LfO

Sorry for the delay - as RK said, I'm having a busy time at work. We want to convey that the X-Corps are an international group (so we want different languages and accents) who work well together (so they must use a common language - in this case, English). The plan is that about two out of three phrases should be English, and the other one out of three should be in your first language. There is no need to limit your accent. On this page, the pairs of numbers for each type of phrase (like [5/2] and [2/1]) are meant to provide the [number of English/number of your language] information. I don't think it is important to use these EXACT numbers - something close is fine. BTW, I like the avatar - we've got a "musical rodent" theme

Sorry I'm so slow - yeah, I was talking about the directory structure. Last call for objections to using this track. If there are none in three days, it goes in the build.

I've just uploaded both source files and renders of the versions of Mr_S's Planetview - I'd like to replace the version currently in the FMOD build with version 3.1, which can be found here. So, I'm requesting two types of feedback: Are there any objections to using this version of the Planetview? If not, I'll put it in the build. Meanwhile, Mr_S has starting on some Interception music. Also, for those who have been involved in discussion about how to store audio source, here's an example of Kelargo's plan in action. I think it looks good. Anyone have comments?

I recorded some Interceptor Chatter a number of weeks ago, but I'm just getting around to opening a forum for their review. There are two "pilots", one female and one male - each has four variations for each of these game events: -Launch -Successful Intercept -Lost Tracking -New Orders (when user selects airborne interceptor) -Affirmative Interceptor Chatter - Iteration 1 I am particularly interested in what people think of the processing - its all done with freeware plugins, so if these sound good, I'll put the effects and presets into the repository so anyone with a sequencer can expand this set. Also, check out this short .ogg: ListBox - Iteration 1 It contains three potential SFX for selecting an item from a ListBox. Do you like any of these? Specs for both of these can be found at the SND Wiki. BUGS issues don't exist for either of these items yet.

What do you mean by "Hover" in the synth list? I've heard of "Hoover", meaning analog sounding, but otherwise I don't understand...

I've added content to the File Storage portion of that Wiki page, including Kelargo's proposal and my comments.

Strongly agreed. The forums just don't lend themselves to this type of thing.

Kafros: You have stated our purpose more clearly than I did. The key word in my statment was "precise" - in other words, the set of tools will be recommendations, rather than requirements - we should not prevent SND members from using the best tools for the job. That's my feeling, anyway - I believe, from Red Knight's statement, that he would prefer we lean toward stricter adherence to using a single tool-set. I interpreted what Mr_S wrote to mean that he was under the impression we're going to build a sequencer into Xenocide - my main goal in responding was to clarify that this is not the case. So, for the reasons you stated, CPU usage is not an issue. Also, as stated in the requirements sections of the Wiki, SFX should bbe mono and music should be stereo. I do not think FMOD should affect the music writing process at all. kelargo: I'm unclear on your proposal. At present, there are two tracks included in Planetview music (one is the Main Theme, which is temporary, but for the sake of this discussion, assume this is where it belongs). So, would you then have something like: ..\PlanetviewMusic\Mr_SPlanetview\Cakewalk\Sonar5\project.proj ..\PlanetviewMusic\ATeXTheme\Steinberg\Cubase4\project.proj ..\PlanetviewMusic\ATeXTheme\EWQL\OrchestralGold\subproject.proj and have .txt in PlanetviewMusic along these lines: Mr_SPlanetview is Mr_S contribution - it consists of a Sonar project (project.proj) blah blah blah ATeXTHeme is from ATeX, and is a Cubase project (project.proj) using the Orchestral Gold library (subproject.proj), blah blah blah I think the Vendor field may be redundant, but I agree that we should use this type of file structure. red knight: What is your motivation for reducing the number of effects used? There are two problems that could be associated with them, but I think we're adresssing both: 1) CPU usage - unless we do implement a tracker or sequencer in Xenocide (which I consider highly unlikely), this is a non-issue. Only SND members will ever have to use these effects. 2) Source control - as long as we finish the project for which this thread exists, most effects will be freeware, and easily accessible.

The main purpose of this project is to keep backups of music source, so that anyone in SND can approximately reproduce the work of former SND members (to prevent loss from members' leaving the project) - either to make changes, or to continue where they left off. As long as the person who wrote something is still around, I think its best that they make changes themselves - this is the policy set by ATeX, and I agree that it will help to maintain a better working environment. It is not my intention to establish a precise set of tools that all SND members must use all the time - I think we would have to limit ourselves too much, or have every SND member get a LOT of expensive software to accomplish this. The current plan is to run all sound through FMOD, which is basically a sound player that we can just stick in the program. Our only option when using FMOD is to import audio files into it. We would have to stop using FMOD for music in order to implement a sequencer. Also, given the CPU use that's sure to accompany running the rest of the game, I don't think we can afford to run any softsynths (you mentioned this below). In summary, I don't expect this project to have any effect on the game code - only on how we work within SND. The finished product from SND will still be stereo audio files. Luckily, I'm also running Sonar 5 Producer, so we can exchange files. I don't have Absynth, but I've been thinking about getting it. As I mentioned above, we will still be exporting everything to audio before putting it in the game, so there's no need to worry about CPU hogs. I would say "no" - especially if you want to do anything more on the Planetview track. I don't think we should re-do anything. My feeling is that the SND membership will always be changing, and so will technology - because of this, it doesn't make sense to make strict requirements about what we use. Rather, I just want to "document" what we're doing, so that others can reproduce our work. Sounds good. I'll get everything into the repository.

I think this is an appealing and ambitious concept, but not right for Xenocide. FMOD Designer isn't designed as a sequencer or tracker - It has no MIDI capabilities, and for that matter, no internal metronome. At best, it could be a wrapper for pre-written music segments - kind of a macro-tracker. You (meaning the coders) would have to write an basic tracker to drive FMOD. Even then, we might almost certainly end up with a lot of cross-fades, which are probably a big part of why you don't like other games' implementation of music transitions. The only alternative I can think of would be to find a freeware tracker that we could embed. If we did find one, we would have to run freeware softsynths under the covers - in my experience, these require a lot of processing power. We would lose our ability to compose with commercial tools. I don't know how well FMOD plays with others, either. Assuming we could overcome the technical hurdles, this would really be an experiment - the results might sound great, but then again, they might turn out to be pretty boring. With traditional music writing, we have some idea of what to expect - and, we already have a start. It really is a very cool idea - it would be pushing the envelope - but in my opinion, we don't have the resources to devote to it.

We can do music as one event with different parameter values, or as seperate events - seperate events for different gamestates seems best to me, but its really fairly easy either way. When it comes down to it, does it really matter where it is in the event tree, as long as its in a seperate .fsb? I'm unclear what granularity of control you have in what to load into memory. Is this the king of heirarchy you have in mind? | |-Music | | | |-Planetview | |-Battleview | |-Main Menu | |-SFX | |-GUI |-Planetview | | | |-Interceptor |-Battleview Where there are seperate .fsb files for Planetview Music, Battleview Music, Main Menu Music, etc. and GUI SFX, Planetview SFX, Battleview, etc. As far as I can tell, there's no association between where something is in the heirarchy and which .fsb file its in. Also, there are three options for the .fsb files - load into memory, uncompressor into memory, and stream from hard disk. Can you override these as needed, and is there something in particular they should be set to? I just came up with the Min and Max concept myself, and put in a rough implementation - currently, those are the only 2 user-defined values. Apparently, I put in some wierd values...I'll take a look at them, but I may not get a chance until after vacation (9 days from now). Same for changing the parameter name - does "ID" sound reasonable to you? If anyone else wants to make these changes in the meanwhile, feel free. Some more details about my intended implementation - Designer recognizes parameters as continuous variables with a fairly high resolution (7 decimal places, I think). What I THINK I've done is defined, using the Launch event as an example, is something like: if (param00 >= 0) && (param00 play random female launch sample if (param00 >= 1) && (param00 play random male launch sample I had to manually set the range for which each sample would be played (male vs. female), so I probably made some data entry errors. I thought I set all the Min and Max values the same using a template, but doc is sparse for the Designer, and i guess I did something wrong.

Fixed the looping problem. Split the Xenocide_00 wave bank, or whatever it was called, to seperate SFX and Music wave banks (which translates to seperate .fsb files). I also adjusted the event group heirarchy so that Music is just below the root level. I'm not sure which of these changes you wanted, but hopefully one of them fixed it. Also, I should describe what I did with the Interceptor chatter. There are actually two sets - one female and one male. Which set is played is determined by the the "param00" parameter of the event. I assume you've just been using the default, which is probably 0. I've defined user-properties on each chatter event (Min and Max, set to 0 and 1). The idea is that when you spawn an interceptor, you pick and random number between min and max - then, whenever you call an Interceptor Chatter event, send that value to param00 (which I suppose I should rename to something like "ID" or "voice"). This way, the interceptor will always use the same "voice", but each interceptor will have a different voice. Well, at the moment, one of two voices, but I believe this set-up will allow you to program it once, while SND can keep expanding the number of available voices (we'll keep Min and Max updated). This can serve as a prototype of how we implement battlefield chatter. Let me know how things go. oh, it looks like I left the original wavebank/.fsb out there in my SVN checkin - just ignore it for now, and we can clean it up after we see how this works.

Between your posts, I started an upload to the Build directory in the Assets SVN. I used ADPCM - what format is yours, Mad?

What's FMOD? I must confess that I'm not totally clear on how sound was implemented prior to the rewrite - it looks like FMOD was used, but FMOD Designer didn't exist yet. In short, its kind of like a hyper-focused IDE that allows sound designers to put together a tree of SFX events. The events can contain variations, multiple layers, and take parameters. For example, I anticipate being able to make a single "event" for the Silabrate in FMOD Designer. Then, at the beginning of a mission, the developer just has to create one instance of that FMOD event for each Silabrate on the battlefield. From there, FMOD takes care of 3d placement of the Silabrate, and the programer can use FMOD's API to tell the event when the Silabrate attacks, dies, etc. New Implementation I've created an FMOD project in the Assets SVN, and put all the currently available Stackless Iteration 3 SFX in there. Here's where we hit a problem - to use FMOD Designer, you have to use its build process, and its proprietary output files. At present, it only supports PCM (uncompressed audio), ADPCM (a compressed format that I've never heard of before), and MP3. I built the project with each of these formats, and these were the sizes of the ouput: PCM - 90 Meg ADPCM - 25 Meg MP3 (quality=50) - 10 Meg In its orignal .ogg format, it was about 12 Meg total. As of May 2006, the developers of FMOD stated that there are no current plans to implement .ogg support in FMOD Designer's build: http://www.fmod.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5264 I have no idea how they get away with including an MP3 encoder in a free download - do you only have to pay licensing on decoders? Anyway, I think we've already established that MP3 is not an option. Like I said, I've never heard of ADPCM before, and the Wikipedia entry doesn't indicate whether it is lossy or lossless. In any case, it appers to be about twice as large as a high-quality .ogg. So, are we willing to commit to using ADPCM instead of .ogg, in order to gain the flexibility offered by FMOD Designer? If we are, we should probably discuss the option getting rid of audio compression in the Assets SVN - I've heard that using multiple compression algorithms can yield some pretty awful results. This seems like something we really need to discuss as a group. As I mentioned in the Lounge, I'll be out of town for a week and a half starting Sunday (August 13), but don't wait on me to talk about this. Note to Developers I didn't upload an FMOD build to Assets - its very easy to do it yourself, though. You'll have to: -Install FMOD Designer -Open the project -In the Events Tab->Project Properties Table (table in the upper right), change the Build Directory to wherever you like - its currently set for my machine. -Select the Wave Banks Tab -Currently, there's just one bank. You can change the Compression Type in the table (as I discussed above, the options are PCM, ADPCM, and MP3). -The Build menu in the toolbar only has one item - select it, and the rest should be pretty obvious.

Come to think of it, do terror species ever panic? I've never seen it happen...