----- Original Message -----
From: "Troman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Development list" <warzone-dev@gna.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 14, 2007 3:48 PM
Subject: Re: [Warzone-dev] Music playlists
On 1/12/07, Troman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Per, do you want scripts to be able to create/manage playlists or just
start
some soundtrack with playBackgroundAudio()?
Now that you mention it, I think we would should have an interface to
some kind of playlist from scripts, not just playBackgroundAudio().
Not sure what exactly you have in mind, but as I see it all we need is
an
interface between scripts and some wz playlist functionality, and in
either
case that should be fairy easy to add the necessary script functions.
Could you have a go at it? If changes to the sound code is required, I
can do those, but I think pretty much everything that would be needed
is there already.
I might take a look at it in the next days.
Troman
I had some musings about the way this should work. Playlist script interface
will be most used by scriptors I assume. I see two main occasions when such
an interface might be used:
1) when it is time to interrupt any background music that might be played
and kick in some moody piece to create atmosphere, like it is usually done
in campaigns.
2) when someone wants to attach a custom playlist to his map, the way it is
done with Unreal Tournament maps for example.
As for the implementation, looks like wz uses 'tracks' to store songs. Track
2 corresponds to menu, track 1 to the in-game music. We can add a 'user
track', which will not be directly accessible by the player from inside the
game.
When modder wants his custom playlist to be played when someone is using his
map he either loads all songs manually to the user track using scripts, like
playlistAddUserSong("mySong1.ogg");
playlistAddUserSong("mySong2.ogg");
Since this is not the most convenient approach it might be a better idea to
load playlist from an external playlist file, which will come with the mod;
either using scripts, like:
playlistLoadUserTrack("myPlaylist.wpl");
or we can make wz recognize a pre-defined filename and load it
automatically.
In case of a map with custom playlist it is simple, just call something like
playlistPlayUserTrack(); from within the scripts (or again we can make wz
start playing user track automatically if a map comes with a user playlist)
for wz to switch from player playlist to the custom map playlist.
In cases when some music must kick in from time to time depending on some
in-game conditions it is a bit more complicated. If user manually adds songs
to the user playlist using script functions we might make this function
return some handle so that modder can refer to a particular song, since
different songs must be played on different occasions selectively, using
this handle or we can simply reuse the filename.
When some song must be played call playlistPlayUserSong(song_handle); or
playlistPlayUserSong("song_name.ogg");
In such cases it might not even be necessary to add songs to the playlist
before playing it, I guess it depends on whatever implementation we will
choose.
I'm not sure if we really need an additional 'user track', but it has
following advantages: songs defined by player and modder are present at the
same time and are kept in separate places. While playing player playlist
(sorry for the tongue twister) wz will not accidentally start playing a song
which might be reserved for a special occasion by the modder.
On startup wz can switch to the 'user track' to play songs defined by modder
while still leaving the player ability to switch back to his own playlist.
Comments?
Troman
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