Happy 2024!
I hope everyone had a nice holiday. Mine was incredibly busy but thankfully things are quieting down now. I come to you today to tell you my plans for Midinous in 2024. I had an extremely successful 2023 and it really helped me to continue to improve the program to 1.1.7.0 -- I do have feature and improvement plans for 2024 but I would expect updates to be fairly sparse.
Midinous is reaching a point where I feel it is feature complete. In keeping with wanting to offer a program that is easy to pick up and not overly complex, I feel the best way to keep it this way is to stop updating it. There's really not much more I would want to do with an app like this anyway. It works fantastically and has exceeded so many of my expectations. What I've seen y'all do with it is truly astounding. Several people have made a computer and even an 8-bit counter...holy moly.
I also want to move on to other projects. I'm not totally done with Midinous -- I want this program to run on hardware, and eventually, maybe proprietary hardware (something that looks like the Polyend Play but functions like Midinous). However, I would have to rewrite this in a c-type language and I really would need to dedicate an enormous amount of time to this. I'm also thinking of game ideas! That's about all I want to say on that for now :)
Anyway, let's go over some of the stuff I'd like to add in 2024.
2024 Roadmap
- Logic timing changes: I have an idea for a new paradigm with the way events propagate on the canvas. Right now a sequence follows a "Traveler -> Point -> Player" paradigm. Or in other words, the sequence is playing, a traveler reaches a point, then the Point will create what's called a "Player" in my code will play whatever MIDI event it has determined. The point also creates the next traveler at that time. So the sequence continues. However I want this to be Traveler -> Actor -> Traveler & Point -> Player. The difference here is that whatever needs to "Act" at a certain time in the sequence can be modulated. This would mean Logic can truly be evaluated before any Players are created. This would mean something like the following would be true:
If Point A and Point C send off a traveler at the same time and Point B is a logic point (or logic sequence) and Point D's intended purpose is to play an event, when B and D are activated at the same time, the logic sequence B would accurately turn off, or mute, D. The way it currently is coded, this is unpredictable, as many people pointed out to me and things cannot be lined up because logic evaluates interspersed with points.
- True tooltips! The bottom bar will no longer be showing information about the control or the point you're hovering over. This will be useful as you can see information from a high level view. Point information and types, path weights, logic information, and more. This comes with a total refactor of the window system so that new windows can be created with ease in the future if needed.
- External sync with MIDI Clock. It's something I have wanted for a long time and this will allow Midinous to feel more complete to me. I certainly hope to get to this within the year.
- Sequence Shuffle. I had a dream last night about how this could work, and I think it's needed.
- Humanize, for when you don't want your sequences to be so rigid
- Seasonal decorations. Who doesn't like season changes to dynamically alter their play experience? Just some fun spice to make Midinous more inviting.
- Steam Achievements. Yes.
- A new point type: Terminator -- A terminator will allow only a certain number of travelers through before deactivating for a set amount of time (or permanently). A terminator could also be configured to randomly *not* allow travelers through. A terminator could be configured like any other MIDI-based point (Portal, Random, Sequential, etc)
- Sub-patching. This would allow certain sequences to be copied from a custom "toolbox" menu which can have presets. This could be especially useful when setting up a large logic sequence (like a computer)
- Minimap. You could zip zoom around your sequences instead of having to figure out where you left off.
- Automatic audio export. Like the automatic MIDI output generated when you run a sequence, if you have audio playing, perhaps you could record your sound with some kind of ring buffer? Midinous does act as a simple synthesizer and you can make it do some really interesting things if you get creative. I would be nice to record these directly instead of having to do it with a 3rd party program.
I think that's all I had on my mind for the moment. As you may know, most of these ideas were generated by you! I've adapted some, and made executive decisions on others, but I think with these changes in place, Midinous will be in a good place for me to call it feature complete.
Naturally, I would still fix bugs as needed for as long as I am able, but I will attempt to ship a stable product to you as I can.
Thank you all for your support and your patronage during the development of Midinous. I could not have done it without you. I hope 2024 is good to you until we speak again.
Keep creating,
Jae ♥