Cool idea- Music on Demand.

Sun May 08, 2005 10:22 pm by Argh

Ok, now... assuming that a mod:

1. Contained original or otherwise-legal music in it.
2. Wanted players to be able select songs and play them whenever they wanted to, as opposed to whenever the game designer said that they should hear the music.

Here is how to do it. It's really super-simple:

1. Make a Class 1 weapon. Give it a Lifetime of 0.000001 or whatever. Really short. Don't have it do damage, have a Flash, or anything. Give it a null FX entry, so you won't see anything.
2. Play the song as the weapon's firing sound.
3. Make the refire_rate as long as the song (down to the nearest 10th of a second- round upwards).

Aaaaand... there you go. Clone the "weapon", and add new Sound entries for each song. Encode each song with the mp3 Frauenhofer codec, and then have a Base somewhere sell these "weapons". Players can either have the song start the second they start firing, or disable the "gun" and play the song manually.

If you make use of my XML Toolkit mod (which drops all guns to level 2, among other things) you could go a bit further with this concept, and go into Shiparch (and any added ships) and get rid of every Gun mount for Class 4-10. Then make every ship have, say... 5 Class 3 hardpoints, buried in the center of the CMP. These "gun" hardpoints would then become a player's "cd-deck". Players could then carry around 5 songs, and they wouldn't interfere with weapons

Sun May 08, 2005 10:46 pm by Chips

LMAO!! That has got to be the most original idea I have heard in... erm... ever

Sun May 08, 2005 11:27 pm by Argh

Well, y'know... music is one thing that people keep bringing up again and again

I just thought it'd be really cool to do it as an "iPod" sort've thing, y'know? You could even code up such a custom weapon with a generic XML script, so that we could have "music add-on mods" that added various songs, etc.- it could be really cool

Oh yeah, and did I mention?

If you set up the sound the right way, in MP, other players could hear whatever music/whatever you were playing!

Hey! You could even use this as a crude "radio", where players could transmit messages back and forth! Hmmmm. Anybody ever explored just how far the game engine lets us transmit sounds??

Oooh... and here's yet another fun use for this. Factions could each have a "theme song", and it could be put into their Loadouts. With care (using small radii for these sounds, so that songs don't blend over one another all the time), you could, say... hear some funky mexican gangsta rap when taking on the Outcasts, or country music when blowing away Xenos

Sun May 08, 2005 11:31 pm by Aldebaran28

You wouldn't even need to do that, you could have them all on one HP class (say HP Class 10 is the CD player) and then people just choose the CD's they want to add into those hardpoints as different weapons of Class 10 type. As Chips said, probably one of the most original and interresting ideas that has been brought here for a long time. I love it.

The only question would be, if one had more than one CD fitted to your ship, what would happen if you 'fired' / played all the CD's at once?

EDIT: Never Mind, I should read things properly at 8:30am in the morning. I thought you were suggesting a weapon class per CD. Need more coffee.......

The message idea though is certainly very interresting.

Freeworlds Mod Developer
Author of Modular Station

'There is no Good nor Evil in the universe, just perceptions and circumstances.'

Edited by - Aldebaran28 on 5/9/2005 12:34:02 AM

Sun May 08, 2005 11:37 pm by Argh

All of the songs would play at once, of course, and it'd sound... crappy. I don't know of a clever workaround for that. And I have no idea, of course, whether having that much data hit a soundcard at once would cause issues. Probably not, but it'd hog a lot of the available channels for polyphony...

But I must admit I really like the idea of having "theme songs" for Factions. It'd be downright hilarious to hear the "Cops" theme song ("Bad Boys" by Inner Circle) being played by the LPI as they try to... erm... "pull you over"

Mon May 09, 2005 2:02 am by Glock36

Brilliant idea but Jeez, the size of the mod would be incredible if you had a good selection of music. And everyone would have to give up a gun slot.

anyone for a 1 gig MOD?
LOL

Glock36
"No Comment"

Mon May 09, 2005 6:15 am by Cold_Void

one or two problems - freelancer doesn't support mp3s(unless i'm being ignorant),on a sidenote I am having a problem with some wave files locking up freelancer when they reach their end & should loop - anyone know what that CTD is caused by?

Mon May 09, 2005 8:46 am by dutch bastard

Great idea, I thought about this earlier but then for a tooter. With tooter I mean a space claxon. Or maybe police sirens for admin ships :O. That would be cool for mods

.

Mon May 09, 2005 11:01 am by Blastocephalis

*throws in a penny*
yes we would lose a weapon slot, but i've never really needed a full complement of slots, or we could just edit some controls to do something like this...
have an extra weapon, deselect autofire on right click... continuing on with this, we assign the whole "dead but cacophonous" gun to this extra control(still trying to decide on a button to use) then when you press that button(you know, the numbers on the top of your keyboard, not the functions) it'll fire singularly like the normal guns, so that they don't all explode into a celestial din
*thinks about what he said* *throws in a haypenny*
there that's my 1.5cents worth

Blazer017:
cats land on feet, and toast buttered side down, so...strap toast butter up to a cats back and drop them.
They hover over the ground in a state of quatnum indecision. =D

Mon May 09, 2005 11:52 am by dutch bastard

Maybe if you make a new weapon class for only those things. Like for example hp_gun_type = hp_tooter_special

!! And have the tooter installed in the loadout if you buy the ship. I seen it before on a mod who had a self-destruct gun. The vessel itself doesn't have any shields but, the vessel carried only energy weapons to shoot others shields down. When the shields where down on the taget vessel you initiate the self-destruct gun and both vessels blow up :O .

Mon May 09, 2005 3:53 pm by Takkun

If perhaps for example (Class 1) weapons were discarded and every ship had an extra (Class 1) mount then you load a single (Class 1) weapons or 'song' onto it before you leave the base, make the damage null, and range null, the refire rate can be changed to suit song length - then dont allow other multiplayer users to hear your songs *sniff i did like the idea, but it would be abused* you can carry your extra songs around with you but only one can be mounted at a time to eliminate the problem of several songs playing at once - and if you could get .midi files to use as the songs or .wav this would greatly reduce the size, but sound quality is also reduced a tad

Also a second idea would be to make your own custom playlist in WMP and press play - and to change songs just minimize FL and cahnge it in a few seconds...

Regards,
Takkun

Mon May 09, 2005 8:24 pm by Aldebaran28

Don't forget there is also the legal issue of distributing those songs. You would, as Argh mentioned, need to have music which you have permission to legally distributed (most likely this would end up being in house produced music just for your mod).

A way around this though could be to have it that each base sells CD's just numbered one to ten and set it up with out the music files. You could then leave instructions for people to use to add their own music they own (legally I hope) into the mod (it would just be the case of making sure they are named right and put in the right folder). Then each player can choose their own sound track.

This would also save on space in the mod as well.

Yeah, I really like this idea... mind if I possibly nick it for Freeworlds Argh if we have time to implement it?

Mon May 09, 2005 8:37 pm by Argh

Go right ahead- it'd be neat to see this in a big mod

BTW, I've coded a tester for "theme songs for Factions", and it works OK. Gotta be careful how you manage it, though- what you want is for people to hear snippets of the songs as they get fairly close to NPCs... kind've like hearing songs somebody's playing on their radio really loud

It's really cool if you do it right though.

As for abuse... eh, what? How can people abuse this? It's not like you could record something obscene and have other people hear it in MP, for example... sounds are all clientside. So, other than annoying people who attempt karoake over Vent, which has nothing to do with this idea... sounds are safe.

As for size... well, if you encode things with the Fraunhoffer MP3 codec, then it's a fairly small MP3. Sure, a 100-song library's going to weigh in at about 300MB- I'll grant you that. But that's why I was thinking that it might be cooler to do this as an add-on... then people could mix-and-match music on their personalized mod. Not a good solution for MP, but for SP, it'd be really cool. And it's super-easy to do if you build off of the Toolkit.

Tue May 10, 2005 10:52 am by Louva-Deus

If you are wanting to hear music from NPC's as you get near them what you can do is make the engine sounds be your music files (overlay/repeat the original engine sound onto the music track you want). That works for NPC's in SP and MP, assuming you have the addon. If you didn't then you wouldn't notice a difference at all. The idea is that you replace the existing engine sounds with your special music versions so that there is no possible way to have a conflict/crash and it's a perfect addon.

For players you chould use the shields as a basis for the music and you have 2 'status' or levels to use for that: shield rebuild sound and shield death sound. Example, the music could get more intense and adrenaline kicking when the shield dies

If you want to go one step further you can make a new purchaseable addon type of sound fx (like the rumble sounds for larger ship loadouts). They would play all the time though.

Edited by - Louva-Deus on 5/10/2005 11:57:14 AM

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