This is one of my favorite games of all time, and this song in particular always leaves me feeling interesting emotions. I love how it starts out sounding tense with the drums and staccato strings before bursting into the main melody, feels so uplifting. Soaring indeed.
Do I know anyone who does/knows about #VideoGameMusic / #VideoGame Music / #VGM? I have a question about how something worked in a discontinued game called #Priconne.
It's a game that has visual novel story telling for cutscenes. During those scenes there's "dynamic music" in the background but I don't know enough about music or mobile game hardware to know what is normal or feasible.
I thought that dynamic music usually worked by having loop_A play in area A then when you moved to area_B it would cross fade by decreasing the volume of A and increasing B. Maybe there's another layer of music added on top to indicate a special effect is going on but that second layer ignores the first. It's just composed in such a way that it sorta works with either of them and has a timing thing so it starts at a time to make certain beats line up.
What confuses me about the cutscenes in Priconne is that it seems like they're able to do fancier stuff like changing tempo, picking which instruments are playing, or making it sound sadder (change to minor key?) in response to where you are in the dialogue tree.
Can you actually do that kind of thing on the fly or do they just have a few variants of the song that they switch between with normal cross fades? I only saw them do it in scenes with a handful of instruments if that helps narrow it down.
I guess what I'm really asking is does the script for the cutscene say something like "switch to track_6_sad.mp3 at next opportunity" or is it more like "for track_6.midi applyTransform(MOOD_SAD) and muteChannel(trombone)"?
@o76923 Changing the instrument is certainly a easy task in MIDI, you just have to change the channel in which the MIDI signal is sent.
In terms of instruments I don't believe there would be any limitation, is more about how the song itself is made that needs to be a certain way to not arouse any weird dissonance whenever the keychange happens. In keys they would probably be limited to using either the same mode or even only the same key during a song, to achieve the major-minor thing.
another fun, fairly obscure, game soundtrack title: Greg LoPiccolo's "Hospital - Alternate" from System Shock.
SS has some great tracks, but the musical qualities really depend upon the quality of MIDI synth you're working with. even with a real Roland SC-55, it's a bit flat sounding.
in a pretty rare move for Origin Systems - they released a Macintosh/PowerPC version of System Shock. there was a bunch of extra space on the CD, and LoPiccolo took advantage of it by rendering and remastering his own redbook audio tracks. they're great - far better than a vanilla SC-55. he took a lot of extra time to customize his instruments and play with the stereo separation.
so here it is, freshly ripped from my macintosh CD.
@vga256@retrohistories
I totally forgot we did that on SS Mac! I remember we had them redo all the cinematic videos at higher res for the Mac version, but forgot about the music. Such a great soundtrack. There is a 99% chance I wrote the red book music controlling code for SS Mac 🙂
