Soundtrack

[k]

And about the announcer between rounds, great idea!. The announcer really makes a difference. And the other day I was talking to someone in the grid about adding announcers like: 'Double Kill', 'Multi Kill', 'Rampage'... with better suited tron phrases lol

That would be cool. Don't forget the classic Mortal Combat "Flawless Victory" if you kill all the other opponents in one round.

[philippeqc]

What I REALLY want is an audio warning that the game start in 3 2 1...

Often I use dead time to go around in my app, and there is few diff between the sound of someone's engine in the game and yours on idle before a new round!

Let it be a series of beeps like in formula 1 racing, something thats not easy to misunderstand.

Anyway, just my 2 c

-ph

[ishAdmin]

There actually is a series of blips on the count down. They are very faint. If you turn your sound waaay up, you'll hear them. Perhaps they could be made louder.

[Lucifer]

Not meaning to toot my own horn or anything, but this I tested on the grid and I think I'm wanting to pursue this for actual ingame music. Anyone want to take a poke at it? I just fired up soundtracker and hit play and then played the game, AA is friendly with the soundcard like that. You might need to disable sound to do it that way. Or you can follow klax's instructions to enable music and have it play this song.

It's still a starter song in the sense that it doesn't pursue any specific idea for very long, but I think it's got a solid foundation to build on, and playing it and the game at once certainly gives me ideas to pursue.

I forgot to mention I'm planning on resampling the instruments when there's more music. Never before did I realize how expressive a guitar is until I tried to methodically break down guitar noises to build an instrument bank for a mod file. Worse, my rhythm playing is pretty involved (alright, every guitar player I've played with learned something directly from me, but I didn't necessarily learn something from them, heh ). So, anyway, yeah. The file's big mostly because the instruments are 16-bit 44.1khz, but when I resample I'll be looking to make them smaller any way I can.

[klax]

What I REALLY want is an audio warning that the game start in 3 2 1...

I'm with you in this. This is a must lol

Lucifer: as an idea IMHO it is very nice. What do u think people?

FYI: I've compared performance of mp3s and oggs with SDL_mixer:
mp3s: really bad performance because of smpeg (veery cpu intensive sniff)
oggs: really really nice performance (I would say it is less cpu intensive than a mod).

[Lucifer]

What I REALLY want is an audio warning that the game start in 3 2 1...

I'm with you in this. This is a must.

I might be able to get my wife to record the numbers, and then throw some reverb and cool stuff on it. She has a good voice for this sort of thing. I might even be able to make them 8 bit 22khz samples, but you might have to settle for 16bit.

On the ogg vs mp3 thing: the real problem isn't the cpu intensive stuff, it's the size of the file. A mod file will be a lot smaller than an ogg file, making electronic distribution more feasible. Ogg files will significantly increase the size of the download. Now, I could finish the one mod file and an intro mod file and then consider recording an ogg soundtrack, but that's not a realistic goal for me to set right now. Sorry. (not to mention, if I'm the one turning in the soundtrack, it won't be mp3 no matter what. Call me crazy, but I'd prefer to leave mp3 where it belongs, on someone else's computer)

For these smaller samples, I would tend to think that .tar.gz will compress better than ogg, since they won't be streamed, and ogg isn't just to compress sound, it's to compress and stream it. Otherwise, even before mp3 we could compress music just fine, we just couldn't stream it. So for sound effects, there's not much difference. I mean, a 200kb uncompressed sound sample only compresses to like 190kb. Seriously. I've run this test before. And then the 190kb ogg file won't gzip much more, whereas the 200kb sound sample would gzip to a smaller size than the ogg file would've ended up.

[iceman]

if this feature get included in some later version please have an option to disable it as players (like myself) with low speed 400mhz pcs have no chance of running in game sound (the pc would grind to a halt)

thanks

[Tank Program]

if this feature get included in some later version please have an option to disable it as players (like myself) with low speed 400mhz pcs have no chance of running in game sound (the pc would grind to a halt)

thanks

You should be able to do sound... On my 233MMX I can play MP3s & do other stuff...

[iceman]

maybe its because im using a K6-2 not a pentium ??
when i have tried it in the past the music kept skipping and finally the pc crashed

[Lucifer]

maybe its because im using a K6-2 not a pentium ??
when i have tried it in the past the music kept skipping and finally the pc crashed

I'd suggest two things. First, you're right Iceman that it should be optional. Some of us don't play with sound at all and would prefer to turn off sound to get every ounce of performance out of it we can get (With sound on my fps hovers around 50, but with sound off my fps goes over 60).

Second, I'd suggest that mod files wouldn't be the same problem that mp3/ogg are for you, and you may likely find that performance is adequate and you like the music. Remember that mod files were developed originally on the Amiga, and it had much less power than even your machine (7mhz 68000 CPU, not even RISC. Basically the top of the line Amigas in 1994 were the same technology you now find in a Sony Clie, the PEG series anyway). So they were built under requirements of high quality music but had very harsh performance requirements.

[voltisubito]

So I'm posting to a thread that hasn't been updated since August 2004... Neat huh.

Uhmm, So is context specific music being worked on for AA?? When I read that I got really excited about the whole thing. I would love to work on/help out with development. How plausable would it be to mix ogg/pcm/raw with xm?? I would also like to do some sound effect work.

Heres my webpage: http://www.wolfteck.com/~jschind

I have a lot of formal music recording and music theory training. While none of it is with tracking, I have been playing with soundtracker for the past few days and I'm really getting a kick out of it. Let me know what the status of music development is and if its cool for me to pitch in. Thanks for a great game.

p.s. Why was mp3 even considered??

[Tank Program]

Ok, to the best of my knowledge:

Sound Development: Almost non-existent
Music Development: Almost non-existent

So please, feel free to come up with some stuff and lend a hand. And I'm sure someone will come along and point out some stuff I've forgotten about... In fact, doing a search for 'music' will problably come up with whatever else there is...

[voltisubito]

I did some poking around the forums today. I think there are some really great ideas here. I am especially fond of the music changing within the context of the game. If one of the developers (coders) would be so kind to email me, I would like to discuss some ideas on how to get this going. I think its extremely feasible without eating a lot of cpu. I also like the countdown ideas, and the announcer stuff. I'm going to try and get the movie sometime soon to find some annoucer-type quotes. As far as the countdown goes, should it be voice or some sort of subtle 'blip' or 'tone?' Or I guess there could be voice + blip. The possibilities are endless... or at least the possibilities are more then 2. Any ideas as far as random announcing goes? Any ideas as far as anything goes?