Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Toastergargletop]

yes; but the melody, beat, tempo etc. are determined by by the state of your fortress.

so an active happy fortress with 50 dwarves would sound different from when it had 20 dwarves and much,much different than if that fortress had a bunch of deaths.

Having residual tones and melodies would be cool too.  Like if you start to get a heap of deaths your fortress song would start to get a dirge-like quality as the casualties stack.

I also envision (or is it enhear?) that old fortresses would have an epic sounding 'Fortress Song', as these residual threads of music intertwine with the current goings on.

[Mel_Vixen]

The question is just what data is needed and can we get it? Contextual music needs one thing: Context.

Also environmental sounds would be nice say 20 Zs in the air you hear wind, on ground level animals and underground the noise of Workshops if they are on screen or near the screen. This is all doable and was already done whatyou really need is just the right data from the game.

[ZhangC1459]

Dude, that would be amazing.

[Toastergargletop]

The question is just what data is needed and can we get it? Contextual music needs one thing: Context.

Also environmental sounds would be nice say 20 Zs in the air you hear wind, on ground level animals and underground the noise of Workshops if they are on screen or near the screen. This is all doable and was already done whatyou really need is just the right data from the game.

well thats more like the soundsense mod.  this is about a adaptive music soundtrack that reads the data for the state of your fortress and composes based on that data.

[Mel_Vixen]

Uh thats a bit trickier actually but there are algorithms that can compose. You can attribute different speeds pitches etc. with moods so the algorith gets a bias to using them. Composition of music especially with multiple instruments is on the other harder.

[Encased in burning magma]

This thread reminds me of the software Anthem. Anyone trying to program such a thing to read DF should seriously consider receiving delivery of any new sofas they have ordered before they commence work.

OP should not open his trunk.

[OmnipotentGrue]

I can just imagine one of your dwarves bumping into a kobold thief and hearing the Pokemon battle music start up.

[Sowelu]

Anyone here play the SNES version of SimCity?  No, it didn't have procedural music, but it did have different music for each progressive city size, and they were essentially variations on a theme (it started out like a sleepy little tune, then started rocking out with orchestral hits when your city got real big).  This made me think of that.

TIE Fighter had the benefit of an existing and very nice symphonic score from the movies.  I think that before we do this, we need to have some more actual musical scores ourselves.  Yes we have the vanilla DF music, but that's just one source to draw from.  It says to me, "small fortress, mildly unhappy dwarves, the underground is cramped and kind of damp and it's none too pleasant outside".  So...I guess, what variables do we want to control on, and how does it change the sound?  Do we want it to all stay about the same in basic melody, or do we want multiple distinct melodies that blend into each other?  Is it a good idea to have different music for good/evil terrain types--I'd figure no, because it means you will only ever be hearing one for an entire fort (unless you change it just scrolling around which I think would become very muddled).

I dunno...the thing is, for the most part, DF does not have big dramatic moments like TIE Fighter does.  You get sieges how often?  Dwarves die how often?  (Yes I know they die all the time, but you know when it's coming most of the time, and it's not THAT that often, it's multiple minutes between them--or ten dwarves in the blink of an eye.)  So, to me, it's just an ongoing theme, and here's the important parts:
- Fort size, so you get a progression as you play.
- Happiness.
- Let's combine those two: Happy dwarves alter the music one way, unhappy dwarves modify it in an orthogonal way.  So if you have a lot of happy dwarves you have your basic music, but if a few become unhappy all of a sudden, it starts to add some darker jabs.  These would make a good rhythm.
- Labor!  If you've got a big mining project going on, it should sound like it.  If you have a distinct farming season, that should be noticeable.
- Danger.  Same thing as Labor really--add or modify the melody when there's fighting or dying.
- TIE Fighter style events with ~10-second musical scores when traders arrive on the map, become ready to trade, and during various siege events, including squads being routed.  Nothing special for your own dwarves dying, unless it's a big squad or something.  You can also go the L4D route and add ominous noises when ambushers start sneaking around--even before you see them.  Also, cram something minor into the next melody bit whenever a moody dwarf stashes another item.

...I think I know what song I keep thinking of!  "Work Day" from Rise of the Triad.  If there is a dwarfier song, I haven't heard it.  I like this song for large (120ish?) forts.  If's got a solid rhythm that you can screw with, and you can tweak the instruments of the melody for different labors.

.....and if you really wanted to be a dork, you could look at disney's Seven Dwarves and their "Hi Ho, Hi Ho!"ing for a super-happy tiny fort...

[Toastergargletop]

Anyone here play the SNES version of SimCity?  No, it didn't have procedural music, but it did have different music for each progressive city size, and they were essentially variations on a theme (it started out like a sleepy little tune, then started rocking out with orchestral hits when your city got real big).  This made me think of that.

TIE Fighter had the benefit of an existing and very nice symphonic score from the movies.  I think that before we do this, we need to have some more actual musical scores ourselves.  Yes we have the vanilla DF music, but that's just one source to draw from.  It says to me, "small fortress, mildly unhappy dwarves, the underground is cramped and kind of damp and it's none too pleasant outside".  So...I guess, what variables do we want to control on, and how does it change the sound?  Do we want it to all stay about the same in basic melody, or do we want multiple distinct melodies that blend into each other?  Is it a good idea to have different music for good/evil terrain types--I'd figure no, because it means you will only ever be hearing one for an entire fort (unless you change it just scrolling around which I think would become very muddled).

I dunno...the thing is, for the most part, DF does not have big dramatic moments like TIE Fighter does.  You get sieges how often?  Dwarves die how often?  (Yes I know they die all the time, but you know when it's coming most of the time, and it's not THAT that often, it's multiple minutes between them--or ten dwarves in the blink of an eye.)  So, to me, it's just an ongoing theme, and here's the important parts:
- Fort size, so you get a progression as you play.
- Happiness.
- Let's combine those two: Happy dwarves alter the music one way, unhappy dwarves modify it in an orthogonal way.  So if you have a lot of happy dwarves you have your basic music, but if a few become unhappy all of a sudden, it starts to add some darker jabs.  These would make a good rhythm.
- Labor!  If you've got a big mining project going on, it should sound like it.  If you have a distinct farming season, that should be noticeable.
- Danger.  Same thing as Labor really--add or modify the melody when there's fighting or dying.
- TIE Fighter style events with ~10-second musical scores when traders arrive on the map, become ready to trade, and during various siege events, including squads being routed.  Nothing special for your own dwarves dying, unless it's a big squad or something.  You can also go the L4D route and add ominous noises when ambushers start sneaking around--even before you see them.  Also, cram something minor into the next melody bit whenever a moody dwarf stashes another item.

...I think I know what song I keep thinking of!  "Work Day" from Rise of the Triad.  If there is a dwarfier song, I haven't heard it.  I like this song for large (120ish?) forts.  If's got a solid rhythm that you can screw with, and you can tweak the instruments of the melody for different labors.

.....and if you really wanted to be a dork, you could look at disney's Seven Dwarves and their "Hi Ho, Hi Ho!"ing for a super-happy tiny fort...

Now that sounds like a plan.

[Sowelu]

So...This would go easier if people could post repetitive, complex-rhythmic dwarfy songs.  Ideally, they should be songs that you could imagine swapping between minor and major chords, or swapping out instruments on a whim, while keeping the beat.

Getting inspiration for rhythms or specific instruments would be very useful.  >.>

But yeah I'm imagining the basic soundtrack as kind of a really wimpy form of industrial or something.  Which makes sense because A) they're dwarves but B) you don't want to annihilate your ears after a six-hour marathon.  It should be gentle enough that you don't feel a need to turn it off.

[truckman1]

Just a thought, what if the baseline music was based on the melodic theme to Heigh-Ho? It might be fitting in that you'd hear it right after embark it would not have many modifiers and the tempo normal. So a relatively normal Heigh-Ho song would be playing when you have 7 dwarves just striking the earth, before shit starts getting real and magma gets involved.

[Toastergargletop]

my thoughts are that the original music could be worked to be more orchestral, giving it more layers that can be modified to suit the data.

[Sowelu]

Oh yeah!  I'd also like to do different basic soundtracks for each season.  But that would be a far-future goal.

Link stuff on Youtube that you think might work.  I'll see if I can dig up some good OSS tools for this.

[NieXS]

I'm surprised that In the Hall of the Mountain King hasn't been mentioned yet. Programming-wise, it wouldn't be hard to mix together some MP3s of recorded drums or w/e with the actual instruments fitting to the game's mood, if you used/forked Dwarf Foreman used pure DFHack since DForeman isn't open source.

[jei]

Soundsense I think is just audio cues for different announcements?

But this sounds like a dynamically generated streaming music file based on conditions in dwarf fortress. This would almost certainly require moderate-to-expert knowledge of the memory locations for things like "active dwarves", "working dwarves", "number of active jobs", that sort of thing, then the ability to use that to define, let's go with midi files. So essentially you'd need to understand memory hacking/reading along with dynamic music generation.

Kind of like the opposite of audiosurf, to be honest. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_composition if you're still curious.

Or have access to the source code. Much easier to read the source code than reverse engineering binaries and hacking memory.