Chris

Idle Thumbs 14: Interface with the Animus

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There's no way to get recorded audio to branch at predetermined loop points? I would think you could record a series of parallel static audio tracks and create transition sections to segue (:tup:) between them, like a set of railroad tracks and switches.

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I don't know for sure, but it might be down to processor load and the amount of AI in current games. Something like iMUSE is, essentially, an AI program that reacts to scripted events triggered by the player.

Actually, I'd be surprised if the AI Director in Left 4 Dead doesn't handle the music as well.

Edited by DanJW

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There's no way to get recorded audio to branch at predetermined loop points? I would think you could record a series of parallel static audio tracks and create transition sections to segue (:tup:) between them, like a set of railroad tracks and switches.

Its of course doable, but the time investment, and more importantly, the budget, would be astronomical, to do it with as much variation as Monkey Island 2 had.

Many games do limited live mixing and transitions with prerecorded tracks (the example which always comes to mind for me is SSX Tricky, just because it was so overt about it -- cutting the music down to just the simplest drum loop when you were soaring up in the air, mixing "It's Tricky" or whatever into the currently playing song when you were doing extremely well, etc), but its still limited to basically crossfading one recording on top of another at a predetermined time, and hitting loop markers. There are some modern games whose music interactivity can be fairly robust, for sure, but just the sheer scale of the score and its numerous variations and transitions in a game like Monkey Island 2 (and a lot of the nuances which make it really sound great) would be prohibitively hard to achieve these days. Back when "making music for games" basically ended at composing it, and skipped the mixing and editing and bringing in performers, you could achieve a pretty large scale composed score with just a few dudes. Now, that's not so much the case. I imagine most "AAA" game scores which involve even a few live musicians often have more people involved in their production than the entire teams responsible for games of the 80s.

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Although I'm going to go ahead and admit I never had any idea MI2 had this stuff until I heard about it later, and still don't know what it sounded like. But I like the idea. The first Hitman game had a system like this. It used the same music format as Deus Ex, I think, and not simply recorded tracks, so it was possible.

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I don't know for sure, but it might be down to processor load and the amount of AI in current games. Something like iMUSE is, essentially, an AI program that reacts to scripted events triggered by the player.

Actually, I'd be surprised if the AI Director in Left 4 Dead doesn't handle the music as well.

Left 4 Dead (like all of Valve's music as far as I'm aware) is all prerecorded individual cues, though. It's a different thing. The Director definitely determines when to stream them in, so the placement of the music is interactive, but the music itself is not.

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Although I'm going to go ahead and admit I never had any idea MI2 had this stuff until I heard about it later, and still don't know what it sounded like.

I did, but it may be because I used to get errors running it a long time ago during the second act where sometimes music for one island would keep playing while it transitioned to another island and then I would have two songs continuously playing on top of each other.

This used to occur fairly commonly all during the second act (the biggest one of course) and would piss me off to no end. I'm sure ScummVM fixes this though.

But I might have noticed the music was doing complex things either way. I don't know, I must have been like 9 years old.

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Monkey Island 2 may have had awesome interactive music, but Beneath a Steel Sky had you looking all over the place for NPC's who were walking around doing their business, sitting in chairs and shit like that. Which is more awesome? Who's to say?

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Well I'll tell you right now that I think Beneath a Steel Sky is shit for the most part, along with almost all of Revolution's catalog, whether they had this "Virtual Theatre" as they claimed or not.

Lure of the Temptress was a bunch of people meandering around acting boring, and I could see that in Beneath a Steel Sky only less so.

I thought Beneath a Steel Sky had serious pacing issues. The game started out wonderful, and just suddenly when you think you are maybe halfway through the game, it makes a beeline for the ending as quickly as possible, introducing all of these sudden elements out of no where when you wake up in the plant. The puzzles were kind of obscure or not too clever, as well as having dead end parts and characters that didn't enhance the story (for me at least). There just seemed to be weird filler, like the bar, that I didn't understand the purpose of. Maybe it just had to cram some more Blade Runner into it?

I don't think I have to do much to contest Revolution from Broken Sword 2 and up though.

Sorry, I'll try not to piss you off further.

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I loved the fact it was like a slapstick British Blade Runner.

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I don't, syntheticgerbil. Quit pissing on my childhood, or I'll do what the native Glaswegians do to people who piss them off :(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(

I'm kidding, actually, but

no, I changed my mind, shut up or I'll shank ye!

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...but Beneath a Steel Sky had you looking all over the place for NPC's who were walking around doing their business, sitting in chairs and shit like that.

That was the most frustrating aspect of the game. Wandering NPC's might make the world seem a little more real, sure, but NPC hunting is a pain in the butt. Seems like exactly the feature that looks good on paper, but wouldn't have (shouldn't have?) survived prototyping or QA.

Decent dialogue though.

Aside: what was with the androids in the chapel?

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There's only like one NPC in the entire game that travels more than about two screens (between his flat and workplace), and is easy as hell to find. I agree it didn't really work in Lure of the Temptress, although I never played that game for very long. I'm still sort of interested though. But you have to give them credit for trying to take the adventure game concept further in realism than anyone else at that time.

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Wandering NPCs is a great feature. But the world should also be aware of that. For example you should be ask others if they saw X, and if possible tell X you were looking for him/her.

But that's only part of the whole thing, a game world should not feel like it's there for just you. In most games the game world feels like it's made specially for you, which kind of sucks. The new PoP is also a bit like that with all the marks on the walls.

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Wandering NPCs is a great feature. But the world should also be aware of that. For example you should be ask others if they saw X, and if possible tell X you were looking for him/her.

Outcast did that pretty well. If you were really far from someone, they told you the general direction, as you got closer, they actually pointed to the person you were looking for.

Even though Outcast is technically a bit outdated by now, it still did some things really well that haven't really been repeated by any other game (AFAIK).

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Howdy,

With all the talk about chip tunes, I'm surprised you didn't mention the Commodore 64's sid chip and the amazing music that thing produced back in the day.

People are still composing on it now.

Not sure how big it was in the states, but in the 80's, I loved my c64 and the sounds it produced.

Check out a demo called Dutch Breeze and you'll see the quality of music you can achieve from a c64.

cheers!:gaming:

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Nice to hear some nostalgia lovin for "scene" chiptunes, some of those guys are nuttas with a keyboard! On a sad note, about 6 months ago I stumbled across an article about mainstream chiptune plagiarism - often the original artist doesn’t have the leverage to enforce their ownership.

A recent high profile and surprisingly blatant example;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Timbaland_plagiarism_controversy

It's a bitter pill to swallow when large labels and artists cry crocodile tears over copyright infringement.

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A developer that would benefit immensely from an iMUSE-like system is Bethesda. I dug the wandering music and the battle music in all their games, but they would always click on and off weirdly, with the crescendo falling off the cliff or being interrupted by a drum roll of some sort before the regular wandering music would timidly wander in. Their efforts seem to be directed entirely towards hiding the seams in the music tracks, which is a pity.

I know nothing about music in general and have only a rudimentary understanding of how MIDI works, but I wonder if there is some benefit to having a half midi, half recorded track composition of some sort. The midi part of the composition would do all the fancy transitions while the taped instruments (or voices or noise or whatever) track would just establish some grunge to the sound, so that it is not all synthetic-sounding. It could be that this method is more trouble than its worth, and delivers something that is not as good as either of its parts. That said, a really good artist could work with the shortcomings of this mutant method to create something compelling...

Ultimately it is just a matter of time before we have a composer/programmer with vision and ability to make another iMUSE.

I think Valve would be a safe entity to expect some species of iMUSEish revival from. The Half-Lifey musics are mostly (completely?) electronic, and they tend to cross fade more cleanly than Bethesda's games, but it would be rad if they interweaved more dynamically than they do. They have money to burn and tend to be obsessed with the cinematic qualities of their games; they ought to be reminded of how awesome iMUSE was and encouraged to go further in that direction. Hint, hint, etc.

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Like a MOD? A cunning retro plan! There is just one tiny insignificant flaw, it's a helluva lot more work than just hiring the city's orchestra for a few hours to play your score and it's hard to make tracked samples sound real.

Knowing nothing about how it works I wonder if the upshot of mpeg7 structured audio is anything along the lines of "letting you just pull out a 'drum' or 'trumpet' object from a track."

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Ultimately it is just a matter of time before we have a composer/programmer with vision and ability to make another iMUSE.

I think LucasArts has it patented, so that doesn't really work.

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To whoever wrote in about Bomberman:

I made this a few years back, with a few other students at Aalborg University, Copenhagen.

You're going to love this:

Awesome! That looks like it would cause some hilarity!

Btw, Chris, was my mail punctuated really badly? I'm the aian email address. (It's not a mis-spelling, my old one got spammed so badly, I had to change it, and that was one of the few I could have. It is spelled Ian.)

I suppose I should sign the mail properly. :grin:

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I think LucasArts has it patented, so that doesn't really work.
I don't think this is a deal-breaker. They can just feign ignorance of the actual iMUSE and then when they're done, show it to LEC and pay some patent use fees. I dunno, maybe it is not all that hot an idea, potentially a dangerous waste of time.

Maybe it would be better to license the thing and then improve it, but LEC has had a schizophrenic business plan for the last ten years and they may just cock-block it because they're protecting their assets or something equally tarded.

How long do patents on something like that last? 20 years from the earliest claim date plus any extensions granted, says wikipedia. If they don't extend it (which they might simply because LEC is a bunch of douchefag lawyers with nothing better to do), it will fall out of patent on November 25th 2011 (iMUSE patent is filed on that date in 1991).

A corollary: Holy cow, it has been near twenty years since MI2 came out. I feel old.

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I think that most of the tech in iMuse is pretty commonplace at this point, at least the non-midi stuff. It's just never been done well. Also, when do patents expire?

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