The way music works in Wesnoth.

[TimothyP]

I mentioned this a while ago in the developer forums, but thought I would discuss it here too.

Currently, the level music in Wesnoth is set up as a single looping piece of music.

Here's how I think it should be made to work, if the programmers are willing:

There is a central sound library where all of the level music is stored. There can be any number of pieces in there. The more, the better. 8-10 at the least. These pieces get played in a random order. There is a 15-20 pause in between pieces. I think this empty space can be very useful. The pieces should be composed with good intros and outros so as not to be awkward.

Does this seem like a good plan to everyone else? I think it would be the most effective.

--Timothy

[scott]

I like it, and I would like it if you could specify (if you wanted to) a subset of the library by allowing music= to take a list. I don't know if you're asking developers or everyone at large, but that's my vote from at-large.

[Corwin]

I think that is a good idea and should at least be considered by the developer. Letting campaign and or faction designers choose which music to use would also be useful.

[TimothyP]

I think these are good ideas. The only catch is that they might only be really cool if there was a large amount of music to choose from. Or not. Your opinion may vary from mine, which is cool.

On the other hand, no matter how many pieces there are in the library, someone may want to hear one piece over and over and so they might like to be able to select that piece only.

I was just assuming we were going with the traditional "You get what we give you" approach to music.

--Timothy

[Dwarven Lord]

I like the idea i have finaly turned off the sound because the music is too repedative.

another idea is to give each CIV its own music library so the orc human and elf music would be diferent and fitting to thoes civs.

just a thought

[TimothyP]

The problems with faction-specific music libraries are these:

1. That requires a much longer soundtrack than any game currently has. And those games have full-time composers. A typical game has 60-70 minutes of music at most. That's a LOT of music.

2. When playing in a campaign, your faction is not the only one on the board. The same is true of multiplayer. It is better to provide a variety of moods, representing various factions, battle, army development/progress, and everything else that is happening in the game. It's not just about factions.

Thanks for you input. It is all valid and worth considering!

--Timothy

[Phyvo]

The faction-specific music is a little irritating to me, since it is so short and the AI doesn't let me hear anything but the very beginning of the song, so even if they were totally awesome I'd end up hating them after awhile.

Warcraft 3 with the Frozen Throne expansion pack has an hour and a half of music. Lots of that is for the cutscenes though to provide the right mood. Add onto that four faction specific songs each, four factions, and bonus tracks and you have a whole lot of music. I think that means Wesnoth should not try to have both faction specific and music of varying moods.

I'd go for the varying moods because BFW is not like War3 where you get a different UI skin and everything to go with your control of the faction. If you do keep faction-specific music though, my personal opinion is that you should remove the plays-faction-song-whever-it's-that-faction's-turn thing... It's ok for the little compositions that Wesnoth currently has, but just wouldn't work for anything truely interesting and long in length.

[edit] Grammar. [/edit]

[TimothyP]

Thank you for the input, Phyvo.

I agree with your ideas. Warcraft III is a good comparison.

For examples of the style I'm pushing for, you all might want to check out the format in Dungeon Siege or Morrowind. Because our sound effects are sparse, we would have smaller gaps between pieces than these games.

--Timothy