Musical cues?

I was just wondering whether anyone had found a way to incorperate in-mission musical cues. I know you could easily use them when landing on a planet, if you're willing to decompress the MP3s into System 7 Sounds, but I'm wondering about music associated with a desc.

Let's say you've got a desc which appears OnShipDone. Could you have music play over it? Would the player be able to scroll the desc while it's playing? Would it persist even after the player dismisses the desc?

You can only make it start beforehand. If you associate a sound with any field of a mďsn resource, it plays after you have "accepted" the related dësc. But for that to work, you need it to be in a snd resource, of course.
In that case, the "sound" (music, in this case) plays until it is finished, whatever you choose to do afterwards (it even persists if you go to the Nova main screen).

If you want to use the "movie" feature, then you won't be able to do anything the same way. It will all be messed up, simple as that

If you can wait a few weeks, you'll see music implementation realised in ARPIA2

So, for example, in EVN Firefly I could have a desc pop up OnShipDone when a player jumps into the same sector as a Reaver ship, which has everyone panicing and getting scared, and when I dismiss the desc I could have the Reaver theme begin playing?

Yep. Just make sure you add "Pxxx" to your "SpecialObjective" ncb field

Right. Some time back, I'm certain I had a program for converting MP3s to System 7 Sounds----anyone care to remind me what it was?

Never mind, I found it. SoundAppPPC.

In this situation (activation via Pxxx), what restrictions does Nova place on bitrate, channels, etc?

You have to use mono, 11.027Hz (I believe), 8 bit sound. Same thing for every single snd resource

If you have any problems with your actual app, I have a working solution for others

Gah. That sounds pretty horrible. Is there some particular reason Nova can't be made to do better? It would seem to be a rather obvious point of upgrade.....

Or is there at least a way to avoid the "background hiss" which results from using 8-bit sound?

This post has been edited by Lindley : 11 April 2006 - 12:54 AM

I think that by editing a snd file in SoundStudio, I was able to make it better
But you'll inevitably get something of lesser quality than the original, that's for sure.

Well, no one knows for sure the kind of soud Nova can play. The only thing I know, is that most sounds of the Nova scenario are IMA 4:1 compressed (still in the system 7 sound format), though I can't remember off the top of my head if they are 11-22(-44?)kHz or 8 or 16 bits, however I think they are definitely mono.

Most sounds in the game need to be 11.025 kHz, 8-bit, and mono, though I am pretty sure I remember that there are some contexts that are more forgiving.

I think that in-space sounds (e.g. weapons & explosions) need to be 11.025 kHz, while landing-scene sounds can have higher kHz rates. I suspect that sounds played via the Pxxx NCB expression follow the stricter rules, since that seems to be what Pace used.

I thought compressed sounds weren't allowed -- it's interesting if they are allowed (as ZP suggests), since the file size savings could add up if one were using long music pieces!

Sounds played via the "movie" field in the desc resource need to be external files, sitting on their own in the plugs folder. They don't have be mono, 11.025 kHz, or 8-bit, and they don't have to be System 7 Sound or .mov files -- they can be .mp3, .mid, or any of a fair range of other formats.

This post has been edited by Dr. Trowel : 12 April 2006 - 10:41 AM

@dr--trowel, on Apr 12 2006, 03:38 PM, said in Musical cues?:

Sounds played via the "movie" field in the desc resource need to be external files, sitting on their own in the plugs folder. They don't have be mono, 11.025 kHz, or 8-bit, and they don't have to be System 7 Sound or .mov files -- they can be .mp3, .mid, or any of a fair range of other formats.

But playing them freezes everything until they're done, right?

@lindley, on Apr 12 2006, 04:02 PM, said in Musical cues?:

But playing them freezes everything until they're done, right?

No, but clicking anywhere while they're playing stops the sound, which rules out most or all musical uses of the desc "movie" field.