Hi, After thinking about this for a while, I'm not sure if it's such a good idea to go with the separating the song playing from the actual song and event control approach. Rather than leap into spending a lot of time and effort in trying it out, it might be a good idea to do a pros and cons list comparing the two models for this. Pros: * more flexibility with sound drivers * some sound drivers might have advantages or better features than others (this could be a con) * song decoding done apart from event control so this aspect does not take up CPU usage in-game * simpler on individual platforms Cons: * complex in overall design, leading to a (relatively) long time to implement and with complexity comes harder to find bugs * somewhat scatty - UNIX would use playmidi, Win32 would use DirectMusic, etc.. * results from different MIDI player programs on different platforms is more unpredictable * lose some control by using MIDI player software? * leave it up to the operating system to control both FreeSCI and MIDI player (this could be a pro) * may get out of sync with animation, particularly looking towards the future if we did have a cross-platform game environment as James recently suggested, where *any* (poorly written) SCI game could run * may not get much of a performance improvement * may need to split up songs at cue points as well Hmmm... run out of ideas. Anything I have wrong or anything else people can add to the lists? Alex.
