Cyborg Gaming Light Impressions So Far

[sterex]

So its been about a month and a half since I purchased the ambx/Madcatz Cyborg Gaming Lights (can you say mouthful?) and I decided to post a little review on this to maybe help possible/future owners and maybe even help out the staff here

So as I said earlier, its been about a month since I got them and so far they have been just about everything I expected. As far as I can tell, with the provided ambx software, the lights each take a sample of half of the screen and display an average of all the colors. If the game is ambx enabled, then more intricate effects can be displayed (like in AoC) but for the most part, the lights are displaying the average background color. This means that in especially bright games like Battlefield 3, the lights are usually only varying degrees of white and dark white. Furthermore, in most RPG games I have tried, the experience is the same. Personally, I was kind of expecting the lights to flash when shooting or change color when casting a spell but I guess that may have been too complex.

Don't get me wrong though, the lights are still great and they do an awesome job of adding a nice mood and setting that helps with the games immersion. However, if the included software was the only program I could use with the lights, I would honestly have been a little unsatisfied due to the high price tag. However, I found the program called Aurora Synthesia on the forums, which I actually discovered at first due to a weird technical problem with installation, and this program really makes the lights come into their own. There are a few different settings on Synthesia. You can either an average of color on the screen (which is actually sometimes better then the official ambx one) or have the lights change lights based on sound, or even do an combination of both. The option to have the lights react to the music is fantastic though, while the reactions may be a bit simple they work especially well with dubstep. Personally, I believe the synthesia program should have been included on the CD instead of the ambx program.

This is where i would like to make a suggestion to any staff who reads this. You guys should really do something about your crappy software. The lights have the ability to do much more then they can with the existing platform. I saw on another post that you saw no need to compete with the synthesia program, but not everyone is going to be devoted to going through the web and finding the program. Like I am honestly surprised you haven't put in a music mode or any non gaming setting yet. I'm sure doing so would garner these a larger market and make you more money.

Thanks for reading

[Froglet]

Thanks you for posting this, it is very interesting reading.

It is certainly our intent to keep adding to the capabilities of the amBX software. It is great that you like the Aurora Synethesia application which I would point out is built on top of our 'crappy' software as we provide the SDKs and enabling technology to create the content and control the lighting. This SDK is deliberately designed to let the community of both enthusiasts and professional developers to enable their applications.

As you say some games already have more sophisticated effects and we hope that this will build and build, the more people who have lights the more games will take the time to make use of them fully. But we also provide the automated effects so that as many titles as possible do something interesting.

We do in fact provide a music plug-in, admittedly only for Windows Media Player which is not everyone's media player of choice and lots of software for video and visualisers works with the automated effects so if you look around on the forums you'll see people using amBX for all kinds of different uses outside of gaming.

We are currently working on some improvements in this area and these will roll out during the year.

We typically don't like to 'compete' with the applications that our enthusiasts develop so we did not feel the need to develop an equivalent to Aurora Synethesia - however having seen that this perhaps will not be supported going forward we are looking at revisiting this.

We also have plans to extend some of the Sound to Light and Video to Light features.

In some ways it is still early days for amBX, the world is just waking up to the power of ambient lighting - you guys are on the crest of a wave and well placed to lead everyone out of the darkness

Keep providing feedback as it helps us improve the product and focus our efforts on things that you really want.