Songs of Diridum

Songs of Diridum is a cool 3D exploration/experience demo for an upcoming browser based fantasy rpg game. The demo currently only allows you to move around in a small village area and listen to the playing jazz band however they have their sites set big for the full release. The most interesting part about the demo is that it requires no plug-ins, additional software, or dependencies other than HTML5 and WebAudio support, which is a standard for most modern browsers. The demo features quirky, blocky structures and people, most of which are inanimate. But, on stage is a band swaying to the music as they play a soft jazz tune. As previously mentioned, the WebAudio API is leveraged in the gaming platform used to create this demo (goo) and you can walk up to the band and hear the difference in volume and spatial distance. You can also make your character jump and after hopping onto the stage you can walk around and really take-in the full effects of the WebAudio APIs spatial audio. Getting closer to one instrument distinctly brings it out and even the way you are facing has a large impact on the sound. As discussed in the link at the beginning of this post, the players each have their own audio cone to make their sounds more realistic based on where your character is. Both the graphics and spatial audio are packaged together in a web-based gaming platform called goo. Goo itself is built on top of the WebGL library but adds things like spatial audio so that you can configure it all from one API. It will certainly be interesting to see what future browser games come out thanks to goo. It may also be very useful to our purposes for using the browser as a unified, cross-platform medium for communication. In particular, since kamehameha will require visuals of some kind, goo might be a good candidate for rendering them while maintaining our dependency-free point cloud system.