An idea, music track embellishment upon powerups!

Hi, easily done really... but the idea is, on my 2D shooter game as you get power-ups the music changes or builds into a nice little trace or Techno track which starts off obviously quite minimalistic at first then comes the hit-hats, bass lead, more drums etc etc... it's been done before I know, but how would you keep it all in time? hmm, I may try it...

 

You keep it in time by synthesizing it in real time (MIDI or whatnot) and turning on and off each instrument as you go. It's unfortunately not as nice with more modern approaches, where you need to play multiple audio files over each other or similar...

 

Just use one loop for each level and change the music when the loop ends.

 

Having all of the tracks playing at 0 volume or having the songs meant to play in sync and then enabling them with a starting time of the other currently playing songs is a good way to go for prerecorded stuff if MIDI isn't an option.

 

The zero-volume solution means the CPU is constantly decoding a bunch of songs, though. And either way, you can run into synch issues.

 

Wouldn't that be the case for really good players who unlock all of the tracks anyway? I think I'd rather have consistently strained CPU than having it get worse as the player does better xP

 

Sure, but I'd rather deal with just the synch issues than synch issues and increased CPU load. Though of course that might not be an issue either, depending on the number of layers and available CPU horsepower.

 

We have a feature to keep layered music synchronized in our Master Audio plugin (link below in my signature). You don't even have to keep the other layers playing silently (you can though). Every time you start a new layer it will align to the other audible layers. And there are "no coding" scripts to make this happen when you enter a trigger or dozens of other events.

I think you'd be better off not using streaming or mp3's with layered music as stated above. Too much drain on the CPU!. Better to have shorter sections that can play in order perhaps and take less memory? They could be wav's.

Hope that helps!

 

Whats the hit like with layering uncompressed formats? My understanding is that the main hit comes from the decompression. If you're layering loops it's quite possible that the loops themselves aren't that long.

 

Yeah loops would be good. If it's long tracks uncompressed & layered, that could take a lot of memory (not good for mobile).