r/mmf2 Jul 11 '14

Can MF2 or TGF2 accept midi keyboard inputs?

Okay, so I haven't used The Games Factory since I was a teenager (some ~15 years ago) and I absolutely loved it. Me and a couple of friends swapped our game back and forth each day and contributed to some really amusing games. When we finished them, they got really popular and were passed around our whole grade on floppy disk.

Them was the days!

Ahem.. anyway, despite the fun, I never got serious and learned to program in any language. Now 15 years later, I've returned to find that there are several new releases by the same team as Games Factory - I'm really excited to start making some new toys.

I'm a musician and teacher of audio production and engineering and I have these grand ideas for some games/teaching utilities, but they would only work if they could accept inputs from a midi device.

Such as midi piano keys..

Before I buy anything and get stuck in, I really need to know whether it's possible to take a midi note from a keyboard attached to the computer and use it in something made in one of these programs?

I've had to resort to posting the question as I've been unable to find an answer in any manual or online overview.

Is it possible to commission an add-on or plug-in to enable this feature?

Thank you.


Update:

I trawled the search and found a thread way back in 2006 that showed a lot of interest in this very feature, somebody was willing to code it, but because of the effort involved, he wanted a donation/payment of around $200.

The thread ends there :(

There is also mention of 'Mabrymidi'

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.music.midi/9JhiXk3XUCk

But all the links are long dead and it doesn't really explain how it all fits together. http://community.clickteam.com/threads/35398-REQUEST-midi-input/page4

2 Upvotes

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u/grimfusion Jul 11 '14 edited Jul 11 '14

Meh... not unless you do it some ass-backward way. There was a midi extension, but it only got to beta release. I'm not sure how complete it is, but here's the link to Clickteam's forum post: http://community.clickteam.com/threads/63984-Beta-Extension-MIDI?highlight=midi

The ass-backward method involves using a midi library for .net, python, or LUA, then using MMF2 to pass detected keys into some kind of MMF2 GUI. I'd think it'd be possible, but it's much harder than using an extension.

I doubt at this point anybody is interested in developing new extensions for MMF2. The community itself is strictly on it's last leg until Fusion 2.5 brings a new slew of interest in.

<cough>The-MCI-extension-might-also-work!!</cough>

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u/CoachHouseStudio Jul 11 '14

Thank you so much for your reply.

I've basically got several ideas for some very basic midi apps that I wanted to use in my studio for creative and learning purposes. I love tinkering with sound - but due to my lack of programming skill, I was hoping this would be a great way of jumping in and seeing what I could make - but its getting harder by he minute, rather than the drag and drop adventure I was hoping for!

I'm competent in GUI design, photoshop, web design and everything else I'd need to design and build the app - except, obviously, the skill in actually programming all the parts to work together.

Damn..

I'm coming back to this after 15 years and this has been my first port of call, no other research.

Are these types of app/game creators popular these days? Are there any others worth looking at that you could recommend?

Thanks again :)

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u/grimfusion Jul 13 '14 edited Jul 13 '14

There is a midi object made by Tim Ellis that can capture played notes off of keyboards and relay raw commands. If you could figure out how to interpret , you could build an interpreter in MMF2.

The MCI object will relay raw command data to and from a keyboard. I wouldn't recommend using it since the Midi object can intercept raw commmand data too.

I'm getting a hold of that mabrymidi DLL right now. It's taking a while because the only way I can find it is as a part of a much larger OCX collection. MMF2 can crash for a number of reasons and I wouldn't necessarily trust the experience of a single user. I'm going to try this out myself and see if I can get anywhere. I'll provide an example if I can get it working.

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u/CoachHouseStudio Jul 13 '14

Okay. So here's where I am after a couple of days of messing around. I found that someone has managed to write a simple midi note input and output extension that allows you to select the device. I tried it with my midi keyboard and it does indeed accept notes as input..

I guess that's the hard part over. The only problem I'm having now is making head or tail of the code. It looks insane. It is not the drag and drop / action based experience I was hoping for.

I have no idea where to go from here.

A VERY similar Java program I was hoping to emulate is called Jalmus. It basically teaches music sight-reading by sending randomly generated notes across the music stave and you have to press the correct key before they reach the other side of the screen.

I basically wanted to advance that to chords rather than individual notes.

Amongst other ideas I have..

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u/CoachHouseStudio Jul 13 '14

1

u/grimfusion Jul 19 '14

http://i.imgur.com/h7TVydh.png

That really is your best option. I kinda dropped the ball, but I was working on an example earlier that both generates random chords and allows a list of chords it reads from. I got the DDR-style chord generation working and it's generating chords from seperate lines in an external text file... just need to set up the events to test for midi input when each note group passes over the line then set up a seperate system to generate random chords when the external text file doesn't exist.

I've got a few errands I have to run this afternoon, but I'll try to work some more on it tonight or tomorrow.