I would like to request that please... is it... for you.... and the... other you? O_O The dark you, that craves virgin blood at nighttime? But to the point! Thank you @TripN , for a long and more in-depth elaboration of MML. If people want more details, I can now always refer them to your post. I had little to do with MML during my Mabinogi time, but later after I learned BASIC I was intrigued, since MML is a BASIC... based language and chiptunes are a big go for me. Why we keep using Mabinogi as example here ALL the time, is because it's the most practical and prominent implementation of MML in a game. MMORPG to boot. Obviously there is more to it than that, but again, we want a system that can exist in a game engine, I wrote the OP specifically without in-depth technical details to quicker gain understanding and support for this cause, and I didn't want to scare the developers by making it sound horribly complicated. Which it isn't one way or the other, but it'll serve its purpose well, much better than ABC ever could. Thanks! It's great to have you on our side. A great read, while slightly unstructured it contains vital information for anyone who wants more and more technical details about MML and its application by an experienced user. Don't shy away from a wall of text. EDIT: All this talk about Mabinogi makes me miss walking around Mari causing chaos and murdering elves. @_@ Sweet, sweet nostalgia.
you pretty much got it, but none of that blood stuff Dx I really agree with that. I think there's a lot to improve on these concepts of User Generated music systems, and I really think StarBound would be a bajillion zillion times more awesome if it was the game that has a MML music system compelling enough to compete with what mabi has to offer. StarBound would be an amazing alternative to turn too, especially if it ended up being a better choice for music. =S
Notable things that are restricting in Mabi are... 1 - The song length. You have a limit on the number of notes you can put on a scroll depending on your composing skill rank, the three songs I posted were for Rank 9 (starts at F and goes to 1, like hex counting down). This means beginning bards are limited on the length and complexity of things they can make, which sort of limits it to people who put forth lots of in-game time (not just composition time). If Starbound gave everybody the same ability from the start it'd be easier to get into music than in Mabi. 2 - Multi plays are annoying as hell in Mabi. Unlike using buff skills (which force a success), using playing instrument normally for practice gives you a chance to mess up a little or a lot (usually a lot) during a song depending on it's composing difficulty (determined by the musical knowledge skill of the composer) and your playing rank. if you want to do a jam with multiple people... you have to use the basic playing skill. So you have to keep trying until every party member gets a perfect success at once. fvdjslgh. FHSDNKBHSKG. Starbound already has a one-up by making music less of a skill and more of an entertainment venue.
The reason why larger teams with corporate backing chose a more convenient way to implement music in lotro, is because they dont want to spend too much time talking about the ABC notation and all the features going into it. To corporate environments, time is money so they fixed a simplest shortcut to it. Mabinogi is like this too, due to limited characters and restrictions, then seeing a rare update to it ONLY BECAUSE OF DIVA CONTENT. They wouldn't bother unless there's money to be made selling hero cards, etc. Also, copyright issues is a big hassle for people in certain nations... if your location is in Japan, expect corporate record companies harassing you on it. If its in America, expect c&d letters and the whole lawsuit based issues due to a "open" music. (music in reality is free, business tries to lock it down) Imagine being sued every time someone sings the birthday song at a restaurant?
I think what people overlook the most in these sorts of discussions, is the blighted audacity of one person playing an eight-track MIDI musical piece on a single, say, trumpet. Get straight-up support for OGGs and MIDIs inside a radio or a music box and be done with it. Instruments, hand-held instruments, should never have more than one track at all. One person being able to replace a whole orchestra defeats the point of trying to assemble an actual orchestra in multiplayer, for instance. (One unassisted person with one instrument. Not talking about beatboxers with loop pedals here.)
No, but while we're flying around the universe in spaceships, killing monsters with flaming hammers, talking to plants, birds and space squids and exploring research labs ran by apes, let's limit ourselves to the most unlikely of skills and be only able to play a single note at a time on any instrument. Do you get my sarcastic drift? This is a game, people want to be able to do more than real-life permits. And while I don't think you should be able to replace an orchestra, being able to play multiple tracks at once is absolutely reasonable. If you play a guitar, piano, or similar instruments you most likely strike more than a single note at a time, a lot more in some cases. In fact there are some amazing videos on youtube where a single person actually almost replaces a whole band. Sure, it's ok to limit the amount of tracks per player, 5~8 would be an ok number, maybe even depending on the instrument, it's hard to play multiple notes at once with a flute, but while you can meet "Medieval Robots and Space Monkeys" all your arguments for reason and logic are pretty much invalid.
So what your saying is that people should be playing music like.... That? How about this? personally, I'd like to do more of these ones You see, People from Space have instruments that can be 2 instruments in 1, and some of us (myself at least) have this strange little ability to curse objects like bottles and other instruments so they produce the wonderful magical music of other instruments as well as their own natural tune =D Most People in the land of erinn don't know this, but TripN is realy an alien from space posing as a local to avoid the mobs who fear things different from themselves that aren't always easy to understand or accept, and erinn is just one of many planets visited by this creature of space (which is why StarBound is the perfect game for me =). Some other interesting visits have been the land of RuneMidgard, the Planet Ragol, parum, moatoob, neudaiz (uhh, I'm not sure if I'm spelling all these correctly though, foreign languages aren't something I'm good with and the universal translator has lots of problems quite often, and sometimes its hard to recall how the locals spelled or pronounced their own worlds etc) (I'm really having fun with this). So, No music like this? or any of this? so you only want stuff like this? http://youtu.be/O3_ABobAMcY Woops, Howed that get in there, Sorry about that, I meant stuff like this https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/57602359/TripNs_Music/Avast_My_MMLs.ogg That last one I think is OK, but it's much funner when we get to see the performers, sort of like this one http://youtu.be/nbWaxeD6nnk Ok, what I'm Getting at is that while I think your saying to just include a Juke Box essentially, Which in itself is also a great additional idea, The point I'm trying to make is that While yes, an 8 track sequence does sound odd off of one instrument and seeing only 1 person play said song, It's still neat to allow the option of solo plays... Ok, 8 tracks for one person would really be new. As far as I know, an online game hasn't done that yet. In APB you get 5 "tracks" or 5 instruments to use. This isn't too far from mabinogi's current limit of "5 players" but different in ways that for now I wont get sidetracked explaining. In mabinogi 1 person only gets 3 tracks to work with, which is why the majority of those songs I shared have multiple performers, like a band. Sure, as another poster stated Let me Translate a little of that for those who haven't visited the world of erinn before: Buff skills: These are skills that grant users and party members a "buff" effect for using the skill, in the case that Rydian is mentioning they are Music Buffs. How they work is just like the skill that allows you to play user generated music, you play them in the same way... How this is different though, is that the original skill for playing user music "play instrument" would screw your songs MML code up by throwing in random "off pitch notes" (its actually not a random note though, it specifically makes the note 2 pitches higher so if the note is C it becomes D because C ->C# -> D, the notes the games system chooses to do that too however are seemingly random, but I've always suspected there's a little bit of a formula too how it arbitrarly chooses notes). Buff Skills are flawless, They always play your song perfectly, unlike play instrument. However, The action hes talking about when he says "multi plays" is called "party jam". It's not a skill per-say, but its based on the skill "play instrument". It allows party members to play whatever score scrolls (the item that stores your songs MML code) synchronized... And he's very right to say this action is annoying. Just like play instrument, players success is randomized. I wont bore with all the details of this randomization, but I will mention some points on it. 1: Sometimes it is nice to be able to play songs solo, That being said Jam really is when this system is at its finest enjoyment for everyone, because it allows more complex songs. 2: The "screw up your play" system was a funny novel thing at first, but when your trying to share a piece with people that includes needing multiple people to perform it tends to attract crowds and it really does stink to have to try and "get it right" by attempting the play 4-100+ times (and sadly, I have helped people and watched people fail over 120 times consecutively due to the maker of the score scrolls having a high musical knowledge skill, a skill that brands the difficulty of a score scroll in a Backwards fashion = Higher grade equals harder scores, makes no sense). 3: To make matters worse, the songs must have the Ticks aligned perfectly per score scroll otherwise they will certainly go off sync due to the nature of how mabinogi tries to use server side synchronization, instead of having it be done client side by combining all scores into 1 MML (similar to listening to the songs in 3MLe2) with one track acting as the master track for tempo related commands to the engine. This one is actually a common problem that I usually notice is happening in peoples multi-user songs. In one regard, it isn't actually the fault of the Playback engine, it is the fault of the MML score scrolls which translates as the coders mistake. However, Part of this is because not all MML composers really know about Ticks and the math involved with division of each note (even though 3MLe2 does actually display this info, it doesn't display it very informatively for less advanced users and devcat/nexon hasn't ever provided information this in-depth to mabi users. I had trouble with this in my early mabi-MML days, but a user 5 years my senior helped me grasp this one, not everyone has had that luxery.) This was particularly an issue when they changed the Tick resolution of the game (unannounced to players) from 32Ticks-Per-Quarter-Note to 96TPQN (which enabled users to divide a quarter note into 3 even time segments instead of 2 even segments and one larger segment under 32TPQN). 4:And the part that always gets me cheesed, because I know how to synch scores based on the ticks per quarter note, is when the server fails to synchronize players.. I cannot tell people how often that one happens to me due to mabinogi's server having issue with people sharing a LAN, plenty of times here's how it goes for me (again, because I share a LAN with a couple of my companion performers) "Me: Dang, we're not synched up, retry... *cancels play* OtherPersons: it was fine on my end.. me: derp... sorry" And "Me: there we go, now its synched up OtherPersons: it sounds off to me, like 1/32 so its not too bad. Me: but its not perfect =( *considers stopping play to retry*" This all brings me to the point of a "jukebox" like function. Selecting the tune to be played shouldn't revolve around multiple fragments of a song being dished out to multiple players, only to have a synthesizer try to play them all synchronized, it should just do it.. well, the way StarBound seems to already do it (and how 3Mle2 pretty much does it). Admittedly, I don't know how StarBound Handles multiple players playing a song, but I do know how it handles a single player, it just prompts you to select a file from a list, and this is convenient. Hopefully, any move to a MML system will retain that function, and only look at the file for instrument tags and compare it to a group of players to check if everyone's got the instruments, then just execute the song with no crappy "off tune" chances. 1 song, multiple people, multi instrument, no need to synchronize over a network just good client sided playback. Not sure I would say its like hex counting since F is a higher number than 1, but that point is irrelevant What is relevant is the limit, because that hasn't really been touched up on much in this thread. The limit is a double edged sword because on the one hand people want the freedom of lots of space to work with, but on the other hand too much space can be too much of a good thing. Let me expand on why. 1: SIZE... it does matter, particularly when communicating data over networks/internets. But it goes beyond just packet transmissions (and of course, a puny .mid or ABC, or mml file is so small its insignificant to interconnected network transmissions). One of the main reasons MML was used in constructing music for old video games was because midi was just emerging in the 70s-80s, and it wasn't exactly a standard at the time, and for those old games memory was a HUGE thing to have to consider. (on that note about midi, today, a vast amount of video games music is actually stored in midi-like formats, usually translatable to midi easily, and the instruments are usually stored as custom instrument banks, also usually translatable to DLS or SF2. A wonderful example of this, is the mobile game market. Most NDS games for example use an Seq file with sound banks that vgmtrans, a software, can usually convert into a midi and DLS file.) Game carts couldn't hold massive 5MB mp3s for the whole game sound track (well, 5MB was a huge file back then, tiny today and mp3 didn't really exist as a standard back then either). MML was communicating musical signals to these early video game machines, that's one reason why MML is actually very well known and popular in Japan. Even with how small an MML is, its information still had to conform to a limitation, usually something super small like 64kb. Plus, the music file and its playback had to compete with other components stored in the machines RAM. These limitations are part of what forced composers back then to have to be very creative with the limited space offered for composing music, its one of the main reasons chiptunes are so darn catchy =D Of course that was then, and this is now, Fast forwarding to today, a simple reason to still impose limitations on the size is to prevent abusive users from using the space to try and annoy other users or cause unintended operations (if the MML system in mabi had no limit someone could force the server to store huge MML files in an attempt to diminish the experience for others, you know, those troll people who try to ruin other peoples enjoyment for... whatever reason, I think this part of the point is understood now). Another reason for a code count limitation is.. well, it still does help encourage creativity. Granted, in Mabinogi the maximum allowed code count on a score at rank1 compose skill is 1200 for the largest track, 800 for the medium, and 500 for the smallest... thats sort of lame but still reasonable to work with, it could be better if it was 1200/1200/1200 because having each track be smaller than the other is just silly, but hay, even with a rank 5 compose level in mabi you can still make longer songs than APB could (though in APB you didn't have to do junk to increase your ability to have more space to work with). APB had like 12 "patterns" you could make, and each track could only use up to 16 patterns (in any order arrangement). Point I'm trying to make is that while limitations can be annoying, lack of limitations could be even more annoying, and its good to establish a general level of acceptance of what the limitations could, or should be. fhseuhfeos indeed. StarBound does have that advantage already, because Chucklefish is aiming to please its users, not try and trick them into playing StarBound with cheap flimsy electrified-floor skinner-box tactics... they use gentle, soft, squishy pink lovable skinner box tactics, like like games used to use to be an entertainment package of of... ok, I lost my train of thought there, and it was meant as cheap (but easy) jab at how nexon and devcat rig their games so the players are disadvantaged and prone to fail even the most entertaining aspects of their game to artificially extend the time a user will spend on the game just because the more time they spend on the game the more likely they will buy something from the micro-transaction cash shop (you can find this dirty tactic in most online games these days actually)...This is most likely the main reason why just about every online company has a 0 tolerance to any sort of moding of the game even if its just a cosmetic mod or something that helps you play it better by reducing the stress it puts on your aging hardware, except for music mods because those help you stay interested in the game! I don't really see that happening in StarBound, things are fair and the game seems like it is open to let users modify it freely (LE GASP, a concept nexon says is the devil! especially NA-nexon). You know, Rockstar also used to leave their games open ended specifically for users to mod them, until that hot coffee stuff happened and they tried to blame modders and hackers until it was proven it was their own content... backstabers... err, sorry, that's off topic now. I think I'll just end my post here ~ ♫
You sure weren't kidding when you wrote "I always end up making huge posts". Informative nonetheless.
While I agree that some instruments sound a little odd if more than one part is being played at once (ie: a flute or a trumpet in 3 voices), there's no sense in removing that for every instrument. I'm able to play simultaneous notes on a viola/violin, for example, or on a piano or guitar. I think being able to play in multiple voices on even those single-voice instruments is a good thing, however. What's the alternative? Finding a second flautist because you want two flutes to sound in the piece? Great posts, TripN! Some very interesting stuff in those walls of yours. I'm studying composition, myself, so some of your analysis on different programs and tools really hit home with me. As for sheet music, the basic notation is usually enough to understand what's going on in a piece. The floating symbols everywhere usually only do slight stylistic modifications. Once you get accustomed to the format and get some of the italian terms under your hat, you'll be pretty set, especially considering the experience you already have with other musical formats!
What's actually necessary, in something like MML, is volume for EACH track. That is the only way you can avoid having similar notes being covered up if you know how to utilize it. Plus stereo speakers are common, so make use of those effects by having 'similar' sounds play different levels on each sides.
Endless support for this. I actually made a colossal MML folder when I first heard that instruments were going to be in the game, and was disappointed that it used ABC instead. I tried Maestro, which promptly butchered a two-minute song into some ear-splitting fifteen-second eldritch horror, even when using only one track. I'd love to be able to fire up those MML files in-game and play some real music!
MML has per-track volume control, via the "v" modifier. I don't know the specifics in regular MML, but in Mabi I believe it allowed a range of sound between v0 (muted) and v15 (loud as balls).
The OP did encourage me not to be shy about it =D ... Posting the youtube videos was also a way to try and show off what sort of fun MML and midi with DLS instruments can offer if the StarBound Staff come to this thread to see what the discussion is about. I want them to see good examples of nicely made music using MML with midi and DLS, and I just feel that my own videos are very good examples because they use my customized DLS instrument pack that replaces bottles and handbells and also wraps extra instruments around the natural instruments blank spaces to maximize instrument options resulting in noticeably more entertaining music than what mabinogi's basic vanilla instrument DLS file has to offer. I don't mean for that to come off as insulting or arrogant towards users who think people should only use the basic pack, nor do I intend for it to sound like I'm trying to say "my MMLs are better" but when searching youtube for mabi-mml music its very easy to find lots of subpar mml's, sometimes ones that are pretty obviously just strait up midi imports into 3MLe where the user didnt even prep the midi to be imported properly... and I dont think any of us here want the StarBound staff to see those, so I shamelessly chose my own videos... With that said, Now that I think about it I should Include the videos of some of the other people who I regard as amazing bards, friends, and who have also used my custom Instrument pack to make amazing mabi-MMLs: Kiyoura is going to have to swap my old piano for the NX piano on this mabi-MML because when I learned that devcat added a piano in the Diva Update I right away removed my Piano, So this video is a bit outdated No Custom Instruments in this one, Pure plain Mabinogi MSXspirit.dls Also vanilla mabi instruments in this one... Notice, a Drum... Mabi-percussions suck imo, which is the driving reason behind me creating a custom instrument pack in the first place. I really Love how Rixan uses the percussion kit I've been working on, have a listen. Oh yeah, my custom instrument pack features fixes for the vanilla instruments, such as the electric guitar. Have a listen to this wonderful piece I think that's the only version of cannon D that I enjoy on mabinogi, or at all =S I really enjoy the rock tunes that rixan makes, here's just one more http://youtu.be/tlwCB6i-zTU Gosh those percussion's rock, love listening to people use them (that's what they were put there for =) While Devcat and nexon probably would hate my guts for making instruments compatible with their game... I'd have to say "the hell with them" if we users here could actually talk the StarBound team into adopting an MML+midi system that beats mabinogi's music system. So in a way, I could say I have a personal interest in this topic, because I would stand to benefit greatly from a new game with an improved yet similar system. Selfish? perhaps, but I do work on music like that because the aspect of sharing it is really delightfully fun, and I think that benefits the whole community that takes part, hence the creation and sharing of a custom instrument pack. By sharing the custom instrument pack the time I invested into it gets returned 10 fold with great tunes other people get a chance to make, such as the ones above that I linked. StarBound is already an awesome game, and the inclusion of a music system is an awesome idea (the best idea in my personal opinion, one that I hope is shared by other users who feel the same way). However awesome it is of an idea, the choice of ABC has not seemed very popular with the community of video game players who want to take advantage of the idea of a user generated music system. I agree entirely about that point, and like to point out that so far we haven't really seen anyone in the thread really attack MML and defend ABC in favor of the latter, all comments have basically been rooting for the former or discussing issues with the only game we have to cite as an example that's using the former for its system and how to improve on and avoid those issues. I suspect a reason why no one has really gone out of their way to defend ABC is because few people who work on music have really even heard about it. In my own personal case, I had never heard about ABC since starting in 2008 to heavily read about music and sound until about a year ago while doing research to see if there was a game I could find to replace mabinogi's place in my music hobby, I read that Lord of the Rings Online had a music system using ABC and passed on this due to not being interested in that game at all. I briefly took a look at ABC anyways, and quickly decided it isn't really meant for making music more complex than simple mono-tune folk songs unless you really want a hassle and spend more time than necessary to tell a sequencer how to sequence.. Gee, on reading about ABC, turns out that was precisely what it was originally designed for, irony? It isn't that ABC is incapable, it is that it is Impractical. MML already does the job much better, and is a proven method for small file sized ascii music expression and as mabinogi has demonstrated well that MML can be adopted quite nicely to direct a midi driven synthesizer. By the way, could someone tell me the directory where the instruments are stored in StarBound? I found text files relating to them that seem to be just the in-game item, but nothing related to audio file resources such as wave, some sort of compressed container or a wavetable like DLS or SF2.. I am curious about looking at the files because I've heard a few people say they have found off tune instruments and I would like to see if i can pitch correct them and map out their ranges for other users to be aware of the ranges =) Anyways, I would love to keep making responses and comments on a lot of great posts that people are making... but I'll be at it ALL day if i do, and have been so far actually So for now I'm going to close off another large post =S
I must agree on this, a game with player-based music system should atleast have the functionality that MML offers to users, nothing less such as what ABC has to offer. Havoc and Tripn' their posts explain exactly why an MML system has to be implemented, atleast next to the ABC, if not replacing the ABC music system.
Slightly off topic, but I'd also love to have an option to improvise on an instrument in-game, instead of always using preset tracks. Pressing different keys for different notes and all that. Jamming out to pre-synched music is cool and all, but nothing beats that feeling of basking in the environment and letting your music fly freely. Though I can imagine it could be annoying to have someone walking around slamming their heads on their keyboards, it's not something you wouldn't encounter already with someone spamming a track that was purposely made as the audible equivalent of Drano.
I've got to say, It really is nice to see so many supporters on this subject. I also find it neat that I actually recognized a few names that I've seen in the mabi community before showing up in this thread
I'm not opposed to limits in general, I'm opposed to limits that you need to spend lots of time in-game expanding. If MML is used, giving everybody the equal of Mabi's R1 composing wouldn't be an issue with modern bandwidth. The MML examples I posted are less than a paragraph of highly-compressible (due to the limited character set and repetitive nature) text data each.
Totally agree, adding that I didn't think you were but I thought your post was a good talking point to discuss so I ran with it in-case anyone did get the idea that limitless code usage would be a good idea.. In retrospect, since StarBound servers are user ran, the best option is to have MML code limitations be defined by the server admins through a definition file... that idea, actually sounds like the likely way it will happen, if MML gets implemented that is. I HATED commercing in mabi to get the rank 4-2 compose books. I was fortunate enough to have got the rank2 compose book for free from a friend. they told me consider it a thank you gift for playing music and making and sharing an awesome custom instrument pack. It made my day, I had bought 2 copy's of the rank1 compose book from player shops in advance before even getting rank 3 compose. 1 for 1m and the other for 900k. Needless to say, I was super happy that day that I could stop commercing, because I don't like doing that combat stuff very much anymore. And commercing for the piano.... getting 5m ducats is misery at its finest, a perfect example of wading through muck to get to a destination... Anyone who enjoys music in mabi to such a high degree is going to feel the compeling "need" for such an instrument (2 if your 1 person band Dx) and the price of the piano just feels like its and excessive excuse to keep players busy trying to get new content, instead of making it only moderately hard. Its not like commercing is too difficult in itself, but it really is BORING to run from town, to town, to town, to town, over and over and over and over etc etc =T As things seem in StarBound right now, None of that business seems to be apart of playing music, you only need the instruments, and thats how I hope it stays, especially if they adopt MML+midi+DLS/SF2.
I have a friend who'd mentioned this to me so I figured I'd grab bart's thoughts on it. <bartwe> i don't want to add that <bartwe> i'd just be yet another thing <bartwe> someone will make a mml to abc converter Looks like it hasn't changed. \:
