Mesmerise

An immersion-enhancing tool for storytelling, table-top role playing games, improv theater, and other social activities.

What does it do?

Mesmerise is a remote-controlled image viewer and music player (although many more features are planned). It organizes images and music tracks into scenes, which you can then switch between using a web-based control panel.

Change between scenes as your story progresses or as your party travels around the world, to heighten the immersion of listeners, players and participants.

Mesmerise is designed to run on a computer connected to a large screen and sound device, with the game master or story teller controlling the action remotely, using a computer, tablet, or smartphone.

Getting started

1. Download and unpack the latest version of Mesmerise.
2. Create an adventure and drop it in the adventures subdirectory of the Mesmerise directory.
3. On the computer you want to display your adventures, run Mesmerise by double-clicking mesmerise.jar file in the Mesmerise directory.
4. On the device you want to control your adventures from, open a web browser and navigate to <IP address of the viewer computer>:8080. If this is the same computer you intend to run the control panel on (for instance, if you're going to cast the Mesmerise application window to a Chromecast or similar device), this will be 127.0.0.1:8080. If not, please consult your router and/or operating system documentation.

Creating adventures

An adventure is simply a directory with the following contents:

• A directory images which contains all images for your adventure.
• A directory music which contains all music for your adventure. Music files must be in MP3 format.
• A file scenes.ini, which defines all scenes used by your adventure.

A scene is simply an assignment of a name to a background and a music track. These assignments are written in scenes.ini file, and has the following form:

[Scene name]
background = image file name
music = music file name

The background file referred to by a scene needs to be placed in the images directory, and the music file needs to be placed in the music directory. All components of a scene are optional, so you can create silent scenes, or scenes without a background.

Any number of scenes can be defined in the scenes.ini file. For instance, to create an adventure with two scenes, one named "Creepy Forest" and one named "Rural Village", each with a background and a soundtrack, you would write the following scenes.ini:

[Creepy Forest]
background = forest.jpg
music = generic_background_music.mp3

[Rural Village]
background = village.jpg
music = generic_background_music.mp3

Note how both scenes make use of the same background music. This illustrates how scenes may share assets with each other.

Development

Mesmerise is build using Kotlin and React. To build your own copy, you will need make, Gradle and NPM installed on your system.

Once you do, check out the source code and run make dist to build your own release package, or just make to build the application JAR file.

If you're going to hack on Mesmerise, rebuilding the whole JAR whenever you make a modification is going to be annoying. Instead, you can run the client and server parts separately by running npm start in the client subdirectory and ./gradlew run --args="-l <path to adventure library>" in the server subdirectory.

Roadmap

The following features are planned prophesied to be implemented some day. Something missing? File an issue!

• Background images
• Background music
• Lighting effects / Philips Hue support
• Image/sound/lighting controls independent of scenes
• Interactive maps
• Share and install adventures using zip/rar/other archive formats
• Overlay images / sprites
• Sound effects
• More audio formats
• Drag-drop adventure editor
• Native Chromecast support?

License

All code and assets are Copyright © 2020 by the Mesmerise project contributors. The application is made available to the public under the Affero GPL license version 3.0.