Re: [Octal-dev] possibly irrelevant idea

[Dave O'Toole]

Gary Richardson wrote:

> Actually, from what I understand there is going to be an octal lib.. the
> tracker is just going to ride over top of that (actually, that was the way
> I thought it would be, but I have been out of the *loop* for a bit).

The "music lib for games" thing has been in my head on this since
OCTAL's inception. In fact, the L in OCTAL is "library." This ties in
OCTAL with another project I've been working on intermittently for the
past 4 years or so, a tile-based game graphics library. It's called
PRISM (are we seeing a pattern here?) and I have briefly discussed
donation to GNU with one of my volunteer coordinators. Not sure whether
it will happen, but PRISM will be GPL either way. It's supposed to be
something on the level of sophistication seen in Ultima VII. Of course,
the prototypes aren't quite there yet :-), and that's been on hiatus
since 1998. But I'm going to get back to it, perhaps after OCTAL is
finished. Of course, then will come the scripting language for the
game's events, characters, and conversations...

How does all this fit together? My primary interest is interactive
fiction and human-computer art. My first experience with computers was
UNIX Zork (ported to RT-11 OS. this was on an old DEC Micro/PDP-11) and
my first computer programs were text-adventures. My passion for
tile-systems and electronic music has naturally fallen into place with
this, and hence things are starting to come together with all these
projects. 

So yes, I do have a somewhat larger plan here :-) but it's got to be one
step at a time, gaining footholds, etcetera.  

> > To me, it seems like one could control the music very nicely based on 
> > certain
> > events that occur in a game. But this is just an idea I had, and possibly 
> > way
> > off the goals of Octal. I just wanted to mention it because it's been in my
> > head for about 2 weeks now.

I agree. Making music context-sensitive can be a very, very effective
mood-maker. Listen to the sound in Ultima VII and you'll hear the
importance of ambience. 

> 
> I don't know how well it would actually work, but it sounds pretty fucking
> cool.

Instead of re-starting a different song when the scene changes (as in
many games), one could break up the song into smaller sections that can
be looped. Transition sections and fadeouts can be triggered when the
player moves to a new area, etc. Ultima VII already did this to some
extent, in that there were many many short, memorable little songs that
could repeat. 

I think that a "semantic triggering" interface between a game and the
OCTAL sound system would be very doable. Anything involving algorithmic
composition is probably beyond the scope of the project--more of an
artificial intelligence thing.

-- 
@@@ david o'toole
@@@ address@hidden
@@@ www.gnu.org/software/octal