TU Vienna   IFS Group
Vienna University of Technology
Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems
Information & Software Engineering Group
  [Topics] [Projects] [Downloads] [People] [Publications] [Press] [Events]  

From TUX Racer to SOMRacer

Making self-organizing maps playable

Selecting music by playing

Download SOMRacer

 

SOMRacer

SOMRacer combines the functionality of the PlaySOM and PocketSOMPlayer applications with the look-and-feel of the classic open-source game TUX Racer. Self Organizing Maps serve as three-dimensional music landscapes, which can be explored by the player. The collected music tracks are exported as playlist.
 

From TUX Racer to SOMRacer

SOMRacer is a modification of the open source game TUX Racer. Significant changes in gameplay were implemented to alter the action-focused downhill-racing experience of the original, allowing for a more comfortable explorative approach, including the flattening of the slope, changes of game physics and configurations as well as replacing textures and assets to obtain a setting more suitable to the music map context.

TUXRacer   SOMRacer
 

Making self-organizing maps playable

An image representation of a Self Organizing Map is divided into three RGB-files by a python script.
 
SOM divided into three RGB-Files
These three image files are interpreted by the TUX Racer engine in order to create a level. The first two image files are used for terrain and elevation generation. The third, which is titled trees.rgb by specification, defines the positions of the game assets. For example, to set the positions of the items used in SOMRacer, discrete pixels of the basically black image have to be colored cyan.
 

Selecting music by playing

The player is able to navigate on the music landscape with similar tracks being close to each other. The tracks are visualized as notes. By collecting one note the respective song automatically starts playing. By quitting the game by hitting Q on the keyboard, a playlist named songlist.m3u is generated, which consists of all tracks collected while playing.
   Quit-Screen
 

Download SOMRacer

As a demo we provide the SOMRacer for Linux, MacOS and Windows. Please download the apropriate package below.
Currently there is one map available which must be downloaded seperately: On Linux you should take the mp3-version, for Windows the ogg-version works much better. Unzip the map into the contrib-folder. (details below)

Linux (37MB)

The binary can be found in the folder src. Maps should be copied to tuxracer-data/courses/contrib/
The binary was compiled on Ubuntu 9.04 (jaunty, x64), but also conains the source code. If the binary does not fit for your system, please recompile it with the following commands: make clean; ./configure; make

MacOS (10MB)

Unzip the map into TUXR6.app/Contents/tuxracer-data/courses/contrib/

Windows (14MB)

Unzip the downloaded package and add the map into courses/contrib/. On most Windows machines the ogg-version works better than the mp3-version.
Note: Installing vcredist_x86.exe on your computer might be necessary in order to be able to play the Windows version.

 
 
top
last edited 06.07.2009 by Jakob Frank