Is original music needed?

Isaactoo · Post by **Isaactoo** » 01 Oct 2005, 00:15

It would be awsome if Spring could just read music from a folder and we could just put in what we wanted.
I must admit that the original Total Annihilation soundtrack fits the game best...but here is some gaming music I really like http://mindjob.org/
I kinda think that http://mindjob.org/files/DNA-Groove_-_U ... Market.mp3 would work well for base building in Spring.

Warlord Zsinj · Post by **Warlord Zsinj** » 01 Oct 2005, 01:35

Homeworld had a fantastic choral section of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. Absolutely haunting; any selection of tracks that I make for Spring will definitely include it. I dare say it is better than the original strings version.

That being said, Homeworld's soundtrack wasn't exclusively classical, and this didn't harm it at all. There was an awesome percussion section for battles (such as when the pirates attack you for the first time in the second mission).

Min3mat, I think the intention of everyone here is to 'dis' emo music as much as is humanly possible.

And yes, with the ability to put custom music in, and have Spring select the tracks from the appropriate folder according to how the battle is going, there would be a large amount of music packs springing up very quickly. While this would likely increase most peoples directories in size, it won't affect the Spring download; any more so than the fact that there is several hundred megabytes worth of maps available for download, but less than 10 meg in the Spring download; and you need maps to play - you don't need music.

monohouse · Post by **monohouse** » 03 Oct 2005, 06:58

WTF ?! what do you need the music for ? it's useless waste of time and spring should not be wasted on that, adding music code and not to mention processor time to handle it (especially in software mixing mode) is definetly NOT wanted since it's barely running fast enough, we don't need to waste the speed on things as trivial as this, there are many music players out there, last time I checked microsuck winblows does have although somewhat limited multitasking capabilities so you CAN run foobar2000 and spring with it and play, waste of code and time I think, nothing to see here move along.

FireCrack · Post by **FireCrack** » 03 Oct 2005, 07:20

^no

And ya know what othr game had good music, freespace.

monohouse · Post by **monohouse** » 03 Oct 2005, 07:21

yeh you're right, original music is needed, but not in spring
yeh but that's a single player game....

SwiftSpear · Post by **SwiftSpear** » 03 Oct 2005, 12:51

monohouse wrote:yeh you're right, original music is needed, but not in spring
yeh but that's a single player game....

Why is it a waste of time? It isn't like spring coders are going to code all the music manually. If music is included you will obviously be able to turn it off, so your argument about wasted processor time is invalid. Sure there's music players out there, but they can't detect the mood of the game, weather action is going on or not, weather you have spotted the enemy or not, plus they include a bunch of crap that isn't needed to run a proper game soundtrack.

Every good RTS ever has had back music, why should spring be different?

BlackLiger · Post by **BlackLiger** » 03 Oct 2005, 17:24

Plus, music simply IS TA, and this is TA Uberised, so we need Uberised Music!

That is to say, TA kinda falls apart without music.

Anyways, if the sims can manage it, why not spring?

shnorb · Post by **shnorb** » 04 Oct 2005, 08:23

http://www.fileuniverse.com/Music/17-Au ... k%2017.mp3 (1.2 mb)

i seriously dont see why anyone would want anything better... i swear i could put that on repeat and let it play all day

tanelorn · Post by **tanelorn** » 04 Oct 2005, 08:26

It's called WinAmp. Heard of it? Play whatever music you want. Simple.

Maelstrom · Post by **Maelstrom** » 04 Oct 2005, 08:43

But, as has ben said earlier, this cannot tell the mood of the battle. You want the big dramatic music for the battles, nice calming music for building, epressing music for loosing and uplifting music for winning. WinAmp is good, and is what I currently use, but does not do what has been requested in various parts of this thread.

SwiftSpear · Post by **SwiftSpear** » 04 Oct 2005, 08:46

tanelorn wrote:It's called WinAmp. Heard of it? Play whatever music you want. Simple.

SwiftSpear wrote:Sure there's music players out there, but they can't detect the mood of the game, weather action is going on or not, weather you have spotted the enemy or not, plus they include a bunch of crap that isn't needed to run a proper game soundtrack.

Every good RTS ever has had back music, why should spring be different?

FizWizz · Post by **FizWizz** » 04 Oct 2005, 17:11

Here are a few my favorites:
http://www.fileuniverse.com/Music/03-Au ... k%2003.mp3
http://www.fileuniverse.com/Music/05-Au ... k%2005.mp3
http://www.fileuniverse.com/Music/08-Au ... k%2008.mp3

This last one, however, pwnz all of them, Hands Down:
http://www.fileuniverse.com/Music/06-Au ... k%2006.mp3

Of course, these would not be appropriate when you've just started and you are reaching out to build solars and mexxes... Nor when your opponent is stomping your face into mud... There's no way this stuff will work without having mood detection; I'm all for having the music-player being integrated into Spring.

tanelorn · Post by **tanelorn** » 04 Oct 2005, 21:07

True, event detection could be very cool.

FizWizz · Post by **FizWizz** » 05 Oct 2005, 02:31

I just remembered something I wanted to bring up that's very related to this. There is another game that checks game states to determine what music to play: Bridge Commander

okay, hold on: long live Star Trek!!!

...now I'll get to my point. BC was different than TA because it had 3 different states that it chose between (as opposed to building/battle/victory/loss): It had non-combat, Confident, and Panic.

"Non-combat" hummed along when there was no fighting going on.
"Confident" beat out pretty cool orchestral bits that were up-beat and gung-ho, and I'm guessing it was triggered when you (and your allies I guess) had a statistical edge over your opponents. Ship ratios, how much damage and what systems are knocked out on your ship, stuff like that.
"Panic" played a set of orchestral pieces that were similar to Confident, but they conveyed panic, as in "OMFG we're out-numbered 2 to 1, my dorsal, port, and aft shields are out, these creeps keep lobbing torpedoes into my phaser banks...etc."

I bring this up for 2 reasons:
(1) I mean to address the different possibilities for music triggers/conditions (TA's 4 and BC's 3) to open up options that you might not have realized.
(2) If someone can upload the BC music, that'd be pretty good to look at to see BC's approach to the different tracks. What I mean is that they did it differently. Each of the cycling tracks in TA had a distinct tune to them that made them unique to each other. BC made like 8 different tracks for the moods that were extremely similar to each other except that slightly different instrument patterns were in each. There were no noticeable song transitions, and it all seemed like a continious, dynamic sound track.

Warlord Zsinj · Post by **Warlord Zsinj** » 06 Oct 2005, 01:28

FizWizz, please have a read through the thread I linked too earlier. In there, we had a large discussion about how things could be triggered, and the different types of "moods" that could be detected and achieved.

Spring RTS Engine

Is original music needed?