Lemma Soft Forums

Alright, I played the demo, and here's what I've brainstormed in correlating the stats to the music.

Ethic:

Used for the main body of the piece

Brooding<----Mischevious----Vanilla----Light-hearted---->Angelic
(Where Vanilla = 50)

Intelligence:

Used for the transitional sections of the piece

Simple <------------------>Complex

or used as counter-sections to the "Ethic" ones

Country Bumpkin (no offense intended, of course:P) <--------------------------> Avant Gaurde

Memory:

Effects queue lengths in between the sections (or some other effect for the transitions)

Charm:

Intro and/or countersections

Grotesque (but not ominious)<--------------------->Smooth Jazz

Health:

This one may be tricky to impliment (depending on if you can code a mini-DSP package into the engine) - essentially, filters and controllers (such as pitch bends) are used to enhance or degrade the quality of the piece (ie, low health would have a sort of subdued, detuned, spacy, noisy feel, while high health would be enhance with more gain, and some chorus effects and such.

The ones after this will rely more on instrumental effects, so they may not be implimentable since only one audio file can be played at a time -

Strength and Survival:

Affects percussion - the greater the stat, the more and more prominent are the percussion, until it almost feels like an action theme.

Household:

Whoops, forgot about this one...... actually, I'm not really sure what you mean by this stat - it's kind of hard to qualify.


Languages and History:

Affects instrumentation (acoustic): the greater the stat, the more acoustic accompaniment joins the piece

Sciences and Technology:

Affects instrumentation (electronic): the greater the stat, the more electronic accompaniment joins the piece

Well, I hope you find a good solution. The MIDIs are a great thing, but the limits of the format are also something to consider. Usually no one can listen to flat music for a longer period of time - regardless of the format. Usually this will be one/two channels of lead melody, but expecially MIDI sounds lack depth and adding bass and heights as separate tracks doesn't solve the problem either. So MIDI is a troublesome format, especially because it has this giant advantage of being so small and it's a great temptation to use it. But you have to be a great MIDI magician to make it not sound like cellphone ringtones. Slow songs work usually better, see Kykuit or MB

Well, sounds great I could have never thought of so many ways to reflect stats in music. Wow!

A couple of points:
1) Obvoiusly you don't have to use ALL stats. Even if only two or three influence the music, that would already be great.
2) Please don't forget that it's not yet sure whether all of this is actually possible. Lets wait for PyToms sound library rewrite, and then look at what can, and what can't be done, shall we?
3)As midis have problems on many systems (and PyTom even indicated he might drop support for them completely), everything should be doable with overlaying and arranging ogg tracks (and whatever other postprocessing is possible with them). Midis where really only intended as fallback for a smaller download...
4)There are still other tracks then the character theme to consider (at least, I hope so ). It might be easier to start with them, and wait for the pieces to fall into place for this last, and most ambitious project.

It's certainly a nice idea, I have to admit I played with it some time ago, but the effect was that it ended up being awfully repetitive, the slight changes were noticeable, but overall the track was too samey, just like a different mix of the same song. And by re-using sequences the test soundtrack seemed very constructed and more indicative of a state than supporting the atmosphere. Just my experiences. I wasn't able to make it work, but perhaps with a larger selection of melodies this could be fixed - plus there should always be tracks fitting to a situation, so the atmosphere doesn't suffer. Good luck, if you pull this off, it's going to be quite an accomplishment.

Yeh, I can see what you mean. I'm trying to decide whether to make the changes more minor and continuous, or more major and discreet. Maybe even both (the diary piece using the former, the character interaction/event ones the latter). But I guess we won't know until we try .

Icekiss, the two pieces that you've request have been PM'ed to you - they are a bit on the short side, but probably would work for a demo or something (also I can probably expand on them, depending on how long the scenes normally are).

Talesweaver, while I'm not completely against the "do more; I'm sure we can fit it all somewhere" mentality towards the pieces, don't you think it'd be better if you could just tell me where the music is needed in the first place - unless, of course, you don't want to disclose any plot points (don't worry, I can keep a secret ). But even very broad (though a bit more specific than just asianesque) descriptions would help some, just so I can have something to build on. Many times it's hard for me to just work from scratch, especially for programmatic music, so any help at all is appreciated. I hope you understand what I'm getting at.

I sent you my requests by PM, shizeetv2. A few minor spoilers were necessary.