A standalone music-driven 3D demo for Windows & Linux.
Procedural worlds. Moving machinery. Stellar storms. Hardware ray tracing.
| Three acts | Sixteen worlds | Seventy-six chapters | One continuous soundtrack |
|---|---|---|---|
| Three distinct visual identities | From neon cities to living architecture | Authored camera paths and transformations | 14:48.68 of music at its original speed |
Actual v0.5 native captures. Click the gallery for a 2:40.75 preview with the original music.
| I · Full Throttle | II · Adventurous Uplift | III · Reality Ascendant |
|---|---|---|
| Neon flight, folded machines and orbital fleets. | Rain, chrome, moving foundries and refractive glass. | Desert colossi, luminous vegetation and a crystal-wing finale. |
| 8 worlds · 31 chapters | 4 worlds · 21 chapters | 4 worlds · 24 chapters |
00:00 → 05:00 |
05:00 → 09:49.92 |
09:49.92 → 14:48.68 |
| OpenGL procedural rendering | Vulkan hardware RT + OpenGL fallback | OpenGL procedural rendering |
| ♫ Luminous Flow — five-minute edit | ♫ Adventurous Uplift — full track | ♫ Rigid Arpeggios — full track |
Explore all 16 worlds
Act I — Photon Corridor · Plasma / Gyroid · Crystal Engine · Neon City · Fracture Machine · Cosmic Reactor · Quantum Ocean · Orbital Armada
Act II — Chrome Cathedral · Rain District · Orbital Foundry · Prism Chamber
Act III — Dune Colossus · Verdant Singularity · Gravity Rebellion · Reality Ascendant
Each return to a world has its own staging and transformation. Read the Act II notes and Act III notes for the implementation.
The music drives geometry, light, surfaces and moving mechanisms. 24 frequency bands provide sustained motion and color; a separate 100 Hz attack layer responds to low, mid and high frequency transients. Both interactive playback and export follow the same saved analysis and audio clock.
New in v0.6.1: a calmer camera — shots glide at constant rates on transient-free drive (no kick shake or zoom snaps), cuts land every two or four bars (196 shots), and rebuilt fighters, carrier, walking colossus, crystal moth and launch rockets. Read the notes →
v0.6: every scene change lands on a tracked beat, and high-energy chapters cut to a new camera angle on each downbeat (346 shots). A flying camera rig circles the action, crash-zooms on cuts, barrel-rolls through tunnels and punches on the beat, with parallax speed dust. The image gains a 2.39:1 scope frame, anamorphic streaks, speed blur, a blockbuster grade and darker, glossier Act II materials. Read the v0.6 notes →
v0.5: faster authored cameras, travelling energy, working machinery, fleet escorts, articulated vegetation and stronger city/fleet/stellar compositions. The transient response now stays distinct from sustained loudness. Read the rework notes →
Turn up the response when launching the executable:
PulseAscendant --pulse-gain 1.5Use ./PulseAscendant on Linux or .\PulseAscendant.exe in Windows PowerShell. Sensitivity defaults to 1, with a range of 0–2. Setting it to zero removes direct transients; spectrum, sustained energy and integrated musical motion remain active. These are frequency-band attacks, not separated instrument stems or a fixed metronome.
| Download | Start | |
|---|---|---|
| Windows x64 | Windows ZIP | Extract everything, then run PulseAscendant.exe. |
| Linux x64 | Linux tar.gz | Extract everything, then run ./PulseAscendant. |
| Source + music | Complete source ZIP | Includes all three original MP3s and four runtime WAVs. |
Keep the complete assets/ directory beside the executable. The demo starts at 1280×720, loops the full show and needs no account or network connection.
- Windows: Windows 10/11 x64 and an OpenGL 3.3 driver. SDL and the MSVC runtime are statically linked.
- Linux: built for Ubuntu 24.04 x64, GCC 13 and glibc 2.39, with a working X11/Wayland display and OpenGL driver.
- Hardware RT: a compatible Vulkan driver with KHR acceleration structures and ray queries. Unsupported devices use the separate OpenGL fallback; an Act II badge identifies the active renderer.
Keyboard controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| F1 / F2 / F3 | Jump to Act I / II / III, including its music |
| 1–8 | Act I worlds |
| 9 / 0 / - / = | Act II worlds |
| Q / W / E / R | Act III worlds |
| ← / → | Previous / next chapter |
| Tab | Modern / 320×200 retro rendering |
| M | Mute; music and animation clocks keep advancing |
| F11 | Fullscreen / window |
| Esc | Exit |
| Layer | What it does |
|---|---|
| OpenGL 3.3 | Procedural worlds in Acts I and III, plus a separate SDF/analytic fallback for Act II. |
| Vulkan KHR ray queries | Triangle BLAS/TLAS, animated instances, traced shadows, reflections and refraction in Act II. |
| Music analysis | 24 logarithmic FFT bands from 35 Hz–18 kHz at 20 Hz, plus independent low/mid/high attacks at 100 Hz. |
| Direction | 76 authored chapters cut on tracked beats (measured tempo, drift-following beat tracker), plus beat-synced camera shots on downbeats. |
| Motion | A deterministic, forward-moving musical clock for selected secondary animation; separately authored camera paths. |
| Camera | Shared cinematic rig: beat-synced orbit setups, crash-zooms, banking and barrel rolls, lens punches, parallax speed dust. |
| Presentation | HDR composition, 2.39:1 scope frame, bloom, anamorphic streaks, speed blur, split-tone grading, film grain, captions and an optional retro rendering mode. |
Use --no-rt to select the fallback, --require-rt to require hardware tracing, or --rt-validation for diagnostics when Vulkan validation layers are installed.
Rendering and soundtrack details
Five reusable meshes form the RT scenes within a 2,048-instance budget. Ray traversal allows up to five surface encounters. Modern RT uses two deterministic subpixel samples and an adaptive edge filter; retro uses one sample per pixel. RT output passes through host readback into an OpenGL HDR texture each frame.
The renderer is not a full path tracer and does not provide general global illumination or temporal denoising. Resolution and scene complexity affect performance: an exported 4K60 video does not imply interactive 4K60 performance. Rendering and provenance →
All music plays at its original speed. Act I preserves the first 299 decoded seconds sample for sample, then fades for one second to its exact 300-second boundary. Acts II and III retain every decoded sample. A combined stereo 48 kHz PCM16 WAV supplies a continuous audio clock with sample-exact joins.
Chapter cuts land on tracked beats within ±2.5 seconds of editorial targets, preferring strong measured attacks, bar lines and phrase starts, with 5–18 second chapter bounds. Subjective musical synchronization still needs listening.
| v0.5 evidence | Result |
|---|---|
| Windows / Linux CTest | 6/6 passed on each platform |
| Windows RT / Windows fallback / Linux WSLg tours | 152/152 chapter samples on each path |
| Exact-time transient A/B comparison | Visible pixel changes in all 16 worlds |
| 1080p60 preview | 9,645 frames, complete decode passed; 13 audio windows measured zero offset |
| Independent review | Code 8.0/10 · Visual finish 7.2/10 · Sampled pace 7.3/10 |
These checks cover the documented builds and samples; physical Linux hardware RT and full-show audience retention remain unverified. See the verification report, independent review and release checksums.
Film status: the v0.5 1080p60 preview is available now. The full v0.5 4K60 export is complete and verified; YouTube publication is pending the earlier upload limit. Earlier YouTube videos show earlier versions: v0.4 Short · v0.3 full film.
The code, shaders, analysis tools and capture pipeline are included. Start from the complete source ZIP if you want the supplied soundtrack: a plain Git checkout intentionally omits audio.
Build on Windows or Linux · dependencies · regenerate music analysis
The release source bundle, PulseAscendant-source.zip, includes all three original MP3s, three per-act runtime WAVs, the combined WAV and generated analysis. A Git checkout intentionally omits audio. Restore all four WAVs before running the full checks: CTest reads Act I and the combined show, while the standalone audio checks also compare Acts II and III. Runtime binary packages include only assets/music/second-reality-three-acts.wav; copying that file alone is insufficient for full source validation.
SDL 3.4.18 is fetched from a pinned commit with a verified SHA-256. Vulkan headers are located from the SDK or fetched from a pinned release. The normal executable loads Vulkan dynamically and can start in fallback mode without a Vulkan loader. A runtime shader compiler is not required because compiled SPIR-V ships with the assets.
Windows, Visual Studio 2026 and CMake 3.25+:
cmake --preset windows
cmake --build --preset windows
ctest --preset windows
./tools/package.ps1Ubuntu 24.04:
sudo apt install build-essential cmake pkg-config libx11-dev libxext-dev libxrandr-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev libxfixes-dev libxss-dev libxtst-dev libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev libegl1-mesa-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libasound2-dev libpulse-dev
cmake --preset linux
cmake --build --preset linux
ctest --preset linux
bash tools/package.sh build/linuxFor offline dependency reuse, configure with -DFETCHCONTENT_SOURCE_DIR_SDL3=/path/to/SDL and a local Vulkan header include path via REMIX_VULKAN_INCLUDE_DIR. Add -DREMIX_RUNTIME_TESTS=ON to register tests that require a working display. The remix_assets build target synchronizes shader changes beside the executable, including shader-only builds.
To recreate audio, FFT data and directed cues, install ffmpeg, Python and numpy, then run:
python tools/prepare_show.py "Luminous Flow.mp3" "Adventurous Uplift.mp3" "Rigid Arpeggios.mp3"The script checks source hashes, prepares the three runtime tracks, combines them without gaps and regenerates per-act analysis, transient response and cue direction. With the original files already under music/source/, it also works without arguments. The PowerShell entry point is tools/prepare_music.ps1.
After editing the Vulkan compute shader, rebuild and validate its shipped SPIR-V with Vulkan SDK tools:
glslangValidator -V -Os --target-env vulkan1.2 assets/shaders/rt_scene.comp -o assets/shaders/rt_scene.comp.spv
spirv-val --target-env vulkan1.2 assets/shaders/rt_scene.comp.spvCapture, export and verification commands
Interactive playback prepares the graphics pipelines before starting the music. The window title shows progress; driver-dependent preparation can take over a minute on WSLg. Escape cancels preparation. This prevents deferred first-draw compilation from consuming the opening music.
PulseAscendant --show-info prints the three acts, measured durations, audio asset and all 76 directed chapter starts as JSON without initializing a display.
build/windows/Release/PulseAscendant.exe --smoke-test --no-audio --capture-dir build/captures
build/windows/Release/PulseAscendant.exe --tour-test --no-audio --capture-dir build/tour
python tools/storyboard.py --help
python tools/render_video.py --app build/windows/Release/PulseAscendant.exe --require-rt --output dist/three-acts/PulseAscendant-4K60.mp4Smoke mode requests all 16 worlds in both styles; tour mode captures 18% and 82% through each chapter. Use storyboard.py to group these images for inspection. The historical verify-motion.py thresholds were designed for earlier capture timings and are not a current acceptance gate. Capture success and pixel differences do not establish artistic acceptance. See current evidence.
Additional audio and music-direction checks need the complete source audio plus Python and numpy:
python tests/test_show.py --app build/windows/Release/PulseAscendant.exe
python tests/test_music_analysis.py
python tests/test_music_direction.pyWithout NVENC, tools/render_chunked.py --app <executable> --work <dir> --output <new.mp4> renders resumable 30-second x264 chunks (default 3840×2160/60, --render-scale 0.5) and verifies the concatenated film. Add --open-matte to the executable for 16:9 instead of 2.39:1.
The exporter reads --show-info, checks the combined music's format and sample count, rejects ranges outside 888.68 seconds, and validates the encoded resolution, frame count, frame rate and audio duration. It needs Python, ffmpeg/ffprobe and NVIDIA H.264 NVENC. A short preview can add --start 589.92 --duration 5. Existing outputs are protected; choose a new filename for another render. Packages are written under dist/three-acts/.
The native --render-stream --fps N option writes bottom-up RGB24 to stdout and diagnostics to stderr. In this mode, --duration is timeline length, not wall-clock runtime.
tools/render_short.py --app <executable> --font <bold.ttf> --output <new.mp4> creates a 32-second 1080×1920/60 trailer from seven native camera excerpts. It places montage cuts on measured Act III music attacks, constrains every segment to its five-second source, and identifies cached renders by SHA-256 of the executable and its assets. Trailer revision 2 removes a weak city-camera excerpt following visual review. It uses a 70–102 s excerpt of Rigid Arpeggios; the full demo retains the complete three-act audio. The original v0.3.0 source archive preserves trailer revision 1; current Git source and the separate trailer-v2 source supplement contain the updated generator.
Pulse Ascendant has its own identity and new choreography. Its history includes a selective reimagining of Future Crew's Second Reality (1993). Future Crew receives credit for the original demo, selected effect ideas and the 14-vertex / 24-triangle glenz geometry. Original source, reference commit 071a82eddb7a7390dbaa491a8a473e0e923a55c2, Unlicense/public domain. This is not an official Future Crew release or a complete port. The original source and prior releases remain preserved.
Khronos Vulkan headers carry Apache-2.0 and MIT notices; the applicable notices and Apache license text are bundled under licenses/.
New code uses the MIT license; SDL uses its zlib license and bundled notices. Music is not MIT-licensed. Luminous Flow, Adventurous Uplift and Rigid Arpeggios were generated with Suno, carry artist metadata joyolo, and were supplied and requested for publication by the project owner. Their applicable rights remain separate. See music credits and source hashes, the receipts in music/, and Suno's terms.
Three acts. Sixteen worlds. One pulse.