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SPEAK YOUR MIND
"Does the distance one travels from center make one more free
to move?"
"No. Freedom has two parts: potential and resolution; as
metaphor has two parts: form and interpretation. Of course,
the two are intertwined. Metaphor lines the road to freedom,
as symbols and words are the bricks and mortar of meaning.
Freedom is being the bricoleur, the mason."
Old school. IRC!
Visit #marathon on irc.gamesurge.net to chat and gather net games.
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Marathon: Resurrection Forum
Re: mercanery
Posted By: Tycho
Date: 2003.6.30.17.33
In Response To: Re: mercanery (Mercenary)
You may or may not be familiar with what tracking is, but here's a very brief and basic explanation:
- You have a library of "instruments" which are just small recorded sounds in aiff or wav format.
- The tracking program allows you to play any not with any of these "instruments"
- You then need to write/compose the songs within the tracking program just as you would compose a regular piece of music using a piano and a sheet of paper heh..Obviously, tracking programs have become fairly advanced over the years so this process is a little easier, but you can't take out the composing part...
- You can compose small repeatable loops called "patterns" which can then be rearranged and placed in various places in various tracks to assemble your complete piece.
- It allows you to mark locations in the song where certain things can happen..like skip to a different place in the song, or loop a certain pattern etc.
The disadvantage of tracking is it's tediousness and inability to morph sounds like you would with conventional synths, keyboards, drum machines, fatmans etc. The advantage is that the file size is very small. Since the song is essentially just your small sounds samples (the instruments) and then just the code to tell the computer what instrument to play at what pitch and tempo, it can be very very light on the game engine, and it can call up fairly complex compositions in situations when there are very few CPU cycles left with very little RAM overhead since it only needs to load up the same "instrument" once, and it's very small..
Essentially, what I'm saying is, you can't import a regular mp3 and hope it will play in the tracker..you have to re-write the song in the tracker using those methods. This blows, but that's how UT is...UT2K3 on the other hand...
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