The Harvest Moon Consortium

Here is a collection of ideas for making the CMP easier to work with. These are based in part on my experience working with it, and in part on comments I've seen elsewhere.

1 - categorize the music. We need to define a few categories to make it easier to pick out a range of tracks to listen through. The categories do not need to be mutually exclusive - there's no reason for a track to be limited to exactly one category if more than one applies. A few examples: "horror" (tombs, crypts, haunted areas?), "forest" (it seems the forests all have a particular thematic style?), "tavern".

2 - adjust the names in the hak file to help map tracks. Maybe it's just me - I converted the tracks to mp3 to listen to them, but I have to open the credits file to map the filename back to a track name in the toolset. We may want to add a track # to the beginning of the name? eg. "90- Tavern - Thoughtful Jig" to indicate that mus_cmp90 = "Tavern - Thoughtful Jig". That way, one can scribble down the number of the track while listening and be able to find it directly in the toolset. I don't know if we can set mp3 tags and keep them preserved with .bmus, but if we could, that would help as well.

3 - pad some user spaces into the hak. Perhaps we can pad in 10 rows or so as user reserved rows, similar to what the CEP does with baseitems.2da. That way, if the builder has some additional tracks, he doesn't have to worry about a future CMP overlapping with his tracks.

Any other "packaging" suggestions?

-CWebb

The padding idea is really nice, but since CMP doesn’t need to update as much I don’t see why we should make everyone manually delete all the current tracks and down load again. Pulse you might as well be doing the whole d@m thing from scratch since all the names would have to be changed for every one of the 350 some tracks.


As much as I like music, listening to all of the tracks is a time killer, better titles and categories could be added or the easy way, We can add a text doc for builders that has the music categorized for them.

Personally I wanted to do that for myself, if I found some free time this week. To categorize everything for quicker selections.

If anyone gets the time to make an EXE music sorter program for NWN that be even better. Im not sure my VB is sharp enough

[QUOTE=Shioni;7657]The padding idea is really nice, but since CMP doesn’t need to update as much I don’t see why we should make everyone manually delete all the current tracks and down load again. Pulse you might as well be doing the whole d@m thing from scratch since all the names would have to be changed for every one of the 350 some tracks.[/QUOTE]

Redownloading 300 odd megs is really hard for those of us on unreliable dial-up. We're still out here, ya know. Plus, for those modules in the works or already released that use CMP, renaming files breaks the modules, which is not a nice thing to do. Granted, there aren't many out there right now, but if we radically change things with our first service release, we're sending a message that we aren't going to be consistent enough for builders to rely on the CMP. Plus, having to manually delete all those tracks is not very friendly for users/players who are not too computer savvy - for some people, having to manually extract the files into the music directory is pushing their computer use skills. It also means having a massive duplication of files for anyone who has a CMP 1.0 module as well as newer modules - look at what's happening with the CEP.

Since the music isn't changing (other than fixing any quality issues), I don't think redownloading everything is the best route to go.

I don't see why we can't do a "patch" release as well as a full CMP1.5 release. The patch would contain the updated hak, the fixed tracks that are already posted, and any additional tracks we wanted to include.

My naming and padding suggestions are only for the .2da file - it would have zero impact on existing users of CMP. Let me see if I can explain the change clearly.

Right now, Travis Richards' "The Grove" is mus_cmp196.bmu. It's 2da entry is: If I am listening to the music in an mp3 player, and I decide I like that track, I need to go extract the .2da from cmp.hak and cross-reference the filename to the title so that I can find the title in the toolset. What I propose is to alter the names in the hak entries thusly: So, if I decided I liked mus_cmp196.bmu, I could go into the toolset and find the track named "196-The Grove" and know that was the one I wanted. Or, if we want to be more complete, we could call it "CMP196-The Grove".

As for user padding, we could set aside rows 325 - 334, exactly like BW did for rows 81-89. Mark them all "USER", and add additional tracks for the CMP at line 335.

I agree that we need to categorize the music for the builders - I think a document is the best way to go, there. At the very least, it narrows down the number of tracks a builder will need to listen to when picking an appropriate track for their areas. Going through the entire CMP at once is very time-consuming, and tracks blur together after a while.

-CWebb

[QUOTE=CWebb;7652]1 - categorize the music. We need to define a few categories to make it easier to pick out a range of tracks to listen through. The categories do not need to be mutually exclusive - there's no reason for a track to be limited to exactly one category if more than one applies. A few examples: "horror" (tombs, crypts, haunted areas?), "forest" (it seems the forests all have a particular thematic style?), "tavern".[/QUOTE]

Categories are fine but like you said - which category do we put music in that fits more than one? Also, remember that some of these music files have long names that already scroll off the list box in the NWN toolset. Adding some sort of category prepended to the name would make that worse. Maybe we should just add a category to the Credits file for builders to use since they are the only ones who care about categories.


[QUOTE=CWebb;7652]2 - adjust the names in the hak file to help map tracks. Maybe it's just me - I converted the tracks to mp3 to listen to them, but I have to open the credits file to map the filename back to a track name in the toolset. We may want to add a track # to the beginning of the name? eg. "90- Tavern - Thoughtful Jig" to indicate that mus_cmp90 = "Tavern - Thoughtful Jig". That way, one can scribble down the number of the track while listening and be able to find it directly in the toolset. I don't know if we can set mp3 tags and keep them preserved with .bmus, but if we could, that would help as well.[/QUOTE]

:_cry2: I'm crying since I really hope you didn't actually convert BMUs to MP3s. BMUs are MP3s!!!! They just have a special 8 byte header. If you drag a BMU onto WinAmp or whatever multimedia player you use, it will understand it is an MP3 and play it just fine. It may be possible to use ID tags in BMUs to help with this. Again, like mentioned above, lengthening the name in the 2da may cause readability issues in the toolset drop down.

[QUOTE=CWebb;7652]3 - pad some user spaces into the hak. Perhaps we can pad in 10 rows or so as user reserved rows, similar to what the CEP does with baseitems.2da. That way, if the builder has some additional tracks, he doesn't have to worry about a future CMP overlapping with his tracks.[/QUOTE]

I did pad entries 81 to 89 in the CMP to be Bioware reserved for music they may release in the 1.69 (at the time 1.68) patch(es). We can leave entries 325 to 399 (75 total) as user reserved for CMP v1.5. Sound good?

[QUOTE=CWebb;7668]I don't see why we can't do a "patch" release as well as a full CMP1.5 release. The patch would contain the updated hak, the fixed tracks that are already posted, and any additional tracks we wanted to include.[/QUOTE]

!!! THIS IS IMPORTANT !!!

I did not intend from the outset to ever do a "full" release again. Music is very easy to add to in NWN versus overwriting haks like the CEP has to do. The release going forward would be simple patches that release a new cmp.hak plus the new .bmu files. You would have to have CMP v1.0 and then patch to CMP v1.5 and then patch to CMP v2.0....etc. If we continue to add content at a good pace, the CMP could approach the CTP size quickly and no one should have to download that in its entirety every time.

Does everyone agree with this? I also want to do an installer for the Windows users and I am going to go back and do an .exe installer for CMP v1.0 on my own time now that most if not all of the bugs have been shaken out.



[QUOTE=CWebb;7668]I agree that we need to categorize the music for the builders - I think a document is the best way to go, there. At the very least, it narrows down the number of tracks a builder will need to listen to when picking an appropriate track for their areas. Going through the entire CMP at once is very time-consuming, and tracks blur together after a while.[/QUOTE]


I vote for keeping categories in the documentation/Credits only. I would like to try to build a module with a scripted even that lets the user change the ambient music for the area so they can simply sit in the game and listen to selections. There are functions to set the ambient area music which could be tied to a NWN "jukebox" placeable of some sorts.

[QUOTE=Tiberius_Morguhn;7727]Maybe we should just add a category to the Credits file for builders to use since they are the only ones who care about categories.[/QUOTE]

I agree that the category(ies) should belong in the credits file. My main argument for adding an identifying prefix in the 2da is to map file name to track title without cross-referencing an external file. I still would like the track number in the 2da for convenience, but maybe that's just because that's how I do things. As long as there is a file other than the 2da to map one to the other, I'm fine. And, if I really gotta have it in the 2da, I can just edit my own 2da.

[QUOTE=Tiberius_Morguhn;7727]:_cry2: I'm crying since I really hope you didn't actually convert BMUs to MP3s. BMUs are MP3s!!!! They just have a special 8 byte header. If you drag a BMU onto WinAmp or whatever multimedia player you use, [/QUOTE]

My MP3 player won't for some reason. My conversion is
at the command line. The music player likes the file with an mp3 extension, but not bmu.

[QUOTE=Tiberius_Morguhn]Does everyone agree with this? I also want to do an installer for the Windows users and I am going to go back and do an .exe installer for CMP v1.0 on my own time now that most if not all of the bugs have been shaken out.[/QUOTE]

I agree with not re-releasing the whole thing as an accumulated package each time. Incremental releases of new tracks, "repaired" tracks, and the new 2da are sufficient.

Does the NW utility installer fit the Win installer need? I haven't looked at it yet, but I've seen it being discussed on the BW lists. If it works, no need to reinvent the wheel, as it were.

-CWebb