Nov 21, 2011
Nov 16, 2011
Custom Soundtracks and Dynamic Music: A Compromise
These days, it's really nothing special to find a game that has "dynamic" music. In such games, you'll hear a basic ambient track when nothing's happening, then things start getting loud when you are in combat or if you're in danger or if you've been spotted or whatever. The thing is, though, that the music associated with said games isn't always very good, or players just don't like it and would rather listen to something else. Some folks, myself included, would occasionally like to get away from a game's soundtrack if they've heard it a million times, so they opt to turn the in-game music off completely and put on their MP3 music or whatever.
There is a disadvantage to this, though - the music a player listens to isn't always suitable for in-game events. They might shuffle to a high-power song like Dimmu Borgir's Progenies of the Great Apocalypse while trying to sneak into a place undetected, or even quite the opposite, they might end up with a quiet song like...nearly anything by Kitaro, in the middle of a tense firefight.
What I've considered is the creation of a specific music player targeted at gamers that aims to get around this sort of thing. Obviously, we can't mod every game out there to add our music into it (games like Skyrim do not have the music folders easily accessible, and some games do not even have the capability to be modified). So the alternative is to make an all-encompassing solution, and since we can't make any kind of detection for combat and non-combat situations, we'll need a manual control.
Here's the basic concept: the Gamer's Music Player has two playlists in two columns. The left playlist is for non-combat situations like stealth missions, exploration, or conversations. The right playlist is for combat and other intense situations. Players load up each playlist with music of their choosing, then run their game and press Play to start the non-combat playlist. When the situation dictates that combat music would be better, players can press the Play button again, which will switch to the other playlist and play the first unheard track. When a playlist is out of songs, it shuffles the track order around and repeats from the beginning of the list.
Now if only I knew enough about programming to write this kind of thing. Or maybe as an interface plugin for Foobar2000. (Say, I wonder if that's already possible, to switch playlists and skip to the next track at the press of one button?)
There is a disadvantage to this, though - the music a player listens to isn't always suitable for in-game events. They might shuffle to a high-power song like Dimmu Borgir's Progenies of the Great Apocalypse while trying to sneak into a place undetected, or even quite the opposite, they might end up with a quiet song like...nearly anything by Kitaro, in the middle of a tense firefight.
What I've considered is the creation of a specific music player targeted at gamers that aims to get around this sort of thing. Obviously, we can't mod every game out there to add our music into it (games like Skyrim do not have the music folders easily accessible, and some games do not even have the capability to be modified). So the alternative is to make an all-encompassing solution, and since we can't make any kind of detection for combat and non-combat situations, we'll need a manual control.
Here's the basic concept: the Gamer's Music Player has two playlists in two columns. The left playlist is for non-combat situations like stealth missions, exploration, or conversations. The right playlist is for combat and other intense situations. Players load up each playlist with music of their choosing, then run their game and press Play to start the non-combat playlist. When the situation dictates that combat music would be better, players can press the Play button again, which will switch to the other playlist and play the first unheard track. When a playlist is out of songs, it shuffles the track order around and repeats from the beginning of the list.
Now if only I knew enough about programming to write this kind of thing. Or maybe as an interface plugin for Foobar2000. (Say, I wonder if that's already possible, to switch playlists and skip to the next track at the press of one button?)
Nov 13, 2011
Weasel's Game Theory Corner: Players As Characters
Complete immersion in a game is sort of a crap-shoot, I have to admit. For the games that try so hard to give you all the atmospheric noise and full-body awareness like Mirror's Edge, there are usually the things that take you out of the experience, such as seeing yourself in a mirror and concluding, "This person isn't me. I'm controlling them, but they aren't me." This really gets me to thinking about the games that try to go above and beyond mere characterization, and put in serious effort towards making the player feel as if they are truly a part of what's going on in the game.
Of course, in the older days, this was a lot easier to pull off, since games like this were primarily text-based narratives with parser interaction. The quintessential example, naturally, is the Zork series, where the "protagonist" earned the nickname AFGNCAAP due to the games' occasionally overt attempts at avoiding referring to the player by any gender-specific pronouns, or describing them at all. As games gained graphical capability, though, it became much harder to immerse the player in such a way.
It does seem, though, that there can be attempts to tell the player that they are the main character. Modern games seem intent on turning the player into a silent protagonist and refusing to show them their own face, but the characterization still comes into play since in-game characters inevitably need to call the player something, and it's often a generic name like "Gordon Freeman" or "Alex Mason" or some such thing. Adventure games like Myst do try to blur this line, though, by refusing to name the player. This even plays into the story, as important figures like Atrus never actually learn your name and even acknowledge such later in the series.
The most recent games, though, hardly even bother - why would a player want to play as themselves, after all, when the entire point is digital escapism, the ability to do anything with no consequences? So I suppose that's why games like Mass Effect, Saints Row, and Skyrim exist, where the player may create a new self to their own design and inhabit them as they would any pre-created character in any other game.
I do wonder, though, why more developers haven't tried to involve the player like Zork and Myst have.
Of course, in the older days, this was a lot easier to pull off, since games like this were primarily text-based narratives with parser interaction. The quintessential example, naturally, is the Zork series, where the "protagonist" earned the nickname AFGNCAAP due to the games' occasionally overt attempts at avoiding referring to the player by any gender-specific pronouns, or describing them at all. As games gained graphical capability, though, it became much harder to immerse the player in such a way.
It does seem, though, that there can be attempts to tell the player that they are the main character. Modern games seem intent on turning the player into a silent protagonist and refusing to show them their own face, but the characterization still comes into play since in-game characters inevitably need to call the player something, and it's often a generic name like "Gordon Freeman" or "Alex Mason" or some such thing. Adventure games like Myst do try to blur this line, though, by refusing to name the player. This even plays into the story, as important figures like Atrus never actually learn your name and even acknowledge such later in the series.
The most recent games, though, hardly even bother - why would a player want to play as themselves, after all, when the entire point is digital escapism, the ability to do anything with no consequences? So I suppose that's why games like Mass Effect, Saints Row, and Skyrim exist, where the player may create a new self to their own design and inhabit them as they would any pre-created character in any other game.
I do wonder, though, why more developers haven't tried to involve the player like Zork and Myst have.
Nov 6, 2011
We've Relocated!
...No, not the Blaugh. That will remain here at Blogger (even though I really hate the changes they've made to the composer and interface in general).
My parents and I have moved to a house just two towns over from the old one. I'm still on the bus line, employment opportunities are just as limited as before (to the best of my knowledge - I haven't checked downtown yet), and the house is a similar sort of two-story setup compared to the old one. The big difference, though, is that we are finally owning a house again, instead of just renting one. Granted, the rental agreements for the last couple of houses didn't suck that much, but there are just some limits I can't get behind...especially the restrictions on using thumb tacks.
Home ownership is cool because we don't have to worry about the rental company ordering random home inspections, we can make whatever alterations we wish (not that we'd need to yet), and we don't need to contact the rental company to schedule any sort of maintenance to vital appliances.
Now if only I hadn't gone and forgot to grab more socks from the old house. Oh well, I'm getting my clothes tomorrow, along with the other essentials, like my TV. And hopefully, sometime in the near future, we'll get actual internet connectivity around here, instead of having to deal with the spotty, relatively slow and bandwidth-limited 3G provided by my netbook. (2 gigs a month just ain't gonna cut it if I decide I want to buy something on Steam.)
My parents and I have moved to a house just two towns over from the old one. I'm still on the bus line, employment opportunities are just as limited as before (to the best of my knowledge - I haven't checked downtown yet), and the house is a similar sort of two-story setup compared to the old one. The big difference, though, is that we are finally owning a house again, instead of just renting one. Granted, the rental agreements for the last couple of houses didn't suck that much, but there are just some limits I can't get behind...especially the restrictions on using thumb tacks.
Home ownership is cool because we don't have to worry about the rental company ordering random home inspections, we can make whatever alterations we wish (not that we'd need to yet), and we don't need to contact the rental company to schedule any sort of maintenance to vital appliances.
Now if only I hadn't gone and forgot to grab more socks from the old house. Oh well, I'm getting my clothes tomorrow, along with the other essentials, like my TV. And hopefully, sometime in the near future, we'll get actual internet connectivity around here, instead of having to deal with the spotty, relatively slow and bandwidth-limited 3G provided by my netbook. (2 gigs a month just ain't gonna cut it if I decide I want to buy something on Steam.)
Nov 2, 2011
Old-School Gaming Aid of the Day
I don't recall if, in the past, I've ever spoken of the Nintendo DS game, Etrian Odyssey. If I haven't, it's a Wizardry/Might & Magic style dungeon crawler whose primary gimmick is the use of the DS's touch screen as a map that the player must manually fill in with the stylus as they venture through the dungeon.
These days, much as I love the Etrian Odyssey series, I do occasionally like to dabble in games of an older (and less portable) sort, like Shining in the Darkness or Eye of the Beholder. For such cases, developers often expected you to have sheets of graphing paper to keep track of the layout of each floor. Well, as I'm in the process of packing and moving, I don't really have access to such things, so a digital equivalent has been necessary.
I've found such an equivalent - Dungeon Mapper 0.2 alpha by Ryan "Zerker" Armstrong. It runs in Java, has a primarily keyboard-controlled interface, and is generally quite helpful once you learn the controls. It supports dungeons of an arbitrary size and any number of floors per file. And since you can save the maps to a single .dungeon file, sharing your maps to other players playing the same game is easy as pie.
If anybody's been wanting to play these old dungeon crawlers (or anything else that needs a manual map), this is just the ticket.
These days, much as I love the Etrian Odyssey series, I do occasionally like to dabble in games of an older (and less portable) sort, like Shining in the Darkness or Eye of the Beholder. For such cases, developers often expected you to have sheets of graphing paper to keep track of the layout of each floor. Well, as I'm in the process of packing and moving, I don't really have access to such things, so a digital equivalent has been necessary.
I've found such an equivalent - Dungeon Mapper 0.2 alpha by Ryan "Zerker" Armstrong. It runs in Java, has a primarily keyboard-controlled interface, and is generally quite helpful once you learn the controls. It supports dungeons of an arbitrary size and any number of floors per file. And since you can save the maps to a single .dungeon file, sharing your maps to other players playing the same game is easy as pie.
If anybody's been wanting to play these old dungeon crawlers (or anything else that needs a manual map), this is just the ticket.
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