When you play Wesnoth...

[Invisible Philosopher]

I have a problem. I want to put custom music in my campaign, but good music in OGG format (the format that Wesnoth uses) takes up too much space (file size). This is a problem for, especially, people whose downloads take a long time (slow connections), and people who don't listen to or care about the music anyway (which is what the poll is trying to find out). It is not acceptable for me to force everyone downloading my campaign to download the music. (This is also a problem, to some extent, for custom story pictures and for numerous graphics, e.g. a whole animated race of people.) There are some choices:

1. Just use default Wesnoth music everywhere. The easy, unhelpful solution.

2. Upload a separate item on the campaign server that contains the music. This has several problems, however, some more soluble than others:

• The campaign server is already a mess and with its current utter lack of organizational ability, this would only make it worse. Putting it somewhere else for download would help, but sort of defeat the purpose of the campaign server.
• Although it is possible to detect whether the person has downloaded the music item, what to do if they haven't? Commonly a person would not want to download the music for the later parts of a campaign before they know whether they like the campaign. So when they get there...
  • Ignore it and play some other music or no music. This is not much good because the person will probably not know that there is other music and will suffer the lack of it.
  • Disrupt the playing experience to say that the next scenario may feature some custom music. The player may not want music or want to spend the time (potentially money) downloading it. To make matters worse, the player would have to save the game and quit Wesnoth, I believe, for the changes to take effect.

It is too much of a bother for the player, who is trying to have fun, to deal with getting music separately. Although support from Wesnoth could alleviate the troubles, the fundamental issues remain. Option #1 is still the only feasible one.

3. Find a way for Wesnoth to use music in a format that is an acceptably small size. I am not knowledgable enough in this area to say whether this is practical, and since I don't even usually play the music, I am not particularly motivated to pursue this.

Any suggestions?

[scott]

music1.cfg:

Code: Select all

#define MUSIC_PACK1
#enddef

your campaign scenario file:

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#ifdef MUSIC_PACK1
   music=great_tune1.ogg
#else
   music=wesnoth2.ogg
#endif

Content sorting/tabs on the server would make this a lot better as an option. It would be transparent to the player. The description field could mention any content packs it uses.

The same could be done for custom units in that the config file uses standard graphics unless you downloaded the graphics pack. It wouldn't work as well as it would with music.

[Attila]

I usually play Wesnoth while doing homework, so I just listen to my own music.

[Pythagoras]

I usually play Wesnoth while doing homework, so I just listen to my own music.

Ha, I used to play old-school counter strike while doing homework, being productive while I was dead and waiting to respawn in the next round.

The current music is good for passive listening to generate a mood, someone in the other room that overhears it concentrating on it quickly comments that it is repetitive though. I'm totally cool with MIDI music, and realize that a lot of work goes into generating the music (and appreciate it), however Wesnoth's soundtrack could be improved with simply more involved/complex MIDI music (less repetitive). Just my opinion, I don't think its terribly high priority.

[Invisible Philosopher]

Code: Select all

...

Yes I know how to do that, as I alluded to in my post.

...MIDI...

I tried playing music from a MIDI file with Wesnoth and it didn't work. Can you get Wesnoth to play a MIDI file? (please?)

[ryn]

For Wesnoth to play MIDI files, the person using it must have a midi soundbank installed, which is LARGE. While these may come with Windows/Mac computers by default, they don't on many Linuxes. If you really want MIDI files to be an option, you'd have to use the SDL_mixer's MIDI capabilities, which (I'm pretty sure) require timidity++ (google it).

[allefant]

MOD (IT, XM, S3M, ...) also would be an alternative, smaller than .ogg, but works everywhere and sounds the same everywhere, unlike midi.

[martenzo]

Turn it off and listen to my own music

[Pythagoras]

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...

Yes I know how to do that, as I alluded to in my post.

...MIDI...

I tried playing music from a MIDI file with Wesnoth and it didn't work. Can you get Wesnoth to play a MIDI file? (please?)

I had thought that all the default music WAS midi! (oops?) Maybe it is just recorded midi -> ogg...?

[hiryuu]

I leave the music off and listen to net radio.

[Invisible Philosopher]

Maybe it is just recorded midi -> ogg...?

At least some of it probably is.

MOD (IT, XM, S3M, ...) also would be an alternative, smaller than .ogg, but works everywhere and sounds the same everywhere, unlike midi.

OK can you get that working? get some music in that format and see how big it is and whether it works in Wesnoth? (I can test whether it works in Wesnoth if you upload the music.) SDL_mixer (the library Wesnoth uses to do music) does seem to say it supports MOD format.

[allefant]

You should be able to find an example MOD e.g. here: http://www.modarchive.com/

[rende]

I listen to the music now, although I just started playing a few days ago. I usually have the TV on too, so the music is pretty quiet. I'm sure after I've played it enough I will turn it off and listen to my own music. It is not bad, or it would have gotten turned off the first time I played.

[Invisible Philosopher]

I tried one of those example MODs and it didn't work either -- Wesnoth just kept playing the music it was playing before.

[xtifr]

Hmm, I cant really vote, because I alternate between the first two choices. I often turn it down so I can listen to some other music, but if I'm not listening to something else, I'll turn it back up, just to have something to listen to. I'm pretty neutral on the music overall (and on most video game music) - I neither love it nor hate it. It would be nice to have alternate drop-in music packs in general, but I think that's a feature that can wait till after 1.0.