Mainlining popular UMC tracks

[Gothyoba]

I personally support adding some of some songs mentioned here like Enchanted Forest, exploration, Climactic Comtemplation and especially Dark Passage. Generally, I support expanding this game’s soundtrack and adding more popular UMC and would like this idea to start getting more interest.

That's what lately I was thinking to post. I thought about some music, surely Enchanted Forest, City of Dwarves, Flight of the Drakes, Notherners Old (nostalgy ) or Everlasting Night. That would also make particular factions more interesting.

I was going to post something proposing a bunch of UMC tracks to be added from the UMC Music Books once I listen to all of it. I personally haven’t listened to Flight of the Darkes. As there’s a new soundtrack replacing it, I don’t think we should re-add the old northerners. The others seem like good ideas to me. I especially like City of Dwarves.

[holypaladin]

I was going to post something proposing a bunch of UMC tracks to be added from the UMC Music Books once I liste to all of it. I perosnally aven’t listened to Flight of the Darkes. As there’s a new soundtrack replacing it, I don’t think we should re-add the old northerners. The others seem like good ideas to me. I especially like City of Dwarves.

Some old melodies replaced with new ones are still in core (frantic together with frantic old) and old northerners are rather still popular being included to many add-ons including my own.

Flight of the Drakes:

[Spannerbag]

Hmm... it' almost a year on from my last post.
I'm unaware of any plan to review or update the mainline music tracks, but that's OK, we're all volunteers.

I think the question to ask next is:
What could we do to improve the existing provision?

By that I mean that despite there being many supplementary tracks available in the various music books many content creators prefer to manually add specific tracks to their campaign. This causes a few niggles that we are all familiar with, most notably bloat.

I don't claim to have all (or any of) the answers but the thought occurs that different content creators will want to include specific tracks and I doubt any arrangement of tracks in a music book would suit everyone. I also doubt most players would be willing to download all the music books so that content creators could reference any supplementary music track(s) without inclusion of said track(s) in their campaign.

Now this is just to start a debate (I'm not proposing this as a final workable solution) but how about this to start an argument a debate?
UMC content creators agree to having a specific repository for all additional (non-mainline) tracks in a specific local folder (e.g. UMC18Music - for v1.18? Any name will do as long as we all agree to it and it doesn't already exist).
Basically this creates a second folder that works like core/music.

Then all add-ons have two components; the add-on, as now, plus a separate resources (dependency) component that downloads the music to the common folder.
This should (I hope, if I understand correctly) prevent the same track(s) being downloaded multiple times and thereby prevent player's storage holding multiple copies of the same music.
The idea isn't new, I'm just stealing from building on what's already being done and standardising it for general use.
It should also reduce download activity; once a track had been downloaded by an add-on, a second add-on that uses the same music will not need to do so.

I would've liked to have included some sort of conditional download within the add-on via #ifhave but there are a few reasons I can think of why that won't work (primarily because AFAIK an add-on can't access - download to - any storage except that which is within it's own directory structure).

There are variations on this approach and I doubt we'll all agree 100% but I'm just putting this out there to see if there's any appetite to think about agreeing a common music repository (or methodology) of some sort?

Existing add-ons don't need to be amended, IMHO players shouldn't be obliged to download stuff twice, especially large music files.
However existing add-ons could be amended to use this new system when a new version of Wesnoth is released (i.e. 1.20) when a player will download content.

Add-ons that don't use this will be unaffected and hopefully over time more content creators will adopt this approach and - at the very least - reduce bloat and duplication on the player's storage device. Plus it will reduce download times.
This is far from ideal but I thought it's worth sounding people out to see what people think.

This could also be generalised for other shared (simple, single file) resources too; sounds are an obvious one but also maybe images; scenery, story etc.?
(Not sure terrain would be straightforward to include in this).
But that is for the future if this first step generates any interest.
(Ideally, long term I'd like to see some sort of common storage for shared UMC content built into Wesnoth itself to further simplify/standardise things.)

Of course, if anyone spots a reason why this won't work please let me know, I'm good a getting things wrong!
And if anyone has a better idea - great!

Let's see what we can come up with...

If there is any enthusiasm at all from the folk who read this it might be worth posting a new thread so it gets more airplay?
OTOH if the general opinion is that - for whatever reason - it won't fly, fair enough, no worries.

Thanks for reading to the end of this rather long post!

Cheers!
-- Spannerbag

[gnombat]

If there is any enthusiasm at all from the folk who read this it might be worth posting a new thread so it gets more airplay?

Wasn't there a thread for this already?

viewtopic.php?t=57182

[Gothyoba]

UMC content creators agree to having a specific repository for all additional (non-mainline) tracks in a specific local folder (e.g. UMC18Music - for v1.18? Any name will do as long as we all agree to it and it doesn't already exist).
Basically this creates a second folder that works like core/music.

Isn’t this what the UMC Music Books are supposed to be? Adopting these books as a standard requirement could be good, and would solve this issue for songs that are commonly used but do not fit into mainline, such as One Thousand Suns. I’m not sure how this proposal would improve the idea of standardizing the Music Books. By having 13 different music books, an add-on may only require some of these to work (those with the relevant songs), instead of installing hundreds of tracks in one resource add-on despite the add-on only needing 5 of those. I might be wrong though. I feel like I might not have understood something here.

However, I don’t think all of this music should remain in add-ons. A lot of it fits suprisingly well into mainline, including some much less popular songs not shown here. I would also propose a newly expanded mainline song playlist and music changes to various mainline scenarios, introdcuing this music to mainline. This also has the bonus of making them easier to use in add-ons, which especially good for veyr popular UMC music (note though that I don’t personally think all music added should be popular, it should be good and at least somewhat thematically consistent with Wesnoth’s other music).

However, I think this would be rather hard to get into mainline, given that the Lords of Music have long been inactive and none of the game’s music contributors appear to be active. This does make reviewing proposals for new mainline music hard, but I’m hoping that eventually such an idea could be considered further.

I like the idea of having commonly used resources in these official add-ons (they don’t necessarily have to be official, just standard.) It would be cool to apply this to units and have an official resources mod with commonly used factions and units (e.g. Dwarvish Witnesses, Minotaurs, Aragwaithi etc.) The same could be done for other resources, such as terrain.

As for Flight of the Drakes, its an excellent song that might fit well in mainline (maybe in WoF, given the name?) Again, please keep in mind I am not a musician/composer. I am someone who is interested in compiling UMC music, and often not a very good judge for this.

[Lord-Knightmare]

Flight of the Drakes:

This is quite good. I maintain a drake campaign Ashen Hearts. Can this be packaged as a resource add-on so that I may use this track? Also, may I have its licensing data to add to credits? (I would add it to the campaign itself, but I dont wanna bulge its size by 100% just cause one track). I would rather have a dependency made out of it.

[gnombat]

Flight of the Drakes

This is in UMC Music Book 10.

Apparently it was downloaded from here? https://archive.ph/cKTaf (archive link - original no longer available)

[Spannerbag]

If there is any enthusiasm at all from the folk who read this it might be worth posting a new thread so it gets more airplay?

Wasn't there a thread for this already?

viewtopic.php?t=57182

Heh, I had to skim through that thread to remind myself what I'd said.

There I was exploring the feasibility of an idea that in the end couldn't work as I'd hoped.
And yes, the idea here is similar but the difference is that in the post you reference I was trying to implement purely in code.
Here I was exploring if there was any appetite for content creators to agree to an informal arrangement to do a similar thing.

The present system of providing music books certainly works; the player can download these (or not) and campaigns can include the extra tracks if they have been downloaded.
I have no idea how many players actually download the music books (and haven't tried to find out).
Also many add-ons embed the additional tracks in their local music directory rather than referencing the music books.
I was wondering if there was possibly an alternative way of providing players with additional tracks that was a bit more flexible and operated on a per track basis rather than per book basis to:

1. Reduce bloat and duplication, and
2. Not require download of entire music books if only one or two tracks were referenced.

I appreciate that storage is cheap, quick and huge, so an extra bit of overhead won't be a major issue for almost everyone's devices.
It just seems... wasteful to have multiple copies of stuff when one would do.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback.

Cheers,
-- Spannerbag

[Spannerbag]

UMC content creators agree to having a specific repository for all additional (non-mainline) tracks in a specific local folder (e.g. UMC18Music - for v1.18? Any name will do as long as we all agree to it and it doesn't already exist).
Basically this creates a second folder that works like core/music.

Isn’t this what the UMC Music Books are supposed to be?

Yes, and the operative word is "supposed"; I've no idea how many players dowload the music books and plenty of add-ons contain music from one or more music books. The music book system works, I was just poking around to see if there was anything that could be done to improve things.

Adopting these books as a standard requirement could be good, and would solve this issue for songs that are commonly used but do not fit into mainline, such as One Thousand Suns...

I agree with the spirit of what you're saying,
However I don't see how having these additional tracks as a "standard requirement" is any different to adding them into mainline?
The music books are optional and I don't think there's a way to force an add-on to include additional tracks other than embedding it within that add-on (but if I'm wrong, I'm sure some kind souls will point this out to me ).

However, I don’t think all of this music should remain in add-ons. A lot of it fits suprisingly well into mainline, including some much less popular songs not shown here. I would also propose a newly expanded mainline song playlist and music changes to various mainline scenarios, introdcuing this music to mainline. This also has the bonus of making them easier to use in add-ons, which especially good for veyr popular UMC music (note though that I don’t personally think all music added should be popular, it should be good and at least somewhat thematically consistent with Wesnoth’s other music).

Again I agree with your point although I can see there needs to be a balance between the size of the game download and how much media is bundled with the game as standard. Extra music quickly bulks up the download and players on slower or less reliable connections might be put off.
I can think of various possibilities to address this hence my previous post.

I like the idea of having commonly used resources in these official add-ons (they don’t necessarily have to be official, just standard.) It would be cool to apply this to units and have an official resources mod with commonly used factions and units (e.g. Dwarvish Witnesses, Minotaurs, Aragwaithi etc.) The same could be done for other resources, such as terrain.

Again we are in violent agreement.
For units, we can have eras I guess (never made or explicitly used one).
However there are loads of resources of various sorts already out there and I've no idea how much duplication or general clutter there is already in "era-space".
I wouldn't want to add to it without good reason.

Thanks for the feedback, always appreciated.

Cheers,
-- Spannerbag

[gnombat]

Heh, I had to skim through that thread to remind myself what I'd said.

There I was exploring the feasibility of an idea that in the end couldn't work as I'd hoped.
And yes, the idea here is similar but the difference is that in the post you reference I was trying to implement purely in code.
Here I was exploring if there was any appetite for content creators to agree to an informal arrangement to do a similar thing.

OK, after reading the old thread and the new idea (again), I'm still not sure I understand what the new idea is, exactly...

UMC content creators agree to having a specific repository for all additional (non-mainline) tracks in a specific local folder

What is this "repository"? Is it an addon? Is it a Git repository? Is it something else...?

[Gothyoba]

My personal idea is to make the use of the UMC Music Books in any add-ons using extra music (unless the music isn’t in the music books) instead of copying these around from add-on to add-on. I don’t mean to force add-ons to use specific dependencies, but it isn’t ideal to have these tracks copied several times between add-ons.

I agree with most of Spannerbag’s points here. While backwards compatibility may mean its too late for this, I believe some of Wesnoth’s generic story art is currently unused. Some if it could be moved to an add-on to save a little bit of space in mainline (e.g. landscape-coast.webp) Similarly, story art from UMC can be out together into a similar kind of resource add-on for other add-ons to use.

As for mainlining UMC music, in order not to add a lot good music that is never used anywhere I think a good methodology to choose new music for mainline is to examine the existing in each campaign and see how it might be improved.

Fo example, Flight of the Drakes could be very good for some WoF Battle scenarios. Dark Passage is a good alternative underground track, especially good for creating tension at the start of a scenario,when your enemy may still be unknown. This could work in some HttT scenarios with dwarves, the cave EI scenarios, such as Escape Tunel and some DiD scenarios. It could even work in shroud scenarios where you are entering an unknown yet closed space, like the third scenario of AToTB. Ambuscade could be good for scrnarios where you are running away from an enemy to reach a destination, perhaps during an ambush, such as THoT’s 6th scenario. I haven’t tried most of these combinations, but I feel this a good way of choosing new music to then add the the full/default music playlists. This also makes sure the music added fits in with the game instead of just being good music that is vaguely in theme but doesn’t fit in a lot of places.

While I was playing on 0.9.7 I did realize that some older versions used to have some now removed music found in UMC Music Book 2, such as wesnoth-4. I don’t think this music fits in very well with modern Wesnoth, but it still pretty cool.

The The Deceiver’s Gambit campaign for mainline which will soon replace DM also has some new music which should be added to the default/full music playlists as well:

Cry from Elensefar
Decoherence
Phase shift
Helios

I’m not sure if I’ve heard of the last three, but the first is defintely one of the UMC music tracks from the UMC Music Books.

[Spannerbag]

OK, after reading the old thread and the new idea (again), I'm still not sure I understand what the new idea is, exactly...

I deleted a loong reply because I wandered off topic and into speculation.

The debate has been over my post rather than the state of play of the music books, which wasn't my intent and isn't helping nor taking us forward.
So scratch that, I have my answer.

A sledgehammer approach to reducing bloat would be to create a separate add-on for each music track.
It would, IMHO, stop creators embedding additional tracks into add-ons rather than using music books because the granularity would then exist to add music on a per-track basis allowing UMC to use (share) a single download for additional music tracks rather than whole music books, but it's a bit late to do this now.

Alternatively the most popular tracks (say the top 10 most referenced tracks in add-ons) could be rolled up into a single download?

Ironically, these solutions also add bloat and redundancy if a player has already downloaded the music books - tho' #ifhave might help there...

I don't think adding more tracks to mainline works long term as music uses more storage than other media (unless other tracks are removed?), plus there is a working mechanism for selectively adding additional material (music books in this case).
I had hoped that a debate might throw up ideas I hadn't thought of.
Using the current toolset to change the status quo is probably not worth the effort (for me, with my ideas/knowledge anyway), given that many players' computers already have the music books downloaded?

Ah well, worth a shot.

Cheers,
-- Spannerbag

[Lord-Knightmare]

Alternatively the most popular tracks (say the top 10 most referenced tracks in add-ons) could be rolled up into a single download?

If it has flight_of_drakes, city of dwarves, ambuscade, gathering storm in it, then sign me up, baby.

[Gothyoba]

My idea of adding more music to mainline serves two main purposes:

1. Making mainline campaigns more enjoyable through the introduction of new, fitting songs that increase the variety of music in the game. I don’t think the current soundtrack is actually an issue here. Wesnoth has one of my favourite soundtracks and is absolutely great. However, I personally believe that everything always has some room for improvement, no matter how good it is. Adding more variety is an improvement over having less variety, as pogn as the new variety is just as good or better and not so much that it starts occuppying a lot of space. I don’t think we need a lot more vareity, as I don’t want the game to be bloated withvarious similar tracks, but some addtions like Flight of the Darkes and Dark Passage could be nice to have. These would make for interesting additions for areas where less fitting music exists (e.g. underground areas). Having some drake-themed music can also make drakes more interesting. There elvish-themed music and dwarvish-themed music, so why not drakes?

One way of making campaigns more interesting and exciting is to add music that is specific to a few campaigns. That way if you, for example, haven’t played WoF, you may feel excited to hear Flight of the Drakes for the first time. This only worsk the first time you play a campaigns, but even when playing it again the fact that it isn’t used elsewhere can make it feel more interesting compared to the default mainline music players are constantly hearing. I know some music can already modtly only be found in cmapaigns, but the full music playlists contains the vast majority of tracks and is used for hings like the map editor. With this in mind, a small number of tracks that are unique to one or a few campaigns (e.g. only cmapaigns with a certain faction) would be interesting to add. Flight of the Drakes could be one of them.

2. Making it easier to include some popular UMC music in add-ons. A lot of this UMC music fits surprisingly well with mainline, and can actually serve the first purpose of improving the experience and vareity of mainline music. In order not to bloat the game with over 100 excellent but repetitive tracks, I don’t plan on most or even a lot of UMC music to be added, but making it easier to add such popular tracks as Ambuscade and Flight of the Drakes is always nice. This would also further encourage UMC to use this music, hopefully making the overall quality of UMC music better. I don’t intend this to be the main solution to this issue though, which is why I also support some kind of resource add-on as proposed by Spannerbag.

Personally, I like the idea of compiling some of the most popular and good tracks into an add-on. Maybe these could be included:

In the Land of Madness
Ambuscade
Climatic Contemplation
Enchanted Forest
The High King’s March
Dark Passage
Flight of the Drakes
City of Dwarves
Gathering Storm
Cry of Elensefar

These aren’t the ten most popular tracks, but they are ten good and popular tracks that could be compiled (I might acutally compiled them myslef if people are interested.) I would also like to continue to encourage the use of the UMC Music Books. Having separate add-ons for each music track could be good for reducing space, but it creates the new problem of add-ons requiring potentially dozens of dependencies.

Expanding mainline music should probably also involve making what’s alady there better. DW and SotA currentyl don’t have soundtracks, and should get some eventually. There also seems to be some support by players for re-adding the old main menu song (I’m wondering if I should make a new topic with a poll on that?) That is quite unrealted though, so it should be a spearate thread if it is to be discussed further.

Just ot clarify, none of my proposals involve removing already existing tracks. I don’t think this would create any major space issues, as long as the number of added tracks isn’t a lot.

[gnombat]

The debate has been over my post rather than the state of play of the music books, which wasn't my intent and isn't helping nor taking us forward.

Well, as I mentioned before, there's the other thread if you want to discuss the problem there...

I think what you're basically looking for is a way to download individual files from an addon, rather than downloading the entire addon. Which isn't really possible right now, but it might be worthwhile making a feature request for it. (Actually, I think the add-ons server can basically do this already, but it would require a lot of changes on the client side to make it work.)

Alternatively the most popular tracks (say the top 10 most referenced tracks in add-ons) could be rolled up into a single download?

I think that's kind of what UMC Music Book 01 is now?

The problem is that most UMC authors will probably not be satisfied with just picking from the most popular tracks, because authors usually don't want their addons to sound like everyone else's addons. (It's kind of like what Yogi Berra once said about a popular restaurant: "Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.")