Messages

is kiniko hot? else i just dont get al these people making her seem like the goddess of games? so many people idd rather have interviewed.

The big problem I've always found with this whole RPG Maker scene is that it's full of idiots like ebby. I always liked the RPG Maker programs, hated the community that surrounds it. Now that there's a legit version out there in English I hope things will improve.

The best thing I see here is that you don't normally see other people's games being referred to as "rubbish," that would seem to be the main difference between here and miserable RPGMaker communities. I wonder if that has some contributing influence to people feeling inspired to make decent games with AGS?

Not everybody can draw you realise? Why should they be banned from creating games? There are people that make AGS games using ripped graphics too, should they also not be made and posted?

(*ahem* Re: Tilesets, people who don't wanna put the time in to make their own graphics shouldn't be making RPGs and posting them on the net)

Why the hell can't they do whatever they want?

Yeah, I was wondering about something like that. The first problem is that you can only play one music track at a time. Second problem is that there would be a varying delay introduced everytime you try to play two sounds at the same time that would only make matters worse.

Anyway, I had another little play around with MIDI files and I found that you can transition smoothly from one to another, but you have to edit the MIDI so that everything is offset by about a 32nd beat, so that nothing from the next measure is played when you change MIDIs. I'm thinking of putting together a simple little module for this, if anyone is still interested in working with MIDI.

I agree with InCreator. Use the most bizarre, arcane compression format you can find, then the first puzzle in your game can be "how do I extract the game to play it." You'll be extending and enhancing the gameplay. Pure genius!

There is a slight loss of rhythm. When I press the sax button there is a very slight delay and with the transition button it is the same.

Yeah, for some reason when you use SeekMP3Position() on a wave file it seeks to a sample (I think) instead of to a millisecond - so I had some difficulty compensating for that.

@Adamaski: I checked it a bit further. I believe that there is actuall further loss when you decompress. At least this is what I hear and this is what I see in the waveforms. I checked the original WAV file, the MP3 at 128 Kbps and the MP3 back to WAV. Everything done to Cubase at the highest quality (and slowest). The WAV files have 1411 Kbps, thus enhancing the "wrongs" of the MP3. You can see that there are differences in the waveform. I don't think that it's alot but anyway, just my thoughts (which are a bit off-topic).

But when you playback audio you're decompressing it, it sounds like there was something iffy in the algorythms used in one of the programs you tried with.

Thanks. The pause before the tune kicks back in was deliberate, it was intended to sound like that. If it sounds a bit wonky it's because I put it together quickly just to see if it would work more than a problem with the system itself. Thanks for the feedback, btw what speed computer were you using? I'm working with an Athlon 2800 and haven't tested it on anything slower.

I wonder, would your method still work if only the short transitions were WAVs, with the longer tunes kept compressed?

No, you need to be able to track the position in the song you want to transition from accurately - it possibly would work the other way around (only compressing the transitions), but that wouldn't help very much with the size problem.

In my computer (Athlon 1800 2800Mhz), it takes some time from track to track.

In what way does it take time? It's meant to wait until the end of the measure before changing if that's what you mean. Or do you mean that it pauses and the sound breaks up?

BTW, it's impractical to distribute with uncompressed WAV files - I convert from OGG back to WAV not for sound quality but so the position in the file can be tracked accurately during playback (as was discussed extensively in this thread already.)

[please make sure to extract this to a new folder]

Here's a quick little demo I put together using .wavs to show how I envision this working...

http://iinet.net.au/~snderson/musictest.exe

(self-extracting rar, please make sure to extract this to a new folder)

Hmmm... an intersesting idea, but I don't think the music and timer would start at exactly the same time. And, even if you could get a timer to trigger the change at the exact right millisecond I think there are issues with the very nature of compressed audio playback that would still cause it to glitch badly.
I think to get a system like this working with compressed audio would require some clever pre-caching trickery...

Even a game with a pretty hefty soundtrack (for an amateur game at least) of an hour or so would only take 600mb hard drive space. Obviously it would be preferable to be able to leave the soundtrack in a compressed format, but would it really so be terrible to have to decompress to .wav files - considering all the cool stuff the composer could now do? Just asking because I'm keen to write a module for dynamic soundtracks using uncompressed .wav files, would anyone actually be interested in using it?

Thanks, that way works.

I'm sorry I ever posted about it in the first place then, Strazer.

Just tried to do an experiment with this but it doesn't seem that AGS will play wav files as music?

Also, I have a feeling the inaccuracy is a problem within Allegro.

With digital audio unfortunately the functions don't seem to be terribly accurate, so you'll get it half a beat on or off or so everytime it transitions.

It's not the accuracy of the functions as such transitions work beautifully with .wavs - it's something to do with the compressed audio decoders.

Very interesting. So if you distribute the music in a compressed format and have it decompress to wav's as part of the installation process you'd be in business for a working iMuse-ey soundtrack completely scripted withing AGS? Cool 

Of course it'd mean the players would need several hundred megabytes free space for the game, but that shouldn't be much of a problem these days should it?

You can do something like that with scripting in AGS pretty easily.  The GetMidiPosition() function returns the current beat so, for example when you want to transition, if you have a 4/4 piece of music, just set it up in repeatedly_execute_always to wait until the current beat is divisible by 4, play the transition music and use PlayMusicQueued to que the next piece. You can also do this with digital audio music tracks: you just need to calculate the tempo and time signature in such a way as to determine the length, in milliseconds, of each measure.

Unfortunately, both ways suck ass when you actually try them out. The problem is the music totally glitches when you stop and start another track. The notes all cut off in a very obvious and unpleasant way and for some reason it ALWAYS plays some notes from further along in the track. With digital audio unfortunately the functions don't seem to be terribly accurate, so you'll get it half a beat on or off or so everytime it transitions.

So yeah, you can script iMuse-ish transitions and stuff in AGS, but it will glitch really badly when it plays them - thus negating the whole point :

There's two big problems with my simple little plugin:
1) It doesn't work alongside AGS DirectSound
2) You have to put everything together in DirectMusic Producer, which is a notoriously un-user friendly and buggy bit of software. Sorry about that 

I re-uploaded the old file to the same location so the link should now work again.
http://iinet.net.au/~snderson/DirectMusic_plugin_source.zip


Not sure how much use it will be. It was some hacked about code I adapted specialised to loading DirectMusic Producer runtimes. It was never intended for playing back normal sound or music files.
Basically you put together all your sound and music resources in DirectMusic Producer and then call routines from AGS using DMRoutine("[routinename]");
The main intention is to be able to recreate the kind of music tricks they had in the old LucasArts iMUSE games. So for example, when you leave one room and go to another it would call up a routine in the DirectMusic Producer project that would cause the music to play a transition piece at the end of the next measure then continue into a new variation or tune, etc, etc.
But yeah, I never could get it to work properly alongside the AGS audio engine, and it's only good for playing back DirectMusic Producer runtimes, not normal audio/MIDI files.
There's plenty of great source code out on the web you should be able to find for that, though.

Burnout is full of terrible generic american skatepunk music, thankfully you can make your own playlist.

Try it with the soundtrack to Cronenberg's "Crash" for a truly strange experience  :o

Janik, I'd be very interested to see how to do that too. I spent a couple of weeks trying to make an audio plugin that worked alongside the AGS sound without success.

One thing you can do (on Windows 2000 / XP only) is set the AGS sound output to WaveOut and then your DirectSound based plugin can do it's thing at the same time. That's a bit of a kludge though, and it won't work on computers running older versions of Windows...