Chiptune Music - Page 2

Chiptune Music

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KDR_11k
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by KDR_11k »

The song "Driller" that's used in Seiklus sounds like something that could work as "idle" music.
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zwzsg
Kernel Panic Co-Developer
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by zwzsg »

Here is what anyone seriously interested could do:
1) Grab a music player widget. Link
2) Find appropriate music, sort it between war and peace.
3) Convert to .ogg, put in appropriate folders.
4) Play many Kernel Panic game with it, check how well that works out.
5) Post here links to the music you used, see if others like too.
6) Sort out permissions and licenses.

None of these steps require actual modding of Kernel Panic. So, if you truely want music in KP, you now know what to do.

Currently Kernel Panic, just the mod, is 5Mb, and the complete installer, 30Mb. I don't know if you intend the music to be inside the mod, or inside the installer. Either way, it would not be acceptable to have the filesize triple or double just because of music. I'd say an increase of download size of +50% would already be a hugelot. That means, the total sum of your music tracks must be under 2.5Mb if music inside mod, or under 15Mb if music inside installer. For .mp3, it's about one minute of song per megabyte of file. Maybe .ogg can do better, and we can gain some more filesize by aggressive transcoding settings. Still I doubt we can get enough music to avoid getting repetitive under 2.5Mb or even 15Mb.





Theorically, chiptune music could be much smaller though. For instance, if we could get a C++ dev willing to add midi support to Spring, then we could have hours of music. Another way would be to write a huge load of complex Lua code to generate music from a score sheet and tiny .wav. And then a chiptune composer willing to write music for KP in that special format. But I'm sure lots of score sheet formats have been invented already, and maybe some of them even had KP-suitable music composed in them! Anybody know enough about music composing on PC to list score sheet storing formats simple enough to write a decoder for?

Though, would be awesome if the music generator widget, instead of switching between static score sheets, was tightly coupled with the mood picker widget, so as to intelligently prod the music generation algorithm into subtly changing the way it compose according to what's going on. Too many games rely on having one music per level, playing in loop until level completed. Some FPS have short theme triggered by scripted event, and Dune2 or TA have that thing that switch to an agressive track when under attack, but still, much better could be done in the music videogame integration. I want a dynamically generated music, representing the game state as music. Layer of music to simultaneously convey what happen in the layer of RTS mechanic (like low tempo for factories, medium for cons, high tempo for attack units), modification of those layers matching ingame event (like bits going bipbopbeep when moving, but bipbipba when firing with some added bu when hit), slight variation in sounds corresponding to army composition (pointer would go more bwuw and bit more biii and byte more booo, so 20 bit and 1 pointer army would be bwi but 10 bit and a byte would sound bio), volume following importance (bit sounds getting eclipsed by socket under attack sound). Like, just by hearing bipbopbeep, bipbopbeep, duda, bipbopbeep, bipbopba bipbipba, bipbupba, duhi, bupbupba, wouheh, bipbopbeep, you would know that the player sent some attack units forward, had a cons busy, met enemy, fought enemy, got a new socket, lost some bits, got a socket hit by stray shots, but has fresh unit coming. Though, not too precise, because if each unit each even thas its tune, then it's more the racket of unit sounds that a sweet game music, so the role of the music composer algorithm would be to synthetise all that, playing music only about what's important, few sounds with attributes pondered by the mean of large unit groups, instead of one sound per unit and event. Oh, and also, constantly recentering the default and threshold to be always on the verge on changing, to force the music to variate even if you have strongly typed play style. Anybody here biclassed coder and composer?




Another way would be to include a music player widget, and empty music folder, in KP, and have a txt or htm file reading: Fill those folder with music yourself, here are links to demoscene and chiptune websites. Though, we'd need to find some where not only the music is good for KP, but also offered in .ogg format: telling users to fetch music themselve is bad enough, but forcing them to do the conversion would be too much!
Dotz
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by Dotz »

actually, I make music myself. I have an excellent ear and mind for music. I have a few songs I already made, but as of now my music software thinks I didn't already buy it, and is asking me for a code of some sort.

anyway, I would be able to make music for you as soon as I get the software up and running again.
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zwzsg
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by zwzsg »

All the above (ParagonX9, Lo-Bat., Mister Beep, Seiklus) now played by Kernel Panic 3.6 - Complete Installer.
Dotz
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by Dotz »

be sure to get the licenses. *notices the complete lack of notice of my previous post*
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zwzsg
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by zwzsg »

Your previous post feature no link to music. :|

Can you code in Lua, Dotz? Or learn it? So that instead of using your software, you'd use a .lua widget to dynamically compose music from short sound bits, like I said in the small text of my above post.
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Pxtl
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by Pxtl »

Is it possible to read and pick apart a binary file in Lua, and load some of the material in that file as audio? I'd be tempted to try and implement a simple Amiga-MOD player.
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zwzsg
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by zwzsg »

Lua can do ANYTHING. What I had in mind was having a collection of short .wav, and some lua code playing them according to some tablature. But if you need to read and write binary, sure, have a look at those VFS.PackX and VFS.UnpackX functions.
Dotz
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by Dotz »

you aren't a music person are you, zwzsg? It takes more than that to create a song. Even though it is feasible to create 'music' with code, it doesn't seem like anything special... other than maybe it would be impossible to get a copy of the song...
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KDR_11k
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by KDR_11k »

Obviously you'd feed it a note sheet.
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Pxtl
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by Pxtl »

zwzsg wrote:Lua can do ANYTHING. What I had in mind was having a collection of short .wav, and some lua code playing them according to some tablature. But if you need to read and write binary, sure, have a look at those VFS.PackX and VFS.UnpackX functions.
Good to know. That's why I suggested Amiga MOD - it's one of those formats - traditional MOD is 4 channels of pitch-shifted WAVs. A very old one, with lots of existing music and tools for it.

Still, you could probably do just fine to recode your existing music as 64kb/s mono Oggs.
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zwzsg
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by zwzsg »

Pxtl wrote:Still, you could probably do just fine to recode your existing music as 64kb/s mono Oggs.
Are you aware if what's I did already for 3.6 (complete installer version)?
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KaiserJ
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by KaiserJ »

i'm not amazingly musical, just throwing that out there right now, but i sort of had an idea of a "bed" type of mix, hear me out on this one

i suppose the music could be divided into three levels.... drums, bassline, and melody... for each level, create perhaps 5 different riffs, all working on a similar scale so that blending between them could be somewhat seamless...

each level represents activity in the game... perhaps something like drums represent the power of the overall conflict (more damage being dealt = more drums) and bassline represents your lab under attack, the melody represents the opponents under attack...

get the levels of music fading independently of each-other according to the events ingame, so that the music is never constant but often fades to represent the changing attributes of the battle.

note : im not talking rock ballads here, im thinking more along the lines of super minimalistic techno... the simpler the music, the more easily this could work.

i'd even be willing to take a whack at making the loops if theres interest (and someone to program the backend, i wouldnt have a clue) but i have a feeling that there are many people on this forum more talented than me in this respect.

and wow, was that paragonx9 song amazing, its on mah mp3 now :)
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zwzsg
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by zwzsg »

That's exactly what I would like, KaiserJ. :-)
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KaiserJ
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by KaiserJ »

then in about a week, i will help you, if nobody else steps up, at least to get the ball rolling... someone will hear my loops, hate them, and improve upon them 8)

this is my fav chiptune/8bit/whatever you'd like to call it song right now. (in the comments : bitpop! i like the term)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJUCOtDIFJ0
Dotz
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by Dotz »

thats actually a pretty good idea.
slogic
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Re: 8-Bit Music

Post by slogic »

Peet wrote:I wonder how hard it would be to write a tracker music (.mod, .xm, etc) engine in lua :twisted:
You don't need. There is a free (for non-commercial use) bass.dll module: http://www.un4seen.com/bass.html
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KaiserJ
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by KaiserJ »

so far i've failed with my music attempts. going to possibly try again later this week
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zwzsg
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Re: 8-Bit Music

Post by zwzsg »

slogic wrote:You don't need. There is a free (for non-commercial use) bass.dll module: http://www.un4seen.com/bass.html
This is a .dll. Spring mods can't load .dll easily. The lua call to bind to any .dll have been removed for security reasons. Helper AI have been deprecated. Bot's .dll are still there, but not you'd still have to rewrite the bass.dll to fit the AI's API. Which you can't because bass.dll is not open source. Then there's the .dll that always link to Spring.exe, but I don't think dev will start shipping Spring with any .dll anyone ask anytime soon, especially when they don't have linux versions.
exdeath
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Re: Chiptune Music

Post by exdeath »

Sorry to necrothread this thread. But I found this website it made me instantly think of kernel panic and those musical ideas.
http://seaquence.org/
With the website you create songs using rts like units

Some example
http://seaquence.org/r3f7

Maybe something like this could be made with kernel panic
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