I am a musician looking to get into writing game music, but I was just wondering about the preffered format for programmers. Not just .mp3, .wav etc but does the composition need to be split in to loops and segments that can be triggered at different time (to create suspense, excitement etc) or is it generally just a whole track. How long should the track go for?! Should it be a 25 minute opus so gamers dont get to tired of it quickly, or should it be a 3 minute loop so it doesnt use to much memory?! Anything else I should be careful of? Any help on the subject would be appreciated

I would have to say music that is good at looping as well as good transitional music. Another thing, in my opinion, is what kind of game you are making your music for. An RPG for instance might have a lot more nice transitional music while an FPS might have a bunch of looping 5 minutes segments.

BTW: Can't resist asking. I am looking for someone to do music for my game. If you are interested and what more info just lemme know, bob_corillian@hotmail.com

Edited by - Corillian on January 27, 2002 6:42:14 PM

Check ya mail, dude

I am curious as well, what program are you using to make your music?

Moe''s site

I think that accommodating loops and so on would be useful, but it really depends on the game. Most don''t do anything so interesting.

I think it would be nice to have music that didn''t only loop, but was split into different parts (of an arbitrary number of instruments) so that you could programmatically combine different parts to create a very large variety of different combinations. Just keep the chord progressions and tempo all the same and it would work well.

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Kylotan, everything you''re describing is possible through DirectMusic. You should check it out. It''s really an amazing music delivery system.

Ed Lima - ELM&M
ed@edlima.com
http://www.edlima.com

I''ve been doing electronic music (not for games) for ages now - There seems to be two distinct methods for making music on the ''puter. I started on the old trackers (bless em'') which used a grid type system for sequencing melodies and creating songs. When I went to move into the more traditional method - playing the keyboard and editing using piano rolls etc I found it really difficult.

So now to get a balance, I used fruityloops (pretty much a polished tracker anyway) to do any old style sequencing, and most of my drums - then I''ll render all the waves and import them into a multitracker (I use Cubase VST)

I then swap back and forward between the two, making/polishing loops. Cubase is a great program to do mastering with (compared with fruityloops).

Other programs I use in the process are Reason (mega softsynth), Acid (loops stretcher!) and every VST software synth I can lay my hands on, as well as a few bits of hardware. All the output from these usually end up in Cubase.

I am interested to know how you all use music in your games - Do certain bits of music trigger when some stage of the game is reached etc or do you all just run a track in the background? Has anyone here written much music for games in the past? I want to know ANYTHING!

as a demoscene / PD game coder, i would like to add that i prefer my music to be in tracker format, either .MOD (protracker) or .XM (fasttracker 2). This is my preference, because not only do i like the style, it keeps the filesize down too!!!!!!

quote: Original post by edlima
Kylotan, everything you''re describing is possible through DirectMusic. You should check it out. It''s really an amazing music delivery system.

Yeah, I forgot about DirectMusic, but that is the kind of thing I meant. Personally I don''t use platform-dependent formats though.



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