Book project for HYDRA - seeking authors
AndreL
Posts: 1,004
HYDRA masters,
UPDATE: Parallax has partnered on the project with Nurve, and to make things a little more interesting. So in addition to the royalty share that each other will get, the first 10 authors to complete their chapter and all materials accepted will get a $250 fee when the book is published. Just a little more incentive to be one of the authors.
I think we have enough HYDRAs in the wild now to where we can publish an advanced book on HYDRA graphics and sound programming. What I am thinking is a "collection" of tricks or how-to's on ADVANCED hydra graphics programming by multiple authors. Nurve is going to print the book and we will sell it online as well as places like Parallax (hopefully). I am thinking we need about 20-30 authors, 2 tech editors. Nurve will handle final layout, editing, and printing.·The working title will be:
"Advanced·HYDRA Graphics and Sound·Programming Perls"
I will personally serve as the producer and·designer·for the book. Each author would write their article in a template that I supply in MS-WORD, laid out in near ready form with embedded figures, tables, edited locally, etc. then I will do a final layout pass, clean up, internal design for the book, cover, pick the coolest screen shots for the back and get it printed, then we will make it available on-line for sale and see what happens.
Typically authors get 5-10% royalty on net as a rule based on experience. Best selling authors get 15% or more·depending on deal. So what we are going to do is take 15% of the net and divide it equally among the writers (standard practice). Of course, this means that authors that write a 5 page article, and those that write a 25 page article are slightly misrepresented, but it become too hard to try and gauge what's more important page count or page quality and after producing a couple hundred books in my life, its more trouble than its worth try and weight the royalty. But, if an author writes 2 or more articles then he/she gets two shares, all payment will be made with paypal each quarter.
Of course, NO ONE, including us is going to get rich. We might sell 100-200 books a year since it will be advanced, and then the net will be small since unless you print 10,000-50,000 copies, books are VERY expensive. So, those doing this, don't plan to buy vacation homes, plan to buy taco bell with the money each quarter [noparse]:)[/noparse] We could do this as an ebook, but printed books are books, eBooks aren't real books as far as I am concerned and no one is impressed if you write someone on a CD, when you put a printed book in someones hand with your name on it, that is far more impressive and cool. So printed book is the way it goes.
I think this will be fun since a lot of you are now getting the hang of HYDRA programming and have created a lot of cool games and graphics engines and your knowledge isn't going much farther than this forum, so this is a good way to get the information out there and it never hurts to have a published book to show off to friends and impress girls (which for many nerds on here is desperately needed [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Anyway, to qualify you must have ALREADY made something really cool and have something to offer that is a "trick" and would be considered difficult, all entries must use custom graphics drivers that you made and or the IP is public domain that you really push hard. Also, anything in my "Game programming for the propeller powered hydra" book rehashed isn't what we want here. This is for ADVANCED readers that specifically want to do graphics programming and learn new tricks.
Articles can be begineer, intermediate, or advanced level. For example, its fine to write a very simple article on how to get the VSU working at very minimum. Another article might show how to make a complete graphics driver with sprites and bitmaps.· And of course, previous writing experience is a must. I am going to do a light edit on these entries, that means they must be college level ready as is, spelling, grammar, figures, etc. all professional. Thus, its always best to let a friend or two edit your entry before draft submission to get another pair of eyes on it.
Lastly, the articles are obviously all about propeller programming, but I want them to really take advantage of the HYDRA and anything that is has like the SRAM card, or the 128 EEPROM, etc. And of course, any added videos or audio annotation for each article is HIGHLY recommended. The more media the better, we have a big CD to fill up. And if we need to, I will go to a DVD.
Interested parties for authors and for the tech editor jobs (tech editors just get fame, their name in the book, and a free copy by the way) please email me at ceo@nurve.net with "Advanced·HYDRA Graphics and Sound Programming Perls" in the subject. Articles should be tutorial and architectural by design. Meaning, a reader should learn HOWTO by reading the article, no what you did. Detail is important. So for example, those that have designed graphics engines. You might do an article on EXCACTLY how to write a graphics engine from the ground up and start with something simple, and interate up to your engine/demo. We don't want just a line by line of a complete engine, we want people to share in the journey. This is what seperates best selling authors from tech authors. A best selling author will grab the attention of the reader and take him on a journey of exploration thru the material from the simple to the complex. Anyone can dump a listing and explain what each line does, that's not useful to the learning process though.· Anyway, here might be some titles of articles (just ideas to get your thinking what I am thinking if I wrote them all):
0. Demo coding on the HYDRA (plasmas, rotozooming, etc.)
1. A 50 line graphics driver for the HYDRA.
2. Developing bitmap graphics engines for the HYDRA.
3. How the hell does the VSU really work?
4. A modular sprite and tile engine design.
5. Developing a multiprocessor graphics engine.
6. Hi-color tricks - how to get thousands of colors on the HYDRA.
7. A simple hardware hack to get more color on the HYDRA.
8. A bitmap based 3D engine for the HYDRA.
9. Playing video on the HYDRA.
10. Using the HX512 SRAM card for high resolution graphics.
11. Parallax overlaid scrolling techniques.
12. Black and White stylizied rendering.
13. Special effects with the raster.
14. High performance math libraries for 2D and 3D graphics.
15. The world's smallest implementation of OpenGL/SDL for the HYDRA.
16. Generating graphics WITHOUT the VSU, direct control of the HYDRA's video DAC outputs.
17. Graphics broadcasting tips and tricks.
18. A 256 sprite hi-color engine.
19. Getting the most out of VGA graphics.
20. A complete NES PPU implementation.
21. Emulating the C64 graphics.
22. Emulating the Spectrum graphics (or APPLE 2, or whatever)
23. Hybrid screen techniques (bitmapped, tile, sprite all on different scan lines).
24. Design and bandwidth considerations for tile, sprite, bitmapped graphics engines.
25. Fast Vector graphics engines.
26. Using the HYDRA as a graphics terminal.
27. PAL programming Unleashed.
28. NTSC programming for the masses.
29. Generating digital video with the HYDRA..can it be done? Of course!
30. Mixing VSU outputs for special video effects.
31. Hydra tile engines supporting 8x8, 16x16, and 32x32 size tiles.
32. HYDRA_HTML - A HTML rendering API for the HYDRA.
33. Driving multiple monitors with the HYDRA - an expansion card hack.
34. Using the timers to generate pure tones.
35. PWM techniques to generate sounds.
36. A complete multichannel sound engine.
37. PCM with PWM and a vowel for $200.
38. What is MIDI and why do I care?
39. Writing a basic sequencer.
40. Waveform synthesis.
41. FM synthesis.
42. Voice synthesis.
43. Click, click, click -- your first sound.
You get the idea....articles should be from 5 to 25 pages. If an article needs to be much larger than 25 pages then it should be a 2,3 part article and each part would count as another entry. Again discretion will be used here. A 10,000 line listing isn't an entry. And in general listings should be fragments, not complete if they are long, the user can look at the CD. So 50-100 lines of code is fine to list, but not 1000. No code dumps.
Also, this book will be similar in concept to other collaboration books like "game programming gems", "graphics programming gems", "shaderX", etc.· All software will be public domain, users can do anything they want with it other than publishing the software for profit, but they may use it in their own programs etc. Of course, the book contents itself, the prose, are copyrighted and not-reproducable under any circumstances without license.
Each author will get a paragraph bio in the book of course, and if we can get little pics from everyone a picture, but with this many authors I doubt that will be feasible, asking·computer·geeks·for pictures is like asking bankers for a loan [noparse]:)[/noparse] But, those that aren't comfortable with their face splattered around the world can use an avatar in their place. However, its nice to have a pic since it does give a reader some connection to the author if they really like your particular article and helps with marketing in the future if you write more books...
The goal of this book is to have every single HYDRA purchase add the book to the product, and of course all those that already have a HYDRA and have gone thru my book for the basics to upgrade to more advanced knowledge. So this book is not going to hold hands, its going to move fast, and kick *** for those that just want the facts and to get coding asap.
Andre'
Post Edited (AndreL) : 1/15/2008 10:39:08 PM GMT
UPDATE: Parallax has partnered on the project with Nurve, and to make things a little more interesting. So in addition to the royalty share that each other will get, the first 10 authors to complete their chapter and all materials accepted will get a $250 fee when the book is published. Just a little more incentive to be one of the authors.
I think we have enough HYDRAs in the wild now to where we can publish an advanced book on HYDRA graphics and sound programming. What I am thinking is a "collection" of tricks or how-to's on ADVANCED hydra graphics programming by multiple authors. Nurve is going to print the book and we will sell it online as well as places like Parallax (hopefully). I am thinking we need about 20-30 authors, 2 tech editors. Nurve will handle final layout, editing, and printing.·The working title will be:
"Advanced·HYDRA Graphics and Sound·Programming Perls"
I will personally serve as the producer and·designer·for the book. Each author would write their article in a template that I supply in MS-WORD, laid out in near ready form with embedded figures, tables, edited locally, etc. then I will do a final layout pass, clean up, internal design for the book, cover, pick the coolest screen shots for the back and get it printed, then we will make it available on-line for sale and see what happens.
Typically authors get 5-10% royalty on net as a rule based on experience. Best selling authors get 15% or more·depending on deal. So what we are going to do is take 15% of the net and divide it equally among the writers (standard practice). Of course, this means that authors that write a 5 page article, and those that write a 25 page article are slightly misrepresented, but it become too hard to try and gauge what's more important page count or page quality and after producing a couple hundred books in my life, its more trouble than its worth try and weight the royalty. But, if an author writes 2 or more articles then he/she gets two shares, all payment will be made with paypal each quarter.
Of course, NO ONE, including us is going to get rich. We might sell 100-200 books a year since it will be advanced, and then the net will be small since unless you print 10,000-50,000 copies, books are VERY expensive. So, those doing this, don't plan to buy vacation homes, plan to buy taco bell with the money each quarter [noparse]:)[/noparse] We could do this as an ebook, but printed books are books, eBooks aren't real books as far as I am concerned and no one is impressed if you write someone on a CD, when you put a printed book in someones hand with your name on it, that is far more impressive and cool. So printed book is the way it goes.
I think this will be fun since a lot of you are now getting the hang of HYDRA programming and have created a lot of cool games and graphics engines and your knowledge isn't going much farther than this forum, so this is a good way to get the information out there and it never hurts to have a published book to show off to friends and impress girls (which for many nerds on here is desperately needed [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Anyway, to qualify you must have ALREADY made something really cool and have something to offer that is a "trick" and would be considered difficult, all entries must use custom graphics drivers that you made and or the IP is public domain that you really push hard. Also, anything in my "Game programming for the propeller powered hydra" book rehashed isn't what we want here. This is for ADVANCED readers that specifically want to do graphics programming and learn new tricks.
Articles can be begineer, intermediate, or advanced level. For example, its fine to write a very simple article on how to get the VSU working at very minimum. Another article might show how to make a complete graphics driver with sprites and bitmaps.· And of course, previous writing experience is a must. I am going to do a light edit on these entries, that means they must be college level ready as is, spelling, grammar, figures, etc. all professional. Thus, its always best to let a friend or two edit your entry before draft submission to get another pair of eyes on it.
Lastly, the articles are obviously all about propeller programming, but I want them to really take advantage of the HYDRA and anything that is has like the SRAM card, or the 128 EEPROM, etc. And of course, any added videos or audio annotation for each article is HIGHLY recommended. The more media the better, we have a big CD to fill up. And if we need to, I will go to a DVD.
Interested parties for authors and for the tech editor jobs (tech editors just get fame, their name in the book, and a free copy by the way) please email me at ceo@nurve.net with "Advanced·HYDRA Graphics and Sound Programming Perls" in the subject. Articles should be tutorial and architectural by design. Meaning, a reader should learn HOWTO by reading the article, no what you did. Detail is important. So for example, those that have designed graphics engines. You might do an article on EXCACTLY how to write a graphics engine from the ground up and start with something simple, and interate up to your engine/demo. We don't want just a line by line of a complete engine, we want people to share in the journey. This is what seperates best selling authors from tech authors. A best selling author will grab the attention of the reader and take him on a journey of exploration thru the material from the simple to the complex. Anyone can dump a listing and explain what each line does, that's not useful to the learning process though.· Anyway, here might be some titles of articles (just ideas to get your thinking what I am thinking if I wrote them all):
0. Demo coding on the HYDRA (plasmas, rotozooming, etc.)
1. A 50 line graphics driver for the HYDRA.
2. Developing bitmap graphics engines for the HYDRA.
3. How the hell does the VSU really work?
4. A modular sprite and tile engine design.
5. Developing a multiprocessor graphics engine.
6. Hi-color tricks - how to get thousands of colors on the HYDRA.
7. A simple hardware hack to get more color on the HYDRA.
8. A bitmap based 3D engine for the HYDRA.
9. Playing video on the HYDRA.
10. Using the HX512 SRAM card for high resolution graphics.
11. Parallax overlaid scrolling techniques.
12. Black and White stylizied rendering.
13. Special effects with the raster.
14. High performance math libraries for 2D and 3D graphics.
15. The world's smallest implementation of OpenGL/SDL for the HYDRA.
16. Generating graphics WITHOUT the VSU, direct control of the HYDRA's video DAC outputs.
17. Graphics broadcasting tips and tricks.
18. A 256 sprite hi-color engine.
19. Getting the most out of VGA graphics.
20. A complete NES PPU implementation.
21. Emulating the C64 graphics.
22. Emulating the Spectrum graphics (or APPLE 2, or whatever)
23. Hybrid screen techniques (bitmapped, tile, sprite all on different scan lines).
24. Design and bandwidth considerations for tile, sprite, bitmapped graphics engines.
25. Fast Vector graphics engines.
26. Using the HYDRA as a graphics terminal.
27. PAL programming Unleashed.
28. NTSC programming for the masses.
29. Generating digital video with the HYDRA..can it be done? Of course!
30. Mixing VSU outputs for special video effects.
31. Hydra tile engines supporting 8x8, 16x16, and 32x32 size tiles.
32. HYDRA_HTML - A HTML rendering API for the HYDRA.
33. Driving multiple monitors with the HYDRA - an expansion card hack.
34. Using the timers to generate pure tones.
35. PWM techniques to generate sounds.
36. A complete multichannel sound engine.
37. PCM with PWM and a vowel for $200.
38. What is MIDI and why do I care?
39. Writing a basic sequencer.
40. Waveform synthesis.
41. FM synthesis.
42. Voice synthesis.
43. Click, click, click -- your first sound.
You get the idea....articles should be from 5 to 25 pages. If an article needs to be much larger than 25 pages then it should be a 2,3 part article and each part would count as another entry. Again discretion will be used here. A 10,000 line listing isn't an entry. And in general listings should be fragments, not complete if they are long, the user can look at the CD. So 50-100 lines of code is fine to list, but not 1000. No code dumps.
Also, this book will be similar in concept to other collaboration books like "game programming gems", "graphics programming gems", "shaderX", etc.· All software will be public domain, users can do anything they want with it other than publishing the software for profit, but they may use it in their own programs etc. Of course, the book contents itself, the prose, are copyrighted and not-reproducable under any circumstances without license.
Each author will get a paragraph bio in the book of course, and if we can get little pics from everyone a picture, but with this many authors I doubt that will be feasible, asking·computer·geeks·for pictures is like asking bankers for a loan [noparse]:)[/noparse] But, those that aren't comfortable with their face splattered around the world can use an avatar in their place. However, its nice to have a pic since it does give a reader some connection to the author if they really like your particular article and helps with marketing in the future if you write more books...
The goal of this book is to have every single HYDRA purchase add the book to the product, and of course all those that already have a HYDRA and have gone thru my book for the basics to upgrade to more advanced knowledge. So this book is not going to hold hands, its going to move fast, and kick *** for those that just want the facts and to get coding asap.
Andre'
Post Edited (AndreL) : 1/15/2008 10:39:08 PM GMT
Comments
Andre'
Sounds good, take a look at the ideas I had as well.
Andre'
I think the biggest road block of people writing games is not knowing how to write a graphics engine, but I bet if something like this was out there, that could at least get some basic 8 bit console style games out with minimal effort. Then when they start to "outgrow" it they can write their own to fit their needs.
Now my only problem is time to write the engine and the tool (though the tool is at least useable) [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Also I do like the idea of having instructional videos as too.
I would like to contribute but I wrote my first video driver just a few days ago and that is pretty much my level of expertise.
However I think my major contribution so far is the Mercury Mission game, it was a great way to start learning Spin.
I guess my contribution would be something like the first entry,
1. A 50 line graphics driver for the HYDRA.
It would be on a basic level though and I would like to angle it from a beginners point of view.
Do you guys think it's a good enough idea to bother Andr
Thanks,
Andre'
could this project be a candidate for your next book?
ZX81 Emulator on HYDRA
http://forums.parallax.com/forums/default.aspx?f=33&m=241640
Your comments are very appreciate.
Regards
Gianni
Andre'
Awesome topics for a book I'm in for a copy and I don't even own a prop yet.(another week or so before my board gets here)
I realize that the prop is not designed specifically to handle DSP (digital signal processing) but it would be great if someone could write a few chapters on what the prop could do well . What 's practical and what's not.
FFT, DFT.
Filters - low pass , band pass, high pass etc.
I hope that all of these make it to print:
38. What is MIDI and why do I care?
9. Playing video on the HYDRA.
40. Waveform synthesis.
41. FM synthesis.
33. Driving multiple monitors with the HYDRA - an expansion card hack.
10. Using the HX512 SRAM card for high resolution graphics.
29. Generating digital video with the HYDRA..can it be done? Of course!
17. Graphics broadcasting tips and tricks.
Can't wait
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Aka: CosmicBob
But, to answer your question, the prop has zero math, so DSP algorithms are tedious at best. You have to write your own multiply, divide, etc. so without math help, there's no special features to help implement DSP -- on the other hand, there are 8 processors you can use to parallel your algorithms together which helps. So, in general, its definitely NOT a DSP processor, but is CAN do DSP algorithms due to its speed, 8 cores, and shared memory. And of course 32 bits is nice as well.
Andre'
Andre'
Thanks! for your comments and consideration . I look forward to getting a copy of the book.
Bob
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Aka: CosmicBob
Andre'
Thanks,
RM
Andre'
- Howard in Florida
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Got Electrons?
1. The Propeller Chip Multi-core Microcontroller - Jeff Martin
2. Introduction to Propeller Programming - Jeff Martin
3. Application Development and Debugging Tools - Andy Lindsay
4. Wirelessly Networking Propeller Chips - Martin Hebel
5. Sensor Management Simplified with Multi-core Programming - Andy Lindsay
6. DanceBot, a Balancing Robot - Hanno Sander
7. Controlling a Robot with Computer Vision - Hanno Sander
8. Using Multicore for Networking Applications and Simulations using an off the shelf Ethernet Chip - Shane Avery
9. Portable Multivariable GPS Tracking and Data Logger - Joshua Hintze
10. Using the Propeller as a Remote Virtual Peripheral for Media Applications - Andre’ LaMothe
11. Using the Propeller to Control your House and turn it Green - Vern Graner
12. Speech Synthesis and Vocal Tract Modeling - Chip Gracey
Andre'
Thanks.
Andre'
Any update on this. Thanks.
Robert
Andre'
Andre'
Ken Gracey
Post Edited (Ken Gracey (Parallax)) : 12/10/2009 7:59:36 AM GMT
Andre'