Soundtrack to Dalaya

Takeda

Takeda

Dalayan Beginner
Just had a creative thought more for my own enjoyment.
I usually listen to music while playing.
Sometimes I like to pick really moody atmospheric music based on the zones,
lots of classical music and early choral music.

Back in the day we'd use music for atmosphere when playing Dungeons and Dragons for various atmospheric purposes.

So two practical question's to the community:

- Is there any practical way to implement soundtracks to raiding?
I know there's an 'Mp3 player' in the client, and presumably voice support, and various external voice communication programs but presumably the sound quality is butt.

- Anyone have any interest in playing the game this way?

Imagine the possibilities!!!
- Increased immersion!
- improve bards 120 percent!
 
Bards already op, can't make them better. I also feel like grinkles had a post vaguely similar to this a while back.
 
I shared a soundpack a couple of weeks back that entailed snipping out obnoxious sound effects (e.g. Imp/Drakeling wing flapping), but I've never addressed the game's music. To do so would pose a number of difficulties:
  • No two people have the same musical taste.
  • It would involve distributing copyrighted MP3s if you want your friends/guildies to have the same experience as you.
  • Each client instance starts and stops music separately and at indefinite points during play, meaning anybody 2boxing would very often hear two separate, desynchronized renditions of same track at once.
  • Zones use non-interchangeable filetypes depending on their era: Pre-PoP music is in MIDI format while PoP music and all expansions thereafter use MP3s.
  • While replacing the MP3 tracks is a trivial matter only involving changing a filename, replacing the classic MIDIs is more involved.
  • The action of a game like this is unpredictable and highly dynamic, whereas the client itself triggers music in intermittent loops (pre-PoP) or when your character crosses a predetermined "node" in zone geography (PoP and beyond). This makes it effectively impossible to use music to heighten drama or add "punch" to important happenings as they unfold.
  • A typical raid session might involve spending 30 minutes in Athica, 3 hours in Tower of Tarhyl, then 5 minutes in Athica. Not counting combat music, that player's entire musical experience would have spanned only two tracks!
  • Bard song sound effects are drawn from regular spell sound effects, meaning there's no way to make a Bard's songs sound unique or immersive.
  • The list goes on...
I'll be the first to defend the game's sound effects, as they can give vital cues for when your box begins taking hits, when your heal finishes casting, and so on. However, I don't think customizing the in-game music is justifiable even if it is a cool idea on paper.
 
The most practical way to do this is probably to DJ raids you participate in using some kind of (out of EQ) streaming software. Hell if I'm in the right mood that kind of sounds fun to me.
 
Haenir said:
The most practical way to do this is probably to DJ raids you participate in using some kind of (out of EQ) streaming software. Hell if I'm in the right mood that kind of sounds fun to me.
Click to expand...
Talking about some rogue raiding utility right here
 
should have invited me to your guild when I would play the kelethin theme on piano over vent <-----got your immersion right here
 
So for all the reason's grink's mentioned it's probably impractical to do anything within the client,
and various issues with listening to potentially other people's shitty music.
Definitely something people would have to be participating in voluntarily.
checking out some of the VOIP services, mumble supports up to 98kbps and will let you send it 128, which is reasonable.
There's also various live podcasting service, just have to find something that's free, mumble/ventrillo seems convenient because it's something people are already using for some functional purpose.
There's probably some way to patch it to ableton so can load a bunch of nice little loop-able sound clips and launch them at opportune moments for dramatic effect. Gonna play with it a bit.
Doing it in a way that doesn't completely displace the usefulness of voice chat, eat all your bandwidth, and cause more irritation than enjoyment.

I just like the idea of playing some super dramatic music while someone tanks something big, and occasionally interjecting snarky musical commentary, that sounds fun to me.
 
Play in a JCPenney elevator and leave vent/mumble open imo. Perhaps call AT&T and sit the phone on the mic...
 
I did start rewriting my own zone music.. but could never figure out how to save it to my files to listen to so I gave up. if this is possible I'll rewrite all midi tracks for game. #producerpower
 
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