Updates to Discomfort Index

In a previous post I had showcased how I was calculating the Discomfort Index in which I was adding a number that reduced over a period of ten seconds every time one of the sensors was pressed, I did this by utilizing timelines which was very good at generating the change over time but in the current presentation of the music change using vcv it became obvious that there were some issues.

First of all, no immediate feedback, the first comment that I received (that should have been pointed at before because I haven't changed the music system in a couple weeks but I digress). Problem number 2 is that the music changes are not apparent enough which maybe means that the return time to "normality" is not long enough. In the observation of both things (and following Vivian's vision and also to make it easier to use the variable for visual effects) we decided that we needed an overall index that instead of going down it is only added to, this way the touch sensor differences become much more evident and the changes between the beginning and the end (at least sound wise) happen over a longer period of time.

So this post is gonna be about the changes to the counter using unreal and then the next one is gonna be about the immediate changes to VCV and future objectives to them.

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Alright!

Unreal

So the previous system only transformed the input information from UDP communication into triggers. To make a system that can be reutilized for all of the sensors I changed the macro that did this transformation to one that receives both the type of sensor that its coming in (how much is it gonna add to the variable) and add to the variable every time one of the sensors is pressed. I also added an additional Integer input that contains the MIDI channel in which I'm gonna play the immediate feedback that I put into VCV (As of now those channels are 7, 8, 9 and 10 within the MIDI channel 2).

The version of the macro in this screenshots was being used for testing, the conditions at the end are opposite since without the UDP connection, the Set variable function would have never been called. But upon testing, the set up works correctly, with the exception that a held press in UDP information was being recognized as separate instances (since all UDP info is being read every frame) which meant that the Discomfort Index would quickly balloon out of proportion.

To fix this I created an additional variable, a Boolean Array with a slot for every sensor. This boolean checks if the last number pressed was the same as the current number, breaking the trigger until it the sensor goes back to 0.