[tranquility]

Hi there. I'm the guy that wrote SGI tranquility way back when.
I'm looking for someone to provide a short (or longer) video of SGI tranquility.

I haven't seen it for a very, very long time and I want to make a video talking about its history,
including the 2000's version for MacOS. I'm making a new 3rd version for MacOS/iOS and could use
an example of the SGI original for a pitch. 

Sadly, my ex threw out my Personal IRIS/Indigos/Indy/Crimson(!) into a dumpster without telling me first 
(Plus a Sun workstation, a Color NeXTStation with laser printer, an AppleIIe, a bunch of old Macs, PCs, and
half a dozen ARP synths....), so I don't have any of my old hardware. Can you believe that?? *sniff*

I do have some versions of the original source I've kept moving to new hardware and
still use it for reference and memory backup on the movement routines.

I can offer some raggedy original source and credit in the new game in exchange.
I found this site from a google and wanted to post in a thread here, but it appears to
just be from the ftp archive and it locked. sigh.

So anyway, drop me a line if you can help (or just to say hi. Hi!)

p.s. There was an unfathomable demo that SGI shipped that displayed a bunch of
squares in dancing patterns. It had a thousand sliders you could change to make the
patterns change. I never could really figure it out at the time. Anyone remember its name?

Wm. Romanowski
tranquility@mac.com
SmallTown, Iowa
--

[Raion]

I don't, but your ex is a bitch for what she did. That's awful.

[BackPlaner]

Holy shit, is it really you?

TQ is probably my all time favorite game. I first played it in our school lab on an Indigo 1 circa 1993. I was hooked.

You didn't have to kill anything, you couldn't die, you had infinite life, all you had to do was..get higher. What's not to love?
It's still one of the first things I install whenever I restore an old SGI. It has such an amazingly relaxing effect when I'm playing it, a large part of that is the music I suspect, it's lovely, very....tranquil. I always thought it would have been great in VR.

So yeah, I'd love to help you out. It runs great on my O2 and my Indigo, not so much on my Tezro or Onyx.
I don't think I have any way of recording it from the buffer but I can point a good quality camera at the screen and get the sound direct from the headphone port.
Probably be a few days until I can finish it though.

Just wanted to say thanks, I think it's a pretty awesome legacy.
(and sorry to hear your ex was so thoughtless.)

[TruHobbyist]

Can't believe what you are telling about your ex. Atrocious.

[dexter1]

Hello William, welcome to irix.cc

So what can we help you with?

First there are some youtube movies of tranquility, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbLhw_zJiFo
From Marcus Herbert came the modified 2.x source we use to rebuild Tranquility on SGI's. For now this is the only source we have from the game and it is coded with irisGL as frontend. I was hesitant to release it since technically it's copyrighted source, but since it's you, i can give you that source code if you need it (and others as well)

PS: that SGI demo might sound like Electropaint. There are several ports of this available and code from a decompiled mips binary. Also, there is source of an early version of Electropaint available as SHAR archive.

[spiroyster]

Was there an offical Windows port of this? I can find information on a reverse engineered version, but broken links :(

[tranquility]

Hi. Sorry for forgetting about replying here, living in these difficult times...
That video is from the 1999/2000 version that I wrote for macOS (and also did a crufty win32 port of it as well).
I'd really love to see the SGI version again one day.
On the sgi tq soundtrack...
After the game was running, I thought that it needed some sort of soundtrack.
It's just one aiff file, playing in a loop. I recorded it in one take on a little Yamaha SHS-10 keytar that I bought at Sears.
I thought that it was ok, but a little short and not that tranquil. I edited the soundflie and slowed it to half speed.
Just serendipity, but I thought that I was on to something interesting. That's what ended up in the final release.

The rewrite in 2000 actually generates unique music and companion play sounds for every play session.
I used some interesting tricks. I could not add reverb on the fly so each sound sample was recorded with reverb on it.
One sample for each instrument, each in middle C, and then changed the sample rate to get different notes.
This ended up also changing the rate of the reverb for each note as well. A good hack that worked really well.
I also varied the playback rate for each note by a little amount so multiple notes sort of phased against each other randomly.
Another trick was when the graphics load started to grow, the music would get more sparse as to not slow up the graphics.

On electropaint (thanks for the reminder), I hunted around, found some old sources, and did a port to swift.
It runs, looks not totally unlike like electropaint, but man, that's a deeply weird algorithm.
Can't do anything with it because it's not mine, but it's fun to look at and diddle with.

More to come. I'm now on (I think) my 4th,5th? attempt at a new tranquility. Too many ideas and it keeps collapsing under its own weight.

[BackPlaner]

Do you still need a video of the original SGI version?

[tranquility]

Do you still need a video of the original SGI version?

Yes, please. Whatever you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
wm romanowski
tranquility @ mac.com