Climbing Wall OSC

This is the contract between the game engine, which owns the wall’s sensors, lights, game rules and content, and SuperCollider, which owns every sound the installation makes. If a message is not described here, it does not exist.

One YAML source is the truth. This site, the SuperCollider responder stubs and the engine’s constants file are all generated from it, so nobody writes an address string twice and nobody typos one.

Draft

Protocol v0.2.0 implements the eight modes of the Prototype Use Cases document. Mode behaviour comes from that document; the audio design on top of it, and every message the document is silent about, is a proposal for review. The wall below is a reference installation — real walls report their own size at runtime.

The wall

Hold identity is the single biggest off-by-one risk in the project, so it is settled once, here, in a picture generated from the same file as the code.

The reference wall: 240 holds, 20 × 12, built from 4 × 2 panels of 5 × 6. Hold 0 (circled) is bottom-left; numbering runs along each row, then up, across the whole wall including decorative columns. Columns 2–17 are the interactive area. Real walls report their own size with /wall/config.

Walls come in different sizes, so the engine reports the real one with /wall/config before anything else. See Wall & zones for the interactive area, panels and how multi-player modes split the wall.

The modes

Chase the Shape Hit every hold of a moving shape. Up to four zones.

Mirror, Mirror A Leader invents a route; Followers climb its mirror.

Find the Match Find both holds of each colour pattern.

Sound Wall Teacher-uploaded audio, one sound per hold.

Climbing Synth Keyboard holds feed an arpeggiator; effect holds shape it.

Draw & Climb A drawn route, scanned onto the wall.

Memory Game A story reveals a route; climb it from memory.

Arcade Missions, hazards, and holding the pipe shut.

Start here

Sending from the engine

The startup order, the float rule, and live geometry. See Lifecycle then the engine guide.

Receiving in SuperCollider

Generated OSCdefs wire the addresses up; your logic lives in ~handlers. See the SuperCollider guide.

Who picks the sound

Content is named by the engine; feedback is chosen by SuperCollider. See the rule.

Testing without the other side

A mock engine for all eight modes and a schema-aware monitor. See Testing.

The rules everything else follows

1. UDP is lossy, so continuous data is absolute, never a delta. The Climbing Synth sends the whole note pattern every time, never “add a note”. A dropped packet heals on the next one.
2. State changes are idempotent. Sending /mode/start twice is safe. Anything that genuinely must land declares an explicit acknowledgement.
3. IDs travel as arguments, not as address segments. /wall/hold/touch 12, never /wall/hold/12/touch.
4. Continuous values are floats. Always. Integers are for identifiers, counts and flags. See Types & units.
5. Nothing about the wall is a constant. Hold, zone and speaker indices are checked against the live configuration, never a hard-coded range.
6. The engine names content; SuperCollider chooses feedback.
7. Once an address is published, it is never repurposed.

Quoting a specific message

Every message has its own anchor. Copy its link and paste it into chat, so feedback reads “the growl on /mode/memory/mistake should not repeat within a second” rather than a paragraph both sides read differently.