Visualization Installation

Unzip contents of zip file into the plugin directory of your Winamp installation. For example, on my system this is in c:\program files\winamp\plugins. Next time you open the visualization dialog in winamp you should see vis_d3d listed.

Code Installation

For details visit my website.

Visualization Usage

Select Visualization in the Winamp Plugin configure dialog. Press configuration to change the visualization behavior and choose the best hardware settings for your systems. Play your favourite music and press "start".

Hardware issues

The visualization can run in either a window or full screen. The best results come from running full screen with hardware acceleration. Normally you enable hardware acceleration by selected the "Direct 3D Hal" on the configuration dialog.

You may get improved results when running in a window by setting the number of displayed colors to 16 bit.

Unfortunately some systems cannot run in this mode, in that case your best bet is to run using the RAMP driver, in a small window. Textures will probably be too slow.

I provide a low CPU version, this uses a smaller landscape with a simple 3D lighting model. The result is much worse than when the plugin runs at its full potential.

Animation

You can configure the plugin to automatically change its display, for passive viewing. For example it can be set to automatically change the landscape shape every once and a while.

Navigation

The plugin is an interactive experience. Use the keyboard to move around the environment and change the lighting and texture settings. You can find some really freaky effects.

The current list of keyboard mappings can be found in the help dialog box.

Texture

Texture support is simple but flexible. You can type in the path of a texture file. This should be a BMP file, I don't think any other formats work. Only certain resolutions work - 256x256 is a good bet. The resolution needs to be a power of 2, i.e. 16x16, 32x32, 64x64, 128x128...

You can use a whole series of bitmaps by following the following a naming scheme - every time you press space you will move to the next bitmap texture. The naming scheme is simple:

bitmap.bmp
bitmap2.bmp
bitmap3.bmp
etc....

You can specify a complete path to the bitmap. If you specify just a file name then it is found in the winamp/plugin directory, the same place that the DLL for the visualization is located.

You can tile a texture multiple times across the surface. For systems that do not handle textures well then you can specify a color for the landscape instead.

Version 1.2 Release Notes

Whats new

Now different landscape algorithms
Texture is on by default and I provide some demo textures, this is really the best way to see the plugin.
Animation options allow you to change the landscape (and camera angle), texture and lighting automatically.
Reorganized configuration UI to be a little less crowded.

Known Bugs

Camera movement animation not yet implemented.
Screen size when running in a window not remembered.
Resizing window first time loses graphics, second time it comes back.
Need to restart plugin to see any changes made in configuration dialog while it is running.

Wish List

What it doesn't do that future versions will attempt to support in the short term:

Fog
More 3D affects - particles would be great
I want to change the key mapping so that it uses the keys I like for Quake.
Lighting configuration
Ability to degrade quality
Animated Camera Movement in interested flight paths
Extend the landscape so that it appears to run forever, get a better illusion of flight
Introduce Direct Draw 2D affects, for example fad effect when changing landscapes

Long term ideas:

Multiple visual effects, including 2D direct-draw manipulation of the buffers
Mouse or Joystick input - more intuitive interactive environment
Organize the evolving code into a visualization library

Version 1.1 Release Notes

Whats new

A ton of code to expose hardware acceleration and enable full screen Direct 3D
More configuration options - landscape roughness slider and ability to "tile" a texture across the surface.
Much more error handling, debug tracing support and even optional "Kill" timer to avoid screen lockups when debugging

Bugs

Hardware mode and RGB software rendering has a strong ambient lighting, I'm not sure why - RAMP works fine.

Still can't get fog working in Retained Mode. No examples, makes me suspicious.

Version 1.0 Release Notes

Feature List

This version demonstrates the following:

Basics of launching a windowed Direct 3D Retained Mode application that is connected to Winamp.
Use of lighting, camera positioning, and rotation
Creation of a 3D object from vertice and face lists
Connecting and reacting to user input
Using the Winamp spectrum data to "move with the music"
Applying Textures in a simple fashion
Dealing with Persistence for Configuration and using a configuration dialog

Bug List

Error handling isn't as robust as I would like, might crash or give uninformative error message if DirectX 6 isn't found or something else goes wrong.
Not tested on many machines, don't know how it will react
Timing values are not tweaked - landscape will not move with the music in the ideal fashion.