Messages

I heard Grundislav went to a restaurant and ate all the food at the restaurant and they had to close down the restaurant.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Ok, enough off-topicism, I think we've got the trolling out of the way. Please keep things relative to the original post, I don't want to see this turn into 80 pages of unnecessary nonsense.

Rharpe, do not use this thread as a soapbox for your personal views, and please take note of the first sentence of the second golden rule of posting.

Do not patronise Becky either.

Seriously folks, find something more constructive to do with your time!

...it uses an anti-alised GUI at least? Doesn't it?

Shall I just sit quietly in the corner?

You'll find that the editor doesn't display the alpha channel, but the engine itself does - basically you have to play the game to see the effects. I'm using anti-alised sprites in my game, and you can even check out MrColossal's game 'Spellbound' which also uses anti-alised sprites if you're not convinced

Sign me and Becky up.

Alright Limping Fish, looks like it's going to be fisticuffs in the carpark then

Ninjas, I can't help but feel you've been playing all the wrong games to say that commercial games have a low standard for music. Played Morrowind recently? Any of the Thief series? Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory? How about Grim Fandango? The Curse of Monkey Island? Quest For Glory 4? Surely you've played Monkey Island 2? No? Final Fantasy 7? Secret of Mana? The megadrive Sonic games? We can go as far back as Wonderboy 3 if you like

Edit: There'll be a point soon too when the whole weight of the 3D glorifiaction collapses in on itself as it becomes so impossibly technically involved to make games with new technology, and people will realise again that a beautifully drawn 2D game is much more enjoyable than a badly made 3D game. I hold John Carmack responsable for the shift of focus from 'gameplay and immersion' to 'fans that cast real time shadows on the foor in 38582x29451 resolution!'

But... I have no avatar! Consider yourself counter-zinged!

Someone mentioned Deus Ex, a game that I felt lacked, save for the main theme, any kind of "Musical Identity"

I couldn't disagree more strongly with this statement. I would elaborate but it would involve much arm-flailing.

Can someone point out a commercial game that prominently features 'easy to write' techno music? The only techno soundtracks that spring to mind are the Wipeout ones... and perhaps Deus Ex might be considered too to the average uneducated pop music denzien (although there's not a hint of incompitence in the writing or musical integrity of that specific game, and I will have fisticuffs in the car park with anyone who might think otherwise).

Don't listen to that flash-music-guide thing either, it's riddled with personal bias and mis-information. Where most people go wrong with this kind of thing is trying to pidgeon-hole every minute variation into subgenres, when in fact it can all be piled into 'good music' and 'bad music' depending on personal preference.

And yes, it IS as easy to write a throwaway bit of rat-a-tat orchestral music these days as it is to make something that goes OOTZ OOTZ OOTZ OOTZ YEAH YEAH BABY DUGGA-DA DUGGA-DA DUGGA-DA DUGGA-DA... or a four-power-chord acoustic punk ballard about how much of a loser you are.

In every avenue of music you will find works of art and childish skribbles in crayon and this perhaps holds true with computer entertainment, but I could reel off a list of games that have sublime soundtracks much quicker than I could ones with awful soundtracks.

Autechre - Untilted
Boards of Canada - The Campfire Headphase
Four Tet - Everything Ecstatic
Elbow - Leaders of the Free World
Sigur Rós - Takk
Amon Tobin - Chaos Theory

It's past midnight in the UK so Merry Christmas to everyone and Captain Pancake's foot!

Synful is the future, looking forward to the updates that are supposed to be happening soon. I think the quick demo I did with the trial when it first came out is still somewhere on the website. It has some timbral issues at the moment, but as the technology is refined these will start to disappear.

In regards to articulation, this is unfortunatly a luxuray you only get with the upper tier libraries. Garritan Orchestral Strings has pretty much every articulation you can imagine, but GPO doesn't, heh (apart from fluttertongue for the woodwinds). EastWest does also stiff you on various articulations as well, although there's the XP versions that have just come out which apparently plug those holes up along with some unremarkable psudo-legato feature.

EastWest did a very good deal on Gold for sure, however I don't use any of their products as I'm not keen on having the 'bigboomy' sound (and static hall reverb) imprinted on my Orchestral renditions, not to mention that their buisness practises are quite unscrupulous - the guys in charge take great delight in making rediculous claims against competing products (take for example the nonsense spurted out on their fourms after the recent Vienna announcements).

The reason why I have a lot of love for GPO is that it's small and extremely playable, making it wonderfully easy to just write music. With anything else you have to carefully plan out what articulations you need to use and quite often end up restricted by the number of instruments you have going due to RAM and processor limitations, unless you have a number of dedicated sampling workstations. I've tried writing things from scratch using VSL and it's just extremely tiresome - you spend more time arsing around locating the right patches and loading them up from an endless list than actually composing! With GPO I can just bam up the patches and get on with making music with no hassle, and when you end up working under strict deadlines this becomes very important.

Of course when it comes to rendering a final piece it's a much different story - big gigabyte libraries becomes much more desirable at this point! (At least for the time being anyway, monolithic sample archives are going to become extinct soon as sampling/physical modelling hybrid technology begins to mature, which means less hard drive space and RAM will be needed but more processor power will).

But yeah, it depends on what you want and how much resources you have to throw at it. EastWest is Hollywood-in-a-box if you're into that sort of thing, Vienna is the CS-80 of the Orchestra sampling world and everything else in between gives you many different colours in a wide palette of sound.

No worries. Not that I have any intention to go on a big tirade against the evils of piracy you understand, but I'm of the opinion that if you have to steal software then don't go publically blabbing about it even if you use it or not

(Incidently, I find your opinion that 'Personal Orchestra sucks' to be quite misguided. It's not all about gigabytes kiddo )

I have the Garritan strings, all the Vienna Cube, Dan Dean woodwinds and Brass. All illegally.

Possibly not a good idea to admit you pirated these libraries, especially when someone posting in this thread does work for one of the companies you mention there

Giant Frikkin' CGI Lion voiced by James Earl Jones wouldn't really change the weighting of how good the film is really 

"Great big frikkin' CGI monkey" is the only thing that strikes me about this film from the trailers. I think I'm becoming allergic to CGI in films, Star Wars Ep 3 brought me out in a huge rash (although I was surprised to find out how much of it was in 'Curse of the Wererabbit' as I mostly didn't notice it at all), and I'm a bit worried that all throughout Kong I'll be thinking about how unrealistic it looks while idly scratching my arms. Although Jackson has already proved that his films go much deeper than the computer technology they're dependent on unlike a lot of the nonsense being churned out these days, so perhaps I'll quickly get over the asthetical issues if I see it

Narnia does appear to be much worse in terms of visual abrasion - great big frikkin' CGI Lion that looks about as convincing as a sock puppet! Not that I was ever much of a fan of the Narnia books though, but from my vague memories of reading it (twee little fantasy story about Christian morals that wasn't nearly as epic as the film trailer would lead me to believe) it would seem that the director has taken a few... creative liberties to try and bring it up to the unnecessary grandeur of Lord of the Rings. Such is Hollywood.

I believe you Eric!

I wonder if anyone'll believe I have something up my sleeve too...