Stendhal Development Meeting 2009-11-22/Result Log/Music

Types of Music

main goal of music is to add ambient/atmosphere
music should be played adaptively according to the place and situation, to give it more value.
- storyteller made some great examples of this, see patch tracker
- some are very pretty and quiet and suitable for outdoors, a meadow
- some are dark and scary like for a dungeon
- a jazz room was suggested, does it fit into the world?
need to compromise between file size and loops being long enough not to get monotonic
files provided and committed to CVS
- Deep_Forest.ogg (This music by storyteller from patch 2665588 is ideal for outdoors as it has bir..., 2009)
- Demiurgo_ANewHomeland.ogg (Added final version of demiurgos song, 2006 )
- Sacred_Moments.ogg (This piece of music by storyteller from patch 2672345 has a majestic and serious..., 2009)
- The_Forsaken_Mine.ogg (This is written by storyteller, atmospheric background music ideal for caves or ..., 2009)
- The_Old_Tavern.ogg (This is written by storyteller, and he comments that ' This background soundtrac..., 2009)

mp3 is problematic
midi
- midi-files can be repeated the whole time aren't so big files and you can make them easy at home
- midi and linux may be a problem
- midi would have a retro touch, like lufia or secret of mana or sth.
ogg
- midi files can be converted
- prefered by many people
- cannot get the range in midi files as you can in ogg

music is played by client
on commands provided by the server
music should depended on zone, "atmosphere" property of zone that is sent to client
synchronization
- there is an unwritten rule that all the players should see the same thing
- problem: player A enters a zone, the music starts to play, player B enters 30 seconds later. For them to hear the same thing the music for player B has to start 30 seconds in
- the music should fade in, there is no need to hear it from the start
- music is not really part of the game world so it may be okay to start at the beginning every time, to make coding simpler for now
other triggers
- there might be special music during a fight against a very strong monsters
- it was suggested that music may be faster when low on health

music should only be played if the Stendhal client is the active window
so when you have two clients open (for example while testing) you don't get a mess
a workaround would be to mute one client manually.
for example when the other music source is not related to Stendhal

the music files should be shipped with the client, just like tiles and images are, but as a separate package
streaming is considered to consume too much resources like bandwidth, streaming is not required for synchronizing
plan:
1. Make /mute persistent (#2880973).
2. include the sound files in stendhal-0.xx.zip (it made sense to have an extra download years ago when the music was twice as large as the client, but that is not true anymore)
3. include the music files in stendhal-FULL-0.xx.zip

we need to be carefully when taking music from any other sources because they may be copyrighted although marked as free
it should be possible to switch sound/music off
music needs quite a bit of coding, the existing sound system needs some cleanup
there are ogg files provided to test with, so the missing computer code is the show stopper

storyteller and miasma volunteered to do the music
hendrik volunteered to fix /mute and include the sound files into the normal stendhal-0.xx.zip download, so that the music files can go into stendhal-FULL-0.xx.zip
plassy volunteered to do the java coding
it may be a good idea to join #arianne on irc freenode. Please ask there if you have any questions or issues.