When submitting my songs, I had the chance to talk to Solatis about where the music for Widelands was going. We discussed some ideas, and he had some very good ones. One is to have a music system where the track would change depending on what was going on in the game - battling, or peaceful building, etc. Another was whether or not different factions should have different music. And finally, whether we should have a specific style, such as a more classical style with recurring themes maybe. Anyways, he has more details on this, and he said he would be posting here once he checked out how hard/long it would be to implement such a system.

Anyways, you are the developers, I/we would like to know what you think as well! I am ready to write more, and have been working on a sketch battle piece (which I will have ready to show probably early next week).

Thanks, saturn

I dig it! We only need somebody implementing it . It would be best to have your ideas very precisely sketched out.

I think the best way to implement such a thing would be to include a messaging system in widelands with which the different modules can interact. This is also needed to provide messages to the user (Mail window). Whenever a fight starts, a "fight starts" message goes around, the user get's notified and the sound system can then change the music.

!SirVer

For the messaging system:

I think Dwarik was working on one and was already quite far - unfortunally he hasn't much time at the moment, so perhaps it would be best, if people interested in this are writing an email to him.

Nasenbaer

First we should devide this discussion into two different topics: the event dependent (and/or faction dependet) music and it's implementation on the one hand and the discussion about some widelands-specific style or recurring themes on the other hand. Since we have allready started to discuss the event-music i will create a new topic for the musical-style discussion.

And here it is: http://wl.widelands.org/forum/post/459/

But if anyone have some ideas for event-/faction-dependet music, wants to help implementing this, discuss the implementation, or just want to tell us if it would be a good or bad idea to have it: this is the right place!

I think to have a messaging system would be a very good thing at all. But in my point of view this is not the first thing to do. First, if we implement diefferent music for factions and events, we won't also have this music instantly as well. So we need to be able to configure different playlists where songs can be placed in more then one list. (So we got no empty lists for some situations) Therefore the current music-sytsem has to rebuild. We need a hierarchical playlist file, which then have to be parsed, and we have to think about how the music should be called.

The call should be simple, just like set a single tag like "ingame", "barbarian", or "peacfull". From where this is called is not very importend for the music-system, but a messaging-system may be the best place.

Also we may need some additional conditions then the message system would offer. For example there would be no message "Now we have peace", but this is needed for the music. So we need some sort of timer, started whenever a fight occur to see how much time is elapsed since the last stroke.

I think i can implement this by myself, but unfortunatly i have not much time, so this will takes many week(end)s. So if there is an developer who wants to implements this, or just want to help, it would be great !

I will write a more "precisely sketched out" version of my ideas to implement it on the mailing-list tomorrow. Even with some additional questions.

Solatis

Well just as suggestion:

The main theme of a world or tribe might be played all the time, but as soon as something special happens, the music might get faded out so we don't here it anymore (although it is still running in the background) and music fitting to the special point would be fade in. (And of course after end of that special the music should fade in again)

so for example:

Normal music is running lalalalala everyone is relaxed and suddenly the music gets silent (perhaps ~0.5 sec) and a loud fanfare is played which introduces one of the fight songs. At same moment a message appears on the screen "The Atlanteans under the leadership of !SirVer attack you at northern frontier!"

For me that would be the perfect messaging and music system

And hey as we think of implementing map regions, the message might even look like: "The Atlanteans under the leadership of !SirVer attack you at Southern Galdin Mountains!"

As if I would attack my dearest neighbours... Pfff