Mods are alive and well in the Gameboy advance and Nintendo DS, and even when primary handheld consoles move up the chain one more notch into compressed audio, cellphones will be moving out of Midi-land and have the resources for tracker files.

Dont ring the death bell of trackers yet, they're paying my bills.

Quote: Original post by iosys
Modules are pretty old news in my opinion...you might learn a lot now but you will definitely be moving on to something else if you take this seriously. Look at film/games/anything these days; with the exception of unreal engine based games, I don't see them anywhere.

I advise you to continue in MPT for a while until you know the ins and outs, then move to something else when you know what more you want/need out of a program.

As for module formats, I think there's .IT and .XM you can try.

But is there anything appropriate to replace them?

I've been thinking about the technical requirements of my games a bit. Since I'm going to have to distribute over the internet whether or not my games are free or for sale, I'll be needing small downloads. With MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files being a couple of meg per minute that will severely limit the amount of music I could provide.

Now with a module format, nearly all the space is taken by the instrument samples, and I only need to provide those once. If I get really fancy, I could procedurely generate them if I figure out a formula for generating the wave form. Or if I have to I could easily downgrade them to MIDI format.

Some module formats like the commercial MED SoundStudio allow the use of multimodules which have shared instruments across the whole bunch but different playlists or alternate sets of codeblocks with a new playlist that will allow you to write different sub-songs for different parts of the game without having to rewrite your own version of the player.

[off topic rant about MED]
Currently MED SoundStudio is in the process of engineering a new MIDI-enhanced version 2.0 that will support several more platforms than just Windows but it's taking a long time since they are short on interested coders. (Who'd be interested in competing with ModPlug tracker and Skale Tracker when they are already free and support some more advanced features?) Traditionally MED SoundStudio has targeted game programmers as well as dedicated music enthusiasts so who knows what they'll come up with.
[/off topic rant about MED]

Quote: Original post by samuraicrow
Some module formats like the commercial MED SoundStudio allow the use of multimodules which have shared instruments across the whole bunch but different playlists or alternate sets of codeblocks with a new playlist that will allow you to write different sub-songs for different parts of the game without having to rewrite your own version of the player.

That would be useful! However, I don't think it would be that difficult to write my own player (famous last words, I know [grin]). It's just adding together waveforms at different frequencies, and applying some sort of smoothing to get rid of nasty pops, right? I'm sure I've simplified the problem down to the point of absurdity there, but compared to all the other crazy stuff I'll have to implement making my own module player will be a piece of cake.

Of course, in order for this whole idea to work, I'll need to be able to have decent sounding small samples, so that brings me back to the looping problem. I've noticed listening to the samples that the additional vibrato at the end of the wind and string samples really makes the sample interesting, so I don't want to lose that. Since I get my samples from my synthesiser keyboard it must have some method of storing all these samples anyway, so how does it do that, and can I use that method myself?