Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Sun Sep 15, 2002 4:41 pm

Hi,

I've bitten the bullet and implemented full MSP sound for my game - i didn't go with send_to_char like most, rather implementing mob/room/obj msp/msparound/mspat commands based on semi-intelligent act calls (not triggering act triggers and such like). It works great aside of two things:

1) Downloading from URL doesn't seem to work for me. Even after solving the chunking errors in apache by modifying the web server config, sounds simply do not download. The download box appears, but no connection. Anyone got this working?

2) I wonder if there were any plans to implement sound mixing support within MSP? It seems to me that only being able to play one sound at a time wastes the opportunity to have different sound "channels", like an ambient sound playing while melee sounds and magic sounds are playing at the same time. It's not a gripe, it's a big entry on the wish list is all. =)

Thanks,

Vizzini

GURU Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 4379 Location: USA

1) You might want to e-mail Zugg directly about this. Perhaps you might also provide him with some way to test this on your MUD.

2) I'm quite sure that you can have a !!MUSIC command playing some .mid file while you send !!SOUND commands to play some .wav sounds. However, it has been a long time since I have played with MSP and I'm not quite sure, but this shouldn't be something that deals with the MSP coding in zMUD rather than with your sound card/driver capabilities.

Kjata

Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2002 2:20 am

Yeah well i'm entirely willing to assist with testing. I'm really excited about the possiblities for MSP. If we can mix sounds, rather than reseting the sound being played at the time, then I can have crowd ambient sound, short melee sounds like sword clangs, hit moans and spell casting or affects (like setting a char on fire for a few rounds). that kind of thing.

Aside of that, with the advent of broadband (i'm stuck on a modem =P) the sound downloading is a great idea. Hell if counterstrike and the ilk can do it, why not muds? I'll prolly offer a full download on a web site eventually if we make a lot of use of sound - it would help if we could play mp3 or ogg vorbis to aid with compression tho.

But anyway, in future I'd like to implement localised sound, like you hear the pulse mobile sound of something nasty the other side of a door, or a wall. or the howl of a werewolf tracking a char a few rooms away, the volume of the sound played by msp dictated by the vector proximity of the char. I dunno. I just see a lot of possibility for sound in text based muds to add atmosphere. and it doesn't have to be cheesy or cumbersome either. Careful selection of sounds and experimental mixes of example scenarios gives a whole new dimension to the builders role.

On the soundcard side, I'm runnin a soundblasterPCI128 under XP with all the latest drivers n horfixes, so I'm sure the card will do the job. It's just there's no way to tell msp not to reset the sound being played by playing the new one, but rather to simply select another channel and play the new sound simultaneously. Course - I'm just speculating here. I've never coded any sound stuff before so all this is new to me.

Anyway, i'm interested in the topic. If there's a way to do the mixing, I'd love to know how because given a bit of time and tweaking, i think we could all use clever use of sound to make rom and the like just that little bit less "boxy" and give them a bit more of a sense of depth.

Vizz.