Music in bzflag

[JUR]

Hi all,
I dont know if someone posted this before.
But I thought it might be a good idea (:

Ushually I play bzflag without sounds. But because I prefer some music while playing, I open youtube and search for a nice song. The problem is, this causes lag sometimes, because the video has to load.
I was thinking of a built in 'radio' or a song playlist in bzflag itsself.
Im not sure if this is possible, but it would be cool
Ofcourse I could buy a radio and listen to music while im playing bzflag, but it could be a nice feature:)
ciao,
JUR

[blast]

Or, like, use a normal music player for your music, not a flash video. Playing an MP3 in, say, Winamp or xmms, takes a lot less resources than playing a Youtube video.

[Cobra_Fast]

Ofcourse I could buy a radio and listen to music while im playing bzflag, but it could be a nice feature:)

Or you could use a normal music player to play a web radio station. Web radio causes you much less traffic than youtube and won't cause you significant lag.

[War Pig]

I use Pandora, and have never noticed any adverse effect on bzflag. I imagine any music playing ability the devs would consider putting into bzflag would be for the map makers to be able to specify a soundtrack for their maps, or custom sounds associated with events, etc. Maybe allow players to send audio taunts to other players.... Wait ... on second thought DON'T do that...

[JUR]

Yes, a soundtrack or any kind of music in a map, like war pig said, would be sweet:) Maybe music for observers or when starting up the game. And I dont know if it is already possible, but I imagine alarm bells ringing when a tank goes trough some kind of gate, or drives over a certain block.
Just bringing more music into the game then the regular sound effects

[ahs3]

I use pianobar in Linux, it is command line very thin and plays music from pandora.

http://6xq.net/projects/pianobar/

ahs3

[Mopar Madness]

I would love to see a way for map makers to add sound effects into their maps.

[Captain Simmons]

I would love to see a way for map makers to add sound effects into their maps.

Special sound effects for some maps would definitely be cool, small music 'things' like the jaws sound when hunting, and the clapping/cheering thing for CTF flag captures already exists. maybe there could be a port of some kind for music/sound effect adding

or players could customize the sound effects and music they hear through the options > audio page in the main page in game?

[Pimpinella]

I see no real reason to have background music in game. There are plenty of options to hear music while playing even now! Providing background music as a part of maps similar to textures would for sure lead to legal problems when unexperienced server owners use copyright protected content. Also we have by now no in game posibility to play mp3, ogg or similar formats yet. Adding custom sound effect to maps would probably be nice, but i think there should be ogg support for that which of course means another lib dependency.
To be honest i see more urgent things on the TODO list.

Pimpi

[hutty]

I however disagree...

When looking at a video game there are three things
graphics sound and game play

guess which bzflag is lacking in....

Although the music files would have to be pretty long beacuse a bzflag ctf match can go on for hours (and usually never end)
other games that have music (nexuiz) only have 20 min or less matches

my suggestion is.... put it in

[Cobra_Fast]

I'd be willing to create some music for the game, although I don't see the need.
If people prefer to listen to music whilst playing, they rather prefer their own music than the music which ships with the game, so they get their own music player with their favourite music running. And I highly doubt that it's possible to create in-game music that will fit everyone's taste.
Additionally music will blow up the game's (download) size, which could have some disadvantages (long download, much drive space needed).
So I'm rather not for putting music into the game.

[War Pig]

a kind of side-topic, somewhat related, would be for the devs to build per-map preferences into the client. So for instance, if I like a small mousebox on a map that doesn't need much fine navigation, and a larger one on maps that need finer control. Currently I have to change these whenever I join different maps, if I want different settings. I use quick keys a lot, and I'd like to define these per map as well. Different keyboard layouts would be nice too.

Even though I'm not sure the devs should be expending their limited resources to this, music could be part of it. I'd be able to specify my own soundtrack for each map from my own library.

[blast]

a kind of side-topic, somewhat related, would be for the devs to build per-map preferences into the client. So for instance, if I like a small mousebox on a map that doesn't need much fine navigation, and a larger one on maps that need finer control. Currently I have to change these whenever I join different maps, if I want different settings. I use quick keys a lot, and I'd like to define these per map as well. Different keyboard layouts would be nice too.

Even though I'm not sure the devs should be expending their limited resources to this, music could be part of it. I'd be able to specify my own soundtrack for each map from my own library.

For that, it'd be better to have a client-side profile loading system.

[War Pig]

For that, it'd be better to have a client-side profile loading system.

Exactly, and the ability to associate specific profiles with specific maps so they load automatically, when joining.

[JUR]

plz stay on topic
@cobra_fast
I think music specified for a map would be improvement, it could contribute a lot to theme maps. Just an example, on loumans graveyart a organ playing. And if players dont like it they could be able to turn the music off ( different from the other sounds).
And just to summarize, the other improvement would be special soundeffects that could be built in a map.

[Mopar Madness]

Yeah, I don't think music that comes with the game and plays constantly is a good idea, maybe a short repeating clip for before you connect to a server, but what I'd like to see is 2 types of music that can be added to a map file, a skybox type music which can be heard throughout the map at the same volume and also a music object which can be placed in the map, has a range variable and the sound gets louder as you get closer to the object and quieter as you move away until you go out of range at which point it goes completely silent.

*and a short off topic thing regarding client profiles*
I have two profiles I use and switch between, a hix specific one and a ducati/pillbox specific one. It would be nice to make the switch in-game. I think I have an idea on how that would be coded, I might try to code it and submit it to BZFlag, I've tried some stuff before that I thought was simple though and failed, so no guarantees.

[blast]

And just to summarize, the other improvement would be special soundeffects that could be built in a map.

That's not a new concept. There was already (buggy) support for this in BZFlag 2.0.x. It just tended to crash clients for whatever reason, so it wasn't ever used. Audio files could be loaded via HTTP just like textures.

music which can be heard throughout the map at the same volume

I had once hacked something like this into BZFlag, years ago. I had just hardcoded a music file that it looped over and over, and it played it at a constant volume.

[adameros]

I'm imaging playing Mystic Valley and being able to follow people by hearing their music come from their tank. If that happens, then finally, my dream of having a bass seeking missile might come true!

[blast]

Kinda related.. back in 1.7 (which is also when I did the above mentioned client mod) I also did some minor integration with Winamp. It could display the song title on the BZFlag screen (as well as the song position and the playing status) and it could control Winamp from in-game. It was just a crappy hacked on feature though. Was still kinda interesting:
http://static.bzexcess.com/misc_screens ... winamp.jpg
(There's some source/binary files related to that in here if anyone cares: http://static.bzexcess.com/other_clients/bzflagxl/ - it required Winamp 2 or 5 to be started prior to running the game)

[Cobra_Fast]

Kinda related.. back in 1.7 (which is also when I did the above mentioned client mod) I also did some minor integration with Winamp. It could display the song title on the BZFlag screen (as well as the song position and the playing status) and it could control Winamp from in-game. It was just a crappy hacked on feature though. Was still kinda interesting:
http://static.bzexcess.com/misc_screens ... winamp.jpg

Player integration would be a good idea too! People could control their music without minimizing/leaving the game.
(PS: Good choice of music in that screenshot )

[blast]

Generally, media players support global hotkeys, so there's not much of a need to integrate it into the game.

[War Pig]

The idea of being able to hear another player's music when near their tank is intriguing. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to shoot a GM into an adjacent vehicle when I could hear their music.