Spring RTS Engine

Monthly Topic Rotation:

Find and integrate some cheap (free) .mp3 or .wav player into Spring and have it read specific (TA soundtrack based) tracks based upon total unit count and units being killed by, or units dying belonging to, a specific player (which'd be a nice stat. to have anyway, as it was fun in TA).

I know that a lot of you programmy nerdy types (thinking Smoth and his Gundam fx) tend not to believe this, but sound is a huge part of the gaming experience, and coordinated sound has always been a feature in which Spring was/is inferior to almost every commercial RTS made.

Anyway, there's your copy and pasted argument. Feel free to copy and paste a technical argument explaining why every commercial RTS made has a soundtrack, but one's too complicated to integrate into Spring.

Just run Winamp. Few games have soundtracks that actually react to what's happening.

How are giant killing mecha nerdy? explosions!!!

Anyway, I think music is a great part of gameplay, especially now supcom has dynamic music like OTA.

Of the people with the necessary know how they fall into the following categories:

A) I play spring for fun and I aint contributing because this is an escape from work, hurry up and do it for me! (wont name names here)

B) I would like it but I already contribute 10 hours a day to spring doing other more important things (e.g. the current spring devs)

C) I could do it if I tried but I dont know how atm and I dont have the time to find out (e.g. me)

D) Let me finish my neverending omgwtfpwn mod project first (e.g. smoth)

E) I always have an exam to do (wont name names...)

Make Patch.

The only tricky part of make patch is getting Spring to play MP3s. Otherwise, the work done on the Contextual Camera UI would probably be fairly easily converted to Contextual Music Playing UI, tbh.

I think it's important for mods to be able to complete the theme of their games. After all, they can provide everything else... but not music. I don't even think the "contextualization" stuff is that important, just to let modders get their own music in there to complete the mood. Obviously this is less important to stat-oriented TA-derived mods, but games like Gundam, Kernel Panic, and SWS have a specific themes that would be nice to see reflected in background music.

Don't forget EE. EE would have a complete soundtrack in a week or so if we actually had the ability to use one...

Argh wrote:The only tricky part of make patch is getting Spring to play MP3s.

You don't need mp3s and you don't want them in an open source game (patents, etc.) oggs all the way.

If you want the spring engine to read mp3s, it can help use sound effects to be mp3s as well. Could the spring engine use plug ins like the LAME MP3 encoder? (i think it would be really cool to have mods with its own select music, and customizable music folders that players can make themselves if they don't like the mods music.)

Encoders wouldn't make sense, what we need is a decoder. A decoder for the patented mp3 format would make Spring unable to be GPLv3 compliant and possibly illegal in the US.

Almost all games use Ogg Vorbis these days because it's free and when you're already shipping your own decoder you can just as well use the better format. Effects often remain in WAV because decoding compressed audio takes a lot of CPU, at least too much to apply to something that can happen 100 times a second.

.ogg too...much better for sound effects than a nonstandardized format like .wav.

KDR_11k wrote:Few games have soundtracks that actually react to what's happening.

I know quite a few... the first RTS which had a dynamic soundtrack I know of is Dune 2. :P

I'm surprised that nobody has raised the issue of 'intellectual property' with respect to the soundtracks. Are all our mod makers also musicians, or would they stuff their mod packages full of copyright protected content? I know what I'd find more likely!

I know that this doesn't directly pertain to the requested feature .. more to its likely consequences.

SirClickAlot wrote:I'm surprised that nobody has raised the issue of 'intellectual property' with respect to the soundtracks. Are all our mod makers also musicians, or would they stuff their mod packages full of copyright protected content? I know what I'd find more likely!

I know that this doesn't directly pertain to the requested feature .. more to its likely consequences.

There is a terriffic amount of free-as-in-speech music out there that would fit nicely with any mod. It's funny since it's free nature makes it turn up in odd places. I frequently hear the Warsow theme on TLC TV shows.

SirClickAlot wrote:I'm surprised that nobody has raised the issue of 'intellectual property' with respect to the soundtracks. Are all our mod makers also musicians, or would they stuff their mod packages full of copyright protected content? I know what I'd find more likely!

I know that this doesn't directly pertain to the requested feature .. more to its likely consequences.

The people who help work in EE have a lot of musical ability (namely myself and wasp) so everything would be all original.

Can't say for other mods.

It would be cool if some kind of mp3 player was integrated, although I doubt id use it in games that I want to win as any sounds other than the game and unit sounds drive me nuts when Im trying to concentrate, I threw my phone across the room during a particularly stressful 1v1 when it started ringing ^^

Id love to hear the ee soundtrack though, wasps wacky digital music mixed with some of Fa's heavy rock riffage would be cool ^^

Pxtl wrote:I think it's important for mods to be able to complete the theme of their games.

QFT. Music isn't necessary but adding some sort of modder defined sound track would be really nice.

KDR_11k wrote:Just run Winamp. Few games have soundtracks that actually react to what's happening.

+1 gazillion

Yay and all for the modder having complete control over his game environment, but to be honest I don't want to listen to your shitty amateur music that more likely than not will be 100% synthesized and/or a straight convert from a MIDI file. I'd much rather listen to music that I like.

tired, how do you register me thinking of sound as not important. I did voice acting at one point just to add flavor to the mod.

This one is a canidate for teh soundtrack for me at least.
Bases Rising by DimensionDude