MIDI sounds bad, and is a bad choice for an audio format. In exchange it has very few advantages. It would be better to use something like OGG, because that opens up a wide selection of permissively-licensed, better-sounding music, and MIDIs can be converted to a different format if there's simply nothing else to use.
The game is a character graphics console game because that was easier to make. Graphics quality was sacrificed to save time for gameplay and other features. MIDI audio is probably no easier to implement than better-sounding alternatives like OGG, so there is no corresponding advantage.
I don't think think bad graphics go better with bad music. Bad graphics and good music can coexist, and ought to.
As I also announced in another thread, the game now supports and also has high-quality Ogg Vorbis music as well as MIDI music. The Ogg Vorbis files for all 34 songs total 56.7 megabytes (59,485,596 bytes). They are optional to include with the game, as are the MIDI files. Both are now stored in subdirectories of the /art directory. You need 3 additional .DLL files to play Ogg Vorbis as detailed in the README file. The game executable itself, when compiled with SDL2 and SDL2_mixer, automatically detects whether or not you have the Ogg Vorbis libraries necessary for Ogg playback, and whether or not Ogg Vorbis and/or MIDI music is present. If Ogg Vorbis music is present and the required libraries to play it back are present, it is used. If those conditions are not met, but MIDI music is present, it is used. If neither music is present, or if the game is compiled without the SDL2 and SDL2_mixer dependencies (i.e. if you #define DONT_INCLUDE_SDL in common.h or define it in your compiler settings or CFLAGS or CPPFLAGS or configure.ac script or whatever) well then there isn't any music and it works pretty much identically to older versions that have no music (occasionally calling dummy functions for music playback that don't do anything when it's compiled in this mode).
So, you can compile, build, and package the game 3 different ways: 1) with Ogg Vorbis music, 2) with MIDI music, 3) without any music. And if you compile and build it without any music you won't need any .DLL files besides PDCurses.dll (or on UNIX-based systems, the ncurses or xcurses library dependency). If it is compiled and built with music, the total .DLL files you need if just playing back MIDI is 3 (the 2 additional ones being for SDL2 and SDL2_mixer), and the total .DLL files you need if playing back Ogg Vorbis is 6 (the 3 additional ones besides the ones needed for MIDI being for libogg, libvorbis, and libvorbisfile).
Oh yeah, and the sound quality of the 34 Ogg Vorbis files is great, and the filesize is as reasonable as I could get it (Ogg Vorbis does quite great at low bitrates). And it's all Liberally licensed, with license information for all the files in the art directory in licenses.txt. That file must be packaged with every distribution of the game for legal reasons, many of the licenses require a documentation file to be bundled with software using files under those licenses, that includes both license information and attribution to the copyright holders. A lot of it is public domain recordings and those are documented too. I put a lot of time and effort into it.
So now when you compile, build, and bundle/package the game you have a couple different options you didn't have before. And it is fully moddable. You can mod the game to use your own Ogg Vorbis or MIDI files. I am not including other formats besides those 2 for various reasons explained in the thread about Ogg Vorbis music, it's a bit complicated, I could get into a long discussion about audio codecs and their support in cross-platform libraries suitable for using in a game like this but suffice it to say, Ogg Vorbis is the format to use for the time being. In the future, Ogg Opus rather than Ogg Vorbis will someday be the format to use once the cross-platform libraries have good support for it but it isn't anywhere near that yet, trying to use Ogg Opus right now with the current state of cross-platform audio libraries would turn the Liberal Crime Squad code into a stinking mess of poo that would be unmaintainable, and thus be A Bad Thing™. Here is a stinking pile of poo emoji: 💩 Hmm, that might or might not display properly, depending on your browser, fonts, and operating system. OK, I will use an image of the emoji just to be sure people can see it in better detail, I'll use the Google Android version because it's the most disgusting looking version:
That's what the code would look like if I included nasty hacks to support Ogg Opus right now.
But yeah I'd just note that Ogg is a container format and set of standards and doesn't refer to any specific codec. The game specifically supports the widely-used, popular Ogg Vorbis audio format but not the newer, not-widely-supported Ogg Opus audio format. And Ogg Theora is a video codec not an audio codec. So saying Ogg is a little ambiguous although usually the meaning is obvious from context; from the context I can tell you mean Ogg Vorbis audio.
And the game now fully supports both Ogg Vorbis and MIDI audio and has full selections of 34 of each of them for all 34 situations in the game that call for different music. And the same song is used for both the Ogg Vorbis and MIDI versions of each song, although in a few cases there are some notable differences in how the Ogg Vorbis versions are performed when compared to the MIDIs (most notably Ogg Vorbis versions sometimes include actual voices of people singing words, impossible to do in MIDI).
Poll
43 (81.1%)
Author
Topic: Idea: add MIDI music to LCS (Read 8636 times)