Fumiaki Kinoshita (part-time employee of IIJ-II) fumiexcel@gmail.com
Mac OS X turns 20 So many pages on this operating system over the years. Today is the 20th anniversary of the release of Mac OS X.I wrote a bit about it in my Macworld column this week, and also put together a little Mac OS X timeline. Citrix Workspace app for Mac overview High performance web and self-services access to virtual apps and desktops. Configure for anywhere access from your desktop or web access with Safari, Chrome or Firefox.
日本語版 is available. Thank you, @stefafafan!
MacOS Big Sur elevates the most advanced desktop operating system in the world to a new level of power and beauty. Experience Mac to the fullest with a refined new design. Enjoy the biggest Safari update ever. Discover new features for Maps and Messages. And get even more transparency around your privacy. Vivitar on trend consumer electronics digital cameras, action cameras,hair tools, beauty tools, smart home, optics, steam toys, daily deals. Enter your mac credentials and click Install Software. Click Close to exit.Not quite there yet. As you may know Rhythmiq is not a standalone application, but a virtual instrument plug-in. You will need a host application that supports virtual instrument plug-ins in order to open and use it.
Introduction
Rhythm games, also known as rhythm actions, are very popular genre in Japan. Konami released Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) in 1998 -- it is the best successful game among the genre. Another famous one, Taiko no Tatsujin(literally, Expert of Japanese drum) is being immensely supported by broad age-group of people. Today, various forms of rhythm games have been released one after another.
However, there are few tutorials to create such kind of games. Even if there are, they might be too old, or written in non-English, or/and work only in Windows.
This tutorial focuses on creating a rhythm game without pain. Don't be surprised, we use Haskell to do that.
This tutorial has two parts.
- Part I contains an instruction to set up environment required for Part II and III.
- In Part II, we build a very simple rhythm game. We use the Call engine to develop.
- Part III introduces some technical backgrounds (graphics, audio) that support Part II.
I'd be happy if this tutorial helps your curiosity to create a game. Tkop combo test game [win update] mac os.
Part I: Preparation
We need to ensure that you have installed GHC. Haskell Platform is an easy way to install GHC.
On Unix or Mac, install libportaudio19.
Note: Currently Call doesn't draw bitmaps well on Mac OS X. Please help me figure out what goes wrong.
The source code used in this tutorial is packed in rhythm-game-tutorial package. You can download it and set it up by:
cabal install --only-dependencies installs a bunch of packages, including two vital packages: objective and call.
objectiveestablishes abstraction for stateful objects. It is not neccessary strictly, though it kills the pain of state significantly.callis a cross-platform multimedia library. While it is small and simple, the essentials of games (2D/3D graphics, audio, input handing from keyboard, mouse and gamepad) is assurable.binding-portaudiois low-level audio APIs.
On windows
bindings-portaudio provides built-in source for installation ease. Unfortunately, due to a GHC bug, it is sometimes unstable. Note that using 32-bit version of GHC is safer to avoid problems if your platform is Windows x64.
If it throws up something messy, please report to me.
Part II: Creating a game
Here we bang! -- Wada-don, 'Taiko no Tatsujin'
Now, think of a very simple game: There's a circle at the bottom of the window, and another circle(s) is approaching. You hit the space key in exact timing when the another circle overlapped the original one.
How do we implement this? The structure of the program can be derived by writing components down:
- Sound: a music is playing through the game.
- Graphics: pictures depend on the time.
- Interaction: the score changes when the player hit the space key.
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We will explain these in order.
Playing a music
Groove is important. It's time to play a music. Our first game is as follows(src/music-only.hs):
Let's execute it:
Can you hear the music? Note that it takes a moment to load a music.
Let's investigate the code. The following functions are provided by Call engine.
In Call, actions are performed on System s monad. runSystemDefault converts System s into IO. stand does nothing, preventing termination of the program.
The signatures of prepareMusic and playMusic are as follows:
These functions will be defined later.
Drawing a picture
Let's construct a graphical part of the game.
linkPicture :: (Time -> System s Picture) -> System () is the only function provided by Call to actually draw something.linkPicture f repeatedly calls f and draws the result of f to the window. The argument of f is the time difference between frames, it is often negligible though.
Due to its game system, we need to prepare the set of times. Let us introduce a new notation to represent timings which is more readable than just the list of decimals.
This notation is consist of a number of packets, representing a sequence of bars. Each packets contain several lines. A bar is divided by the length of line. '.' and '-' represents a note and a rest.
The implementation of the parser is not so interesting.
Given timings and 'life span' of circles, we can compute positions of visible circles from the time.
Create a function to render circles. Since Picture is a monoid, we can use foldMap or mconcat to combine pictures. translate (V2 x y) shifts the picture into (x, y). bitmap b turns a Bitmap into a Picture.
unsafePerformIO, which has the type IO a -> a, looks really uncanny function. The use of unsafePerformIO must be limited to passive, virtually constant operations like getArgs, readBitmap, etc.
renderLane passes the result of phases into circles. color changes a color of a picture.
Here is an updated main.
There is a serious problem in this program. The graphics and music may diverge when the program has stumbled accidentally. We need to use the musical time instead of the real one.
Component: prepareMusic
A music is essential for rhythm games. Code romantic (itch) mac os.
readWAVE loads a sound from .wav file.source .~ sampleSource wav $ Deck.empty is a bit tricky.
Deck is an utility to play a music. source is a Lens which is purely functional representation of accessors. new $ variable $ v instantiates a music. Regard linkAudio $ playbackOf i as a cliché for now.
Component: getPosition and playMusic
The implementation of getPosition and playMusic is as follows:
You notice two new operators: use and .=. These comes from the lens library. This package contains types and utilities to deal with various accessors.
Neoteria (itch) mac os. pos, playing are Lens. Given Lens' s a, you can take and modify a value a from s.
use and (.=) are getting/setting operators that work on stateful monads.
With lens, we can access a specific element of a structure easily, allowing you manipulate them just like 'fields' in OOP languages. However, the state of the deck is packed in music in gameMain so these can't be used directly. The (.-) operator, provided by objective package, executes an action within a context held by a left operand.
getPosition m returns an accurate time (in seconds) elapsed from an origin of a music m.
Putting them together, we got src/tutorial-passive.hs.
It is not a game though -- simply because it has no score, no interaction.
Handling inputs
Let's deal with inputs. Now introduce two components, rate and handle.
rate calculates a score from a time lag. handle returns a score and updated timings. viewNearest :: (Num a, Ord a) => a -> Set a -> (a, Set a) is a function to pick up the nearest value from a set. If we fail to attend to remove a nearest one, flamming the button causes undesired score increment.
And the following code actually handles events:
Note that a few variables has instantiated.
After linkKeyboard is called, the engine passes keyboard events Key. Key is wrapped by Chatter to indicate that a key is pressed, or released. When the space key is pressed, it computes the time difference from the nearest timing and increment the score by accuracy.
We need to load a Font as we want to show players the current score. Call.Util.Text.simple generates a function that renders a supplied text.
Just add text (show sc) to renderGame. src/tutorial-active.hs is the updated source we made interactive. It's a game, yay!
tutorial-active
Extending the game
However, when you actually play this, you may feel dissatisfied. It is because the interaction is still poor. If it would have more showy effects, it'll be exciting. Most rhythm games shows the recent evaluation of the accuracy immediately. So, players can notice whether their playing is good or bad.
Thanks to purely functional design, we can extend lanes so easily(tutorial-extended.hs)!
ix i is a lens that points an i-th element of a list. Just arrange the result of forM using translate.
Another interesting feature, transit, is convenient to create animations.
The argument t varies from 0 to 1, for 0.5 seconds. To instantiate this, put this object into a list:
And effects .- gatherFst id (apprises (request dt)) returns Picture, removing expired animations automatically. It benefits from objective much. Here is the complete linkPicture section.
There is no difficulty around input.
Moreover, with LambdaCase GHC extension, you can replace ev -> case ev of with case.
The overall game goes in only 123 lines!
Part III: Technical background
Graphics
Monoid is the general term for composable stuff which has 'empty'. A picture is one of the monoids since there is an empty picture and pictures can be composed by overlaying. The standard library base provides a typeclass for monoids:
Call uses free monoid to represent picture.
In de-CPSed form,
Its Monoid instance is trivial.
Using free monoid, we can isolate the drawing process from Scene. Think of drawScene :: Scene -> IO () which calls concrete APIs to draw Scene. For empty picture, we don't do nothing. Combine a b is equivalent to calling drawScene a >> drawScene b.
So the implementation of drawScene will be as follows:
where drawPrimitive, applyVFX, withMatrix are environment-dependent.
In other words, free structures are kinds of DSL which encourages the reusability of programs. Andres Löh's Monads for free! is a great introduction for free structures.
Call puts together a few kinds of transformation in Affine class. Thanks to type families, we can use the same operation for both 2D and 3D. Normal is the normal vector, which is 3-dimensional vector in 3D but it is just Float in 2D.
Audio
Currently, there are few packages for audio that work in common platforms and are easy to install. I choosed portaudio for now which supports a bunch of backends. Humans are so sensitive about sound; 20 miliseconds of latency is noticable for us.
Thus, it is important to minimize latency when it comes to audio. This is the main reason of why call relies on callback. The call library aims to be small and concrete, leaving abstraction to objective.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Kazuhiko Yamamoto for guidance of the architecture of this tutorial.
Today is the 20th anniversary of the launch of Mac OS X, and Macworld has an interesting piece on the history leading up to it. Jason Snell goes so far as to say that the new operating system for Macs was 'an act of desperation' by Apple.
The reason, he explains, is that while Apple had set a new direction for personal computers with the launch of the Macintosh in 1984, it had lost its way by the late 1990s …
In 1984, a graphical user interface on a personal computer was revolutionary; by the late 1990s, not so much.
As revolutionary as the original Mac was, it was also an early-1980s project that didn't offer all sorts of features that would become commonplace by the late 1990s.
That operating system had been originally designed to fit in a small memory footprint and run one app at a time. Its multitasking system was problematic; clicking on an item in the menu bar and holding down the mouse button would effectively stop the entire computer from working. Its memory management system was primitive. Apple needed to make something new, a faster and more stable system that could keep up with Microsoft, which was coming at Apple with the user-interface improvements of Windows 95 and the modern-OS underpinnings of Windows NT.
By 1996, says Snell, Apple had given up.
In a spectacularly humbling moment for Apple, the company began searching for a company from which it could buy or license an operating system or, at the least, use as the foundation of a new version of Mac OS. The company's management, led by CEO Gil Amelio and CTO Ellen Hancock, clearly had come to the conclusion that Apple itself was incapable of building the next-generation Mac OS.
We all know what happened… next.
Dec. 20, 1996–Apple Computer, Inc. today announced its intention to purchase NeXT Software Inc., in a friendly acquisition for $400 million. Pending regulatory approvals, all NeXT products, services, and technology research will become part of Apple Computer, Inc. As part of the agreement, Steve Jobs, Chairman and CEO of NeXT Software, will return to Apple–the company he co-founded in 1976–reporting to Dr. Gilbert F. Amelio, Apple's Chairman and CEO.
The acquisition will bring together Apple's and NeXT's innovative and complementary technology portfolios and significantly strengthens Apple's position as a company advancing industry standards. Apple's leadership in ease-of-use and multimedia solutions will be married to NeXT's strengths in development software and operating environments for both the enterprise and Internet markets. NeXT's object oriented software development products will contribute to Apple's goal of creating a differentiated and profitable software business, with a wide range of products for enterprise, business, education, and home markets.
Snell gives a good outline of the software challenges that followed, and says that's what makes the anniversary such an important one.
When we celebrate the 20th anniversary of Mac OS X, it's important to realize what we're celebrating. We're celebrating a software release that was the culmination of Steve Jobs's return to Apple. We're celebrating the operating system we still use, two decades later. But we're also celebrating the foundation of iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS.
In that way, this isn't just the 20th anniversary of Mac OS X 10.0. It's the 20th anniversary of modern Apple, and the end of the dark days when Apple couldn't fix its own operating system.
The full piece is a good read.
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