Enhanced sfxr for Love2D

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 18:23:00 +0000

I’ve made a bunch of usability and quality of life changes to the sfxr.lua demo app.

fix: getDirectoryItems (from a PR)
fix: off by one sample length error (from a PR)
fix: space bar was not playing the sound
fix: selected wave form was being ignored (sounds were always square wave)
fix: loaded wave form not updating the interface (but sound was playing correctly)
add: clone method added to sfxr.lua
add: history form with list of previous sounds, save current, and undo/redo
add: “play on changes” so that any time you adjust a sound it plays automatically
add: keyboard navigation in file picker (A–Z: jump to files, Enter: choose, Esc: close picker)
add: window title reflects the most recent loaded/saved file
add: window title and filename reflects last operation
add: file selector shows data directory path
add: unified save directory across platforms

You can get it at: gingerbeardman.itch.io/enhanced-sfxr-for-love2d

At some point I’ll fork the project on GitHub and file some PRs with my changes, but the repo for it seems very dead so I’ll wait until I hear back from the owner. Source code is at the above link.

Slugs on a Cube: interactive animation

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:43:00 +0000

Japhy Riddle makes art, music, films, and animations. He’s also a retro technology enthusiast. Naturally, he combines all these skills and interests into wonderful creative output! I follow Japhy on social media and love his high quality videos and animations. Check him out on YouTube!

Voxel slugs traversing an invisible cube’s edges

A few of days ago a new animation of his popped up: it shows three coloured slugs moving around the edge of an invisible cube, positioned and directed so that they never quite touch each other! Japhy created the animation by printing out each frame and combining them onto the final result, leaning into the print offset registration errors that are so lovely.

Interactive version

I thought it would be fun to create an interactive version of the animation, and I chose to do it in LÖVE (aka Love2D, though I am doing 3D rendering in software). I stopped short of imitating the print errors, but that would be possible by drawing and compositing in the same way that Japhy did it. Here it is:

Three’s a crowd

I spoke with Japhy and we discussed how possible it might be to maximise the number of slugs. If they’re six cubes long there could be 4 of them on the cube rather than 3. So, with the aid of my interactive and controllable version of the animation, I figured that out and added it. If the slugs are shorter then more of them can wander around the cube, and similarly if the cube is larger. But those are challenges for another day! I might even make a screen saver of this at some point.

Download

You can download it (as .love, macOS .app, or Windows .exe) and play around with the animation yourself. There are a bunch of hot keys that modify the cube in various ways. Have fun!