glOW - New (unofficial) light generator program

[LoB]

***** ADMIN *****
Please sticky this!

Good idea, done.

[Uhyve]

Is it ever possible to use drivers from game controllers for our rumble pack?

That would be really cool, I'd really like to do it, but I don't know how well I could make it work. The main problem would be that if you want a game to send vibration information to a pad, you generally need to be playing the game with that pad, which means it wouldn't work it you want to play with a keyboard and mouse. But yeah, if you do play with a pad, I'm thinking it'd actually pretty easy in that case (I believe XInput allows you to read vibration values). Update: Apparently not, seems like XInput doesn't let you read vibration, very annoying.

One thing that needs doing before that though is for the rumble bug in the SDK to get fixed. For some reason, I have to turn the lights off when turning the rumble off (or setting it to 0%) or the amBX won't register the rumble change. The fans work fine but I did the same when turning those off to make it seem like an effect .

Good idea, done.

Hehe, never had a stickied topic before.

Edit: Oh, and the lack of updates is temporary, just need to get some other stuff out of the way then I can definitely put alittle more time into it again.

[Kryss2k]

I use MotionJoy to enable my PS3/360 controllers to work on the PC... not sure if you can hijack/lowjack the rumble from any of that

[Uhyve]

Since MotionInJoy kind of acts as a man in the middle, it must have access to the rumble values but I don't think it actually exposes them unfortunately. I was really wanting to avoid requiring the install of extra programs anyway if possible. At the moment, I'm taking a look at DirectInput, it's old and nasty, but it's actually got quite a few features that XInput doesn't.

If all else fails, one day I'd like to make an amBX visualiser for audio like Aurora has, I mean, I could use sound to guess vibration values and that would work with KBM aswell.

[delsterus]

Great utility. But alas i'm also expierencing a minor lag when using. Could you please recheck that? Ill submit any data you will need

[Uhyve]

Yeah, the performance (or lack thereof) at the moment really does need improvement, seems to be quite a bit worse for different computers. I know what the issue is, it's just gonna take alittle bit of time to fix. Although there might be an experimental Windows 8 fix in a couple of days as long as the drivers work, which I believe they do. Windows 7 and older will be a bit more difficult, but it'll get done.

On the Windows 8 front, I'm kind of interested in making a metro app, wonder if I could put it on the Windows Store (at a price of $0 of course). You never know, could give amBX a bit of extra exposure.

I'm hoping I can get an annoying project out of the way tomorrow, then I'll feel better about spending some proper time on this.

Edit: Oh yeah, found out about a way to get vibration information from an XInput pad. DLL hooking, which is where you hook onto API calls, in this instance, the call that games use to set pad vibration. Programs sometimes do this to create overlays in games (see fraps FPS counter), where they hook onto the end of the render call and add some extra stuff to draw. It'll require a bit of reading, but at least I know it's possible.

[delsterus]

maybe you can give some tips to lower lag? it's abbout 1s
I've tried lowering screenfreq to a point of 0, but it only disrupts fluid transitions of collor leaving the lag.
Btw i'm on 64bit win7 witha core2quad q9400 @ 2.66ghz

Oh and the color balance isn't available from the interface only if edit it manually. They sould really include this in the drivers/control panel

A windows 8 app would be great but i didnt get my hands on it yet.

[Uhyve]

If on Windows Vista or 7, switching from Aero to Basic (or Classic) will help with the lag. Still working on improvements though, so at some point, I'm gonna have this thing working full speed with no drawbacks, I'm sure of it.

On the colour balance front, I know, I do really need to start moving stuff into the interface, but I've always hated having to make UIs. I'm half considering going open source at this point just for the off chance that someone does it for me.

Update: Gah, mirror drivers don't support Aero, very annoying.

[ambvox]

Hi,

as I like the original amBX's responsiveness and smooth colour-transitions, but totally dislike it's "strange" screen-sampling (especially the lower half of the screen), I'd like to know if you're still working on Glow ? It really does what I expect it to do and if you can reduce lag and/ or the "roughness" of colour-transitions on settings below 60ms it'd be perfect !

regards

[Uhyve]

I've not stopped working on it, but all of the different ways I've tried sampling the screen are either slow or don't allow for aero, which has been a bit disheartening. I've just been concentrating on other pet projects more lately.

The roughness of the transitions below 60ms is alittle weird, the API usually does color transitions for you, but when using faster sampling rates, it doesn't seem to be able to keep up. I tried doing my own transitions a while back, but either the API didn't like it, or they just weren't very good.

It's all stuff I want to spend some time on, but yeah, just been taking some time off from it for now. When/if I stop I'll definitely be releasing the source so other people can improve it (though I'd be willing to do it sooner if there was an interest).

[henson0115]

awesome work, running glow with fxgen disabled and i get no fps reduction at all, without glow and just using fxgen fps is cut in half! nicely done! keep up the good work:)

edit: is there a chance you can add an automaticly start glow on bootup option to this?
thanks

[Uhyve]

Hehe, thanks. I suppose I could add an option for that, I'll put it on the list . In the meanwhile, to make the program start on boot, I'd suggest making a shortcut to glOW in "Startup" in your Start menu (create it if it doesn't already exist). If I added that feature, I'd probably just make it do this automatically (I'm afraid of the registry).

[henson0115]

no worries that would be perfect thanks

[MasMe]

I'm registered to give you many many many thanks to do this app.

Man... cyborg ambx software sux a lot. Wow, I needed to restore de system 2 times because seems there is a "battle" with this software and Comodo firewall. After those restores I unistalled the firewall and then I installed the software (cyborg) and yes, works with games but not in other app's like wmp. I was so disgusted.

But then I found this topic and.... MIRACLE! xD Now I have amBx enabled whatever I do: desktop, anime, film, game... man, this is perfect!

I have a high-end computer and I have too a little lag sometimes. Please, I read something up about Windows 8. No please, no xD, try to solve it for W7, because we are a lot of people that we are using it, and I think about gamers (me for a example) will be in W7 for a long time : P

Your software is a totally all-in-one, I don't know why people still ask for other ones. Well, really this needs a things, and is to can change de brightness level of the lights. I don't know if it is difficult to apply :\

Thanks for you work!!

Sorry if my english is not good, but I only learnt the basic on school and playing games hehe. Probably I done a lot of mistakes, but I think that the message can be understand xD

[Urban-UK]

awesome work, running glow with fxgen disabled and i get no fps reduction at all, without glow and just using fxgen fps is cut in half! nicely done! keep up the good work:)

edit: is there a chance you can add an automaticly start glow on bootup option to this?
thanks

ah brilliant, if glow works without fxgen enabled, that will be perfect for me, fxgen caused to many problems on my machine, so it resulted in me ending up not using my ambx kits

I need to reinstall my system due to getting a new ssd so ill try installing my ambx kit this weekend before I reinstall my OS, all being well ill be using my ambx kit again soon

thankyou to the author of glow for making this program, we appreciate your work

Edit: just noticed in first post "added fan and rumble control", nice!!, would it work in games that support force feedback? i'm thinking maybe ambx should hire this guy