Optional music/sound "theme packs"

Samples of sound/music, ideas or suggestions related to the development of audio assets for FreeOrion.
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StratCaster
Space Kraken
Posts: 133
Joined: Sat Jun 05, 2004 5:35 am
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#16 Post by StratCaster »

eleazar wrote: Not only is that a ton of work, but it would tend to force the player to relearn all the musical...
Who cares if its a ton of work, we have a ton of time...[before the game is complete]
eleazar wrote: I'd rather suggest each race has something like a "national anthem" in several versions for different situations: The musican has the chance to inject more "personality" into each anthem because it won't be playing all the time. Something really abstract and weird might make a great anthem for a machine race, but would drive most players crazy if they had to hear it most of the time.
Most likely you'd have your stock FO tracks and mixed in can be a few tracks based on the type of race you are playing. Of course most of the game will be customizable so if you want, you could listen to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers if you convert their tunes to oggs...

Also, I think most of the music is done... Mongoose has a ton of tracks completed as well as Gui and a few others. If actual race and back stories get nailed down, maybe then some 'race' tracks can be realized, but until then we are musicians in waiting...
"The mighty warships of the Vl'Hurg Empire dived screaming upon the unknowing Earth, where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog." -Hitchhikers Guide

LithiumMongoose
Audio Lead Emeritus
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#17 Post by LithiumMongoose »

StratCaster wrote:Mongoose has a ton of tracks completed
Some of them are better than others. ;)

@eleazar: The only guaranteed places for different things to be playing at the moment are 1) game title screen, 2) galaxy map, and 3) combat. The first can't really be race-specific, since you haven't chosen a race yet at that point. That leaves a situation where we can probably get away with as little as two tracks per race. I think that's very doable, and also well worth doing, personally.

Any additional categories, or additional tracks in existing categories for variety, will probably stay non-racial, at least for a while.

Also please keep in mind that the powers that be are reluctant to fully authorize, or forbid for that matter, anything on this subject until later in development. That being said, as a minor insignificant power myself I have set forth the semi-official plan for the moment, which is to contribute anything people want to or feel might prove useful, and we'll sort it all out later.

LithiumMongoose
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#18 Post by LithiumMongoose »

I'm all for diplomacy anthems -- Civ4 does that wonderfully, and even has multiple different ones for each race depending on what era that race is currently in -- but they're necessarily much shorter than tracks for other categories (30sec - 1min), and at their core are basically an optional element (which is why I didn't list them above).

Combat victory on the other hand, is not something I would devote any resources to right now. We'll have to see exactly how FO implements combat of course, but in these sorts of games I would fully expect combat to end almost immediately after end conditions are met, and proceed either to the next combat or the next turn. There is more potential room for pre-combat music (an optional category I alrdy have a track made for), since there are things to do in a pre-combat phase (deciding what action to take ala MOO3's combat scheduler, surveying the terrain, placing ships, giving initial orders, etc). But if we do anything at all for post-combat, ie a victory/defeat/draw fanfare, it'd have to be short, like around 5 seconds, and I'm not sure going race-specific on something like that is really worth doing.

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eleazar
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#19 Post by eleazar »

LithiumMongoose wrote:Combat victory on the other hand, is not something I would devote any resources to right now. We'll have to see exactly how FO implements combat of course, but in these sorts of games I would fully expect combat to end almost immediately after end conditions are met, and proceed either to the next combat or the next turn...
I don't expect anybody to work on it now, with the races uninvented.

However, the game should pause a few seconds to declare the winner of a battle, and perhaps display some stats. It's very anti-climactic (ala MoO1) to instantly go from the last move of battle to the next thing.
Star Control athems left a big impression on me, which were 3-4 second long played on victory. It gave a chance to gnash your teeth or gloat depending on your success. Which was much more compelling than hopping instantly to the next battle.

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