A Few Sound Coments

[aaronfeld]

First I want to say that I really like the music of the game but, forgive me if I am wrong, it seems that it has not change for some time. I would like to here more music, which I know is a big task but I just wanted to put that out there. Second I just wanted to know what programs people use to mix their music.

Thanks

[Iris]

First I want to say that I really like the music of the game but, forgive me if I am wrong, it seems that it has not change for some time.

It hasn't changed during the last 15 days, to be precise.

• Activity log (starting May 16th, 2007, sorted in descending order by date) [20 KiB].

[Captain_Wrathbow]

Seems to me wesnoth is getting new songs added constantly.
Well, no, I can't say that, cause it depends on how you would define constantly and how often you would expect songs to be added to a game.
If you just do MP or something, you may just get tired of hearing the default playlist, but look in the music folder: there are tons of songs.

[aaronfeld]

I don't upgrade when every verson comes out so maybe I should do that hmm.

[Telaron]

I would like to here more music

Look around the Music and Sound Development thread some more. There are quite a few songs that are either being worked on for mainline, or have been committed for mainline recently.

http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=30502

http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=30438

http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php ... 47#p448247

[aaronfeld]

Aye

[West]

I don't upgrade when every verson comes out so maybe I should do that hmm.

Guys, we need a facepalm smiley.

[Captain_Wrathbow]

I don't upgrade when every verson comes out so maybe I should do that hmm.

...yeah, that would be a good idea. Do you expect new music tracks to just appear in your folder?
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new music in... whatever version you are upgrading to.

[aaronfeld]

Yeah I probly will soon but it seems that the verson I got has the same from the verson I had...Thats what I was trying to get at.

[West]

First I want to say that I really like the music of the game but, forgive me if I am wrong, it seems that it has not change for some time. I would like to here more music, which I know is a big task but I just wanted to put that out there. Second I just wanted to know what programs people use to mix their music.

Thanks

I felt this might deserve a more serious answer, so here goes.

I would also like to hear more Wesnoth music. In fact, I would love to have a hundred tracks in different moods and styles. After all, Wesnoth is more like a TBS engine rather than a typical computer game with one single storyline, and the more music there is, the more variation we can have between the different campaigns. My dream is to have a complete separate soundtrack for each mainline campaign, yet with certain themes that bind them all together into one single almost Wagner-like suite. This will likely remain a dream and nothing more, but who knows.

From a more realistic standpoint, we're going as fast as we can. Wesnoth like all OSS projects relies on voluntary contributions. On top of that, the Wesnoth soundtrack is in a genre that is very time-consuming and our standards are high. We simply can not churn out new tracks every month. In fact, three or four new tracks every year is probably as much as anyone can hope for.

Theoretically, it would be possible to get more music contributors. We could post requests on various composer forums and I'm pretty sure we'd get a noticeable influx of new composers. But who will review their work and make sure it's of high enough quality and fits the game? Right now we have only two active Lords of Music -- me and Tyler Johnson, and Tyler's off working for a few months now. It all boils down to lack of manpower.

So like I said, I would also like more new music. But it's not going to happen any faster until we have more contributors *and* LoM's.

[Iris]

While I have no official say on the matter, as a (former?) add-on author I'm mildly bothered about the current trend of adding more generic music tracks to mainline while the obvious unavailability of musicians willing to work on music for UMCs doesn't seem to have any realistic solution so far.

• Longer, detailed version of this rant.

I personally think that mainline is about to hit a critical mass where adding new music isn't improving the quality of the official game distribution in any evident way, and old music (such as loyalists.ogg) is still around awaiting replacements. Just like in the artwork department, Wesnoth just has a limited content set, so quantity should not be a concern anymore — quality, on the other hand, is and it should always be the highest priority.

Maybe there could be specific tracks for the different mainline campaigns, but odds are that they'll either be eventually moved by a random mainline campaign maintainer to data/core/music/ for global availability, or just copied/pulled by UMC authors for their own use.

[West]

Excellent blog post shadowmaster, I must say I agree with you on basically all points.

You're right in that we can not keep adding random music to the game. My aim has always been that mainline tunes should sound like they belong together. In terms of production this isn't possible as we all have different samples and plugins and ways of working, but musically speaking it *is* possible, and I think it should be a requirement. Seeing as we already require original material I think it makes sense to demand that all new compositions should feature some existing theme(s) and/or be written with a specific campaign in mind. After all we're working on a game here, not a repository of miscellaneous compositions.

I understand that the licensing is a problem, but if campaign-specific music is to be reality in the future we need to prohibit the use of music made for one campagin in other campaigns and UMC. If we don't, there is no point in even trying to have "mini soundtracks" for mainline campaigns. Because, like you say, it will all end up as core music anyway. Yes, we can have a pool of generic tracks to be used here and there, but once a piece is written for a campaign, it should stay in that campaign. Nothing else makes any sense.

Here's the hitch though. How do we entice our composers to write music for the campaigns? This has been discussed before and IIRC we never got further than that. I was hoping some composer step forward and say "I want to do that campaign!" but no, nothing. I think there's too much work and pressure involved. Also, we don't have a lot of active mainline composers anymore. Timothy and Aleksi are gone. Rain and Jeremy haven't been around in, what, a year? Doug Kauffman comes and goes every other year or something. It's mostly "untried" contributors ATM. And before anyone takes offense at that, I mean untried as in people that we don't yet know can be relied on to provide more than a single piece in high quality (something wrong with that sentence but you know what I mean).

Personally I have no big interest in composing any more pieces for Wesnoth. At least not right now. I would certainly like to score some mainline campaign somewhere down the line but as long as the problem you describe exists, I'm not even going to consider it.

So I dunno. Maybe it's time to stop accepting random music and demand that new contributors take on specific tasks, like replacing old tracks or scoring campaigns? After all, it's not unreasonable of us to have such requirements. We have so much quality music in the game that we shouldn't have to be "thankful for what we can get". Of course, the reuse issue needs to be solved first.

[Max]

I understand that the licensing is a problem, but if campaign-specific music is to be reality in the future we need to prohibit the use of music made for one campagin in other campaigns and UMC. If we don't, there is no point in even trying to have "mini soundtracks" for mainline campaigns. Because, like you say, it will all end up as core music anyway.

if someone contributed music written for a specific campaign and explicitly asked that it should not be reused in other campaigns - do you really think that some developer would just ignore this wish and use it in other mainline campaigns?

and for umc: just add a text file to the music folder in the campaign asking not to reuse this music in umc. you could even forbid such music from being uploaded to (the official) add-on server(s) by changing the rules (http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=24320). but i doubt that this would be necessary.

[doofus-01]

I understand that the licensing is a problem, but if campaign-specific music is to be reality in the future we need to prohibit the use of music made for one campagin in other campaigns and UMC. If we don't, there is no point in even trying to have "mini soundtracks" for mainline campaigns. Because, like you say, it will all end up as core music anyway. Yes, we can have a pool of generic tracks to be used here and there, but once a piece is written for a campaign, it should stay in that campaign. Nothing else makes any sense.

I'm not totally sure I follow. If some idiot slaps together a random play-list and attaches it to some lazy p.o.s add-on, and that somehow became popular and was how a piece of music was introduced to the world - that would be bad. But if the author is paying any attention, and a piece fits the scene, why shouldn't it be used?

Is music much different than visual art? There are already campaign character portraits, it looks odd to have them popping up in other, unrelated campaigns. Are those portraits being abused? (Honest question, I'll admit that I'm not as familiar with the UMC content as I once was.)

[West]

I'm not totally sure I follow. If some idiot slaps together a random play-list and attaches it to some lazy p.o.s add-on, and that somehow became popular and was how a piece of music was introduced to the world - that would be bad. But if the author is paying any attention, and a piece fits the scene, why shouldn't it be used?

Is music much different than visual art? There are already campaign character portraits, it looks odd to have them popping up in other, unrelated campaigns. Are those portraits being abused? (Honest question, I'll admit that I'm not as familiar with the UMC content as I once was.)

I think I would like to revise my above statement, I wasn't thinking clearly. Naturally all game content should be allowed to be used by UMC authors. I don't even know why I mentioned UMC. What I meant was that mainline campaigns should (if we go ahead with this idea) have at least some amount of unique tracks that may not be used in other mainline campaigns.

You mention character portraits being used in other unrelated campaigns. Are you talking about UMC stuff or mainline? If the latter I think it's a problem, yes. At least if it's important characters. Just like I would find it confusing and awkward encountering the image of Character X from Campaign Y in an unrelated campaign, I would find it just as confusing and awkward hearing Chartacter X's theme song.

My whole point is that reusing a campaign-specific tune in some other campaign would detract from the originality and appeal of both campaigns. That's all I was trying to say.