Castle Paradox

[Mike Caron]

Ok, so not usually two words you hear in such close proximity to eachother. However...

As a few of you know, the next version of the OHR will feature Midi music in addition to BAM (in the windows/Linux ports only...).

However, Midi doesn't have any sort of method of doing proper looping. Just blindly looping the song doesn't help either (victory fanfares, anyone?)

So, I invented a solution: http://gilgamesh.hamsterrepublic.com/wiki/ohrrpgce/index.php/Music_Code. I want some feed back, and C&C.

I bet some of you are wondering why I posted this here, as opposed to, say, Announcements. Well, this deals directly with the musician, as the current proposal allows for some very neat effects.

For example, take Dancing Mad from Final Fantasy VI. For those not in the know, Dancing Mad is the Final Battle song. The final battle has four parts, and the song has four sections. When you defeat a section, you move on to the next, and the music changes accordingly.

But, it doesn't just change. Oh no. It plays until a natural break in the song (say, when it would loop), and then switches. This means that it goes to the next section while you're in the middle of that section. It's a really cool effect, having seamless music transitions.

Well, a similar thing could be done here by using the conditional jumps (is this tag set? If it is, continue on. Otherwise, loop.)

And, the opera scene from the same game could be done too using the tag-setting (or variable setting) commands at each voice note, and having a plotscript checking the tag continuously until it's set, and then reseting it when it shows the next lyric.

So... yeah.
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Final Fantasy Q
OHR Developer BLOG
Official OHRRPGCE Wiki and FAQ

[Artimus Bena]

I'm not really going to read through the whole wiki section, (I had a very long day), but the proposal is very very very very very very appealing, and from my experiences with programming, it seems very doable at this point. I say go for it dude.
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[Moogle1]

Sexy.
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Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

[LeRoy_Leo]

Hells yeah, this is a good idea!

Will this mean I can loop from a fanfare before a victory piece into the victory piece and every sequential loop will skip the fanfare?
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---msw188 ---
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[Mike Caron]

Artimus & Moogle1: Thanks!

Leroy: Yes, and even better. Say someone in the game does something great, and you want to play just the fanfare (not the looping part), you could set a tag, and then put "if tag set: stop song" at the beginning of the loop, so it won't play the rest if the tag is set.

The possibilities are night almost endless
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I stand corrected. No rivers ran blood today. At least, none that were caused by us.

Final Fantasy Q
OHR Developer BLOG
Official OHRRPGCE Wiki and FAQ

[msw188]

Sound effects?

Even more complicated (I assume), will it be possible to have plotscripting (or something) change volumes midsong? And/or would it be possible to have more than one song playing at once? Together, these could make songs fade into each other...

Sorry if these requests are rediculous, I do not know anything about midi or programming.

[SilentAngel]

This sounds like an excellent idea, actually, and it's kinda the missing piece in the puzzle for a project I've been wanting to work on for a while. Being able to set tags during any part of the song could trigger anything, be it an NPC, lyrics, whatever. Sounds spiffilicious. I say go for it
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[Mike Caron]

[SilentAngel]

Maybe you could do it with music being counted by ticks rather than seconds? Might be a bit more accurate, I'm not sure.
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Current Projects:
Hikari no Senshi - Inperiaru Taisen: ~10% Complete
http://www.castleparadox.com/forum/download.php?game=392

Stepmania Online Stats:

Next song to pass on Stepmania: Paranoia Survivor Max (Heavy)
Next song to pass on DDR: MaxX Unlimited(Standard)

[PlayerOne]

When I was reading up about MIDI for the conversion routine in WinOHR, a beat was equivalent to a quarter note. The default tempo is 120 bpm, which is half a second per beat, but the MIDI tick resolution is usually much finer.

[Joe Man]

Ooh, does this mean the limit of 100 songs would be eliminated through special looping tags and tricks?

Oh, and if that limit was already resolved with some version of OHR already, sorry for being ignorant. The question sill applies, however, though with a much bigger number.
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Last edited by Joe Man on Fri Dec 13, 1957 1:21 am; edited 2,892 time in total

[Mike Caron]

[Artimus Bena]

wee will find tha m00sic limmitts, and TERMINATE themm.


After writing uhp a couple bills furst.
_________________
SACRE BLEU!

|||Compositions!
|||Eldardeen Soundtrack!
|||Red Mercury!

[Mike Caron]

http://ohrdev.com/miditest.zip

Well, here is a sort of "test bed" for music code. It implements the whole spec, with the following exceptions:

* variables are not implemented, and any "set variable" or "if variable" commands will be ignored. This will change in the next version.

* Tags are limited to 8 (I was lazy and used 1 byte). However, you can change them with the left and right arrows, and space.

* Chorus is not implemented (no one uses it, right?). Laziness again. This will also be rectified soon.

Anyway, a description of what you see:

The top of the window shows the current position of the song, in beats. As the song plays, that goes up.

Below that are two columns. The column on the left shows the label positions. They default to 0, of course. The column on the right shows the Jump counters. If a limited jump is encountered, a jump counter is set, and everytime thereafter, when that jump is hit, the counter goes down by one. When it reaches zero, it ignores the jump, and resets the jump to undefined.

Below that are the tags. An unset tag is blue, a set one is green, and the highlighted tag is flashing. Use Left and Right to select another tag, and use Space to toggle.

Finally, the far right is the volume. Use Up and Down to change that.

Use Escape to quit.

This is a command line program, and *requires* an argument, the midi to play. And, don't be fooled by the window it spawns; it'll still hog the console until it quits.

I included the Final Fantasy Fanfare, looped, for your listening enjoyment. Sorta. You'll notice what I mean in regards to the "beat" measurement not being fine enough, but, there's not much I can do, and the benefits outweigh the negatives, right? Thought so.
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I stand corrected. No rivers ran blood today. At least, none that were caused by us.

Final Fantasy Q
OHR Developer BLOG
Official OHRRPGCE Wiki and FAQ

[DomGallo]

Actually, I think with creative tags and looping, you probably could bypass the 100 song limit, by segmenting songs and only activating tags when you needed them, pretty easily. After all, it's a 100 song limit, you make one or two songs a bit bigger, split 'em in half and tag 'em right, and you've got 200. I'm no expert, but it seems feasible if you have any kind of a creative mind in your body.
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