Sorry for the long silence - I got back this evening from a week in a campsite in France with my wife and our two over-excited kids (aged 2 and 3).
Just a quick question- I know it wouldn't be screen accurate (ridge profiles etc.) but would there ever be released any kind of Eccleston sonic approximation, perhaps in a limited edition? (ie. raised button and red/black wires)
I'm afraid it's very unlikely that we'd ever release an Eccleston sonic - as was suggested back near the start of this thread, most of our customers wouldn't know the difference between that and the Tennant version. In fact, more people have asked us why ours doesn't have "that black spiral thing inside the clear tube" (i.e. the fake moulded black wires inside the Character Options toy version) than have asked us for a 9th Doctor's version, and quite a few people have got slightly uppity and argued that the Sonic we're making is actually the 9th Doctor's not the 10th's.
Now when you do the gesture movements, is it you activate a different sound by gesture and when you press the button everytime it's that sound until it gets changed or is it by gesture everytime?
Sorry for being unclear on this before. As you know, in FX Mode, a single button press (holding the button down) will activate the normal 10th Doctor's Sonic Screwdriver sound (with the blue tip lighting up) until you release the button. If you double-press and hold down the button on the second press, the sonic is then armed for gesture-controlled sound effects. Currently each of the gestures will trigger a different sound which will continue until the button is released or another gesture is detected (so you can make a number of different sound effects in quick succession if you want to, or change the sound effect easily if you accidentally triggered the wrong one). I'm considering altering the functionality so that once a sound effect has started, no further gestures will change the sound (so that you can wave the sonic around as much as you like whilst making the scanning noises etc.) until the button is released and double-pressed again, but the disadvantage of this option is that it all feels a bit more cumbersome, especially if you accidentally trigger the wrong sound. The gestures are a fair bit less sensitive than they were for the 11th Doctor's sonic, so with the existing setup it's actually fairly easy to walk around with the sonic making the scanning noise without it accidentally triggering different sound effects, so I'm tempted to leave it as it is.
Also guys with Think Geek as far as I know they don't have pre-orders per say it's the Email me when they come in stock and everyone rushes to order :\ I did check out the product site and you are able to pre-order it on the BBC America Store.
That's correct - ThinkGeek don't take any payment details before they actually have stock, whereas BBC America do have a more conventional preorder payment system. Both retailers will be receiving stock from us in early October, so either option should work fine.
Also, thinkgeek will most likely open preorders when the release date gets closer. Probably sometime in September.
I haven't discussed it with them myself, but I'm pretty sure that ThinkGeek no longer do regular preorders, so they'll just email you when they have the products in stock.
One further question that may have been answered but I didn't see (unless I missed it) In FX mode can the sounds be played with both the emitter extended and not extended?
All functions can be used with the emitter head extended or retracted - the sonic itself doesn't know any difference (but the sounds are a bit quieter when the head is retracted). We did look at including a couple of internal switches or sensors to detect the extended/retracted state but we had to stop fiddling with the mechanical design and kick off the tooling back at the start of May in order to meet our October release date. (I know that some of you wouldn't mind waiting a couple of weeks longer for the product, but it really screws things up for our retailers if we don't deliver on the dates that we've promised.) In principle it would be possible to detect extension and retraction using the accelerometer, but I've already pretty much run out of code space in the main microcontroller, so don't have room to add any more features.
I really hope that the gestures arent as sensitive as the 11th's when in the (2nd) fx mode. Considering most people would wave around the screwdriver with the scanning sounds I would think it would just spit out random scanning effects unless held level. Also, has anyone asked if it still has the voice telling you the different modes your in? And does it still click like it did with the 11th's in silent control mode?
Yes, the gestures are indeed less sensitive than they were on the 11th Doctor's Sonic. The voice is pretty much the same as before, but the "Quiet Control Mode" will be quieter than the 11th Doctor's version - it'll still do the small clicks when sending IR, but it won't keep saying "Quiet Control Mode, memory bank A" every time you pick it up after a minute or two's inactivity. It'll also still make power-up and power-down sounds (and remind you of the mode) when powering off and on again - I thought about removing those noises too, but it would cause too much confusion for some of our customers.
I hope that all makes sense.
Cheers,
Richard
P.S. I was delighted to hear the news that Peter Capaldi is going to be the next Doctor - I'm guessing that he's relatively unknown for those of you outside the UK, but he's an excellent actor. If you're not offended by some rather emphatic profanities, I can highly recommend watching "In the Loop", which is a movie based on the BBC TV series "The Thick of It", for which Peter is best known here in the UK. (It also features the late, great James Gandolfini.) I found it exceedingly funny, but I guess the depiction of bumbling British politics might not be so amusing for non-Brits, and please don't watch it if you're sensitive to "bad" language.
