound stream? Does it sound like a worthy idea overall?

im not asking how im suposed to do it. il figure that out myself im just wondering what you think about it.

Hello!
It's cool for the player to see and hear the music - that way the user experience goes to a positive feedback.

Why not let the user interact with the bubbles music himself? Look potapon and Rez(ps2) gameplay movies to see what i mean.

Maybe you can play a sound file when a bubble pops up and when you do a combo you overlap sounds and a music appears. Something like that =] It gives a lot deeper emotion to the gameplay.

It is plenty doable.

If you try to do this just by monitoring the stream of output, there's a sample project hosted on here somewhere that measures "beat energy", but it really doesn't work very well ime. There's a thread to that effect somewhere here too. You'll need to look into using FFT methods to get a good result.

You can download a freebie game I made that pulsates some ground colours based on it so you can judge for yourself: Mega Defender It's only 30Mb

I've not tried doing this with tracker music as I didn't have any, but it should be totally trivial to rip the beats out of that.

Thnx for the insight and the ideas i will look into it.