Are we supposed to get sound support at some point?
Well right now there isn’t anything to play for music. Sound support has been mentioned a few times, but it’s not exactly on the priority list (especially since most rougelikes are silent anyways). If anyone wants to code it up and make a PR it would probably go in though.
MIDI trax are on the way, you only need to be patient for a little while. 
Even though I’m onto the whole “everything from nothing” all by myself, I didn’t forget nor did I brake the promise with (heart-breaking) abandonment of prior work. I just happen to like flawless things that tend to move worlds.
Popping back to look in at ye olde CDDA…and oh lookie, a new version!
Just want to say it’s pretty awesome. Love the new things I’ve played with so far. I’m using the SDL tiles version, it’s really nice. I can play without tiles, I just much prefer it WITH tiles. So it’s great.
Had a look at the advanced inventory management, and I pretty much came on right now to say how awesome that is. Perhaps one of the best features. I know it’s been in for a while, but even so.
Great bloody work you lot!
EDIT: I wondered what the blue rectangle between Day and Focus was…and I wondered what the time was…then found a watch. Figured that without the watch, that little rectangle was a representation of where the sun was!! Hooooly shiiiiieeet. Such a cool little immersion type feature
Vehicles are for the most part fixed in tile mode with the latest experimental SDL build.
If someone wants to test my WIP fake-ASCII tileset it’s always here: http://cesspit.net/misc/10x10.zip
I update it from time to time.
Actually, you might remember the music thread - the guy who had the most support has written us an entire soundtrack, and it really is just waiting on sound support to be added.
Not only one soundtrack; I’m patiently exploring the indie scene for authors, studying their approaches and improving the current songs that are lined up for the first pick (the first two-by-four, as mentioned before). I saw this as the only way, since the game was, at one instance of the time, greatly improving in every aspect; the actual tunes should supply the dynamic to drive player’s imagination through different game phases. As the dev team has tasks lined up, this will also be there as I promised, eventually.
Again, my inspiration comes from free tools for open sourced games - and any real improvement will be appreciated as far as the embedded technologies and digital formats go. If there would ever be anything besides the 24 tracks I’ve planned myself, I see no problem supplying them for future gamers, in any mod there can be.
edit:
The Informer bit, for those not patient yet: TMPDT
Start reading from above, PM and email me for ideas.
The topic commited to the third batch (tracks 17-24) would be more interesting (hopefully not a one-man act and interactive for the board members.
Just to confirm, the music will be a separate download right? I know it probably wouldn’t take up much space, but I (and a few other Cata players I know) are currently stuck using mobile internet and I know others just don’t want sound, so an expanding file size would be annoying. It’d be great to have the music as a mod (and I can’t wait to see what’s been designed) but just as a separate download.
I think the goal is to have a Resourceful and Resourceless download - for those with crappy internet connections, you’d download the base game and it wouldn’t come with music or tiles, but you could download them separately as desired and just drop them into place. For most people, you just download the full version and switch between the various options locally as it strikes your fancy, with everything already plugged in.
*kevingranade pokes at the SDL_mixer API with a stick.
Huh, that’s not as bad as I thought…
While we discuss music i ll drop this jewel i found here
That feeling of loneliness and hopelessness
This one is perhaps to gamey but is awesome also http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/548279
That sounds great, I just despise when things go from a 2mb to a 30mb download for resources you just don’t need to play. Will this be for the experimental’s as well? Cata dev builds seem to have become increasingly stable (I imagine it’s from a lot of hard work recoding messy bits) so it’d be a shame if we couldn’t get those resourceless as well.
As a side note however, having them as a plugin/mod (even an all in one ‘official resource’ mod) might make it easier rather than having lots of different ‘full’ versions? Just a thought.
The SFX could get large enough but that’s not the case with midi compositions.
As for support and custom user picks, players should be able to enjoy mpeg and browse the resource folder in-game.
Again, ideas folder open for the enthusiastic bunch: mailto.
I think for releases we’ll have:
“game + media” archives for each build.
“game only” archives for each build.
Official release media archive.
For experimental builds they will almost certainly just be the game itself, we probably aren’t putting audio media into github anyway.
We might do periodic media releases if we e.g. find a new song or add some more sounds to the media pack.
We’re fairly unlikely to do a curses or wincurses release that includes audio, since we’re probably going to use SDL for audio, which might just be a step to far for number of build targets.
Ninja’ed by vultures: Yea, the media directory is just going to be a directory with a bunch of sound files in it, maybe with some json attaching metadata to different files. You should also be able to drop in your own sounds. SDL_mixer supports a pretty wide variety of formats, so it’s pretty much drop in and play.
Now for that kung fu kick, there are a lot of media libraries - but you might wanna take a look at cncs232.dll (MMF 1.5 or above) for it’s a way to bring a/v content to Windows games. Platformers and indie platformers such as SMW use it frequently.
note: The library and the consequent ones are free (and required to run certain games) but the developer tool isn’t. It’s an alternative when you’re trying to get things done without SDL 1.2 and 2.0, but it’s also more than a directX mixer.
Windows-only is a dealbreaker, as is non-open source developer tool requirements.
It needs to be cross-platform and open source for me to even consider it, I’m fairly sure SDL is the best option in that direction, even more so since we’re already integrated with SDL.
Another option for media is to do it how soundsense in dwarf fortress handles their download. you could have a downloader exe with the game to download the optional media. That way you guys don’t have to have multiple versions of the game available, and we could just decide if we want the download individually or not.
That’s actually a far more complicated solution 
Providing multiple versions is simple and cleap.
Windows-only is a dealbreaker, as is non-open source developer tool requirements. *SNIP*Actually, I was looking for some enhancers to the chiptune wisdom online when it popped up. It seemed to me that most of the indie/rl projects used 'complementary' and so to say 'vanilla' solutions. I don't glorify or pity this or that, it's just that some less popular games make use of the fact that there are plugins out there. I'm pretty certain the recent one I posted about was available in the VB format.
[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:150, topic:3053”]*kevingranade pokes at the SDL_mixer API with a stick.
Huh, that’s not as bad as I thought…[/quote]
Actually about the post you made about SDL API only, but yet…
Regarding this, I did some research on my own behalf. If there’s no doubt to what port, interrupt and handler for memory access are, the nature of the Windows XP (ver 5+) is to parse everything to the Primary Device Driver. The utility port therefore is the driver, mostly WHQ certified, which is in most cases the only one. However, XP can have multiple drivers installed and running for the same piece of (physical) hardware, but not for the exact device they represent. This way some aux input could be digitally outputted in a stand-alone manner, whilst your analog output is using the exact hardware the driver’s aimed for. Altough it’s only a mapper of a sort, it still prevents from mishaps if there’s, say, an application that utilizes the installed hardware to the full extent, such as a studio port of a recording utility, and a simple audio player and exporter with software mixing; your common audio player software. Now for the “research” part:
Example_1: An application with suitable background music and sound effects running over Media Player. This is when the native mixer pokes the sound card for resources and capabilities, and mixes them to the same output if available (that’s 99.9% of the time). Works as long as the OS can assign port maps without coliding with reserved resources - so it’s full-proof most of the time, as far as the driver’s concerned.
Example_2: A piece of software that’s written so to use another, inbound API. This works through more than one IRQ (interrupt request) address and handles virtual devices on both levels - frontend and process. The “depth” of the code should render the sound card driver usable or unusable to other apps; a standard, enterprise suite such as Cubase should leave the default mapping to the system so you can exercise some basic forms of sound rendering, no matter what the main utility (here Cubase) figures are at the moment. A “savage” sound processing app may reserve all the resources from the driver but not the driver itself (a pro really) so no rendering happens or there’s a warning message at most.
Example_3 XP has certain extensions to the Windows core, such as CMD for some basic DOS support. On the DOS end, sound needs to be initialized regardless of the mapping in the AUTOEXEC or CONFIG native scripts. For more than a few games this is a issue resolved in a suitable way that represents a stand-alone mixer utility that attempts to reserve resources based on the chosen driver, and parse everything to the main app in the way its code requires. Since DOS and Windows cores are very different on this issue, the main OS asks for the primary driver on those specific ports - if there’s no 100% DOS EMU driver installed (it’s not there in most WHQ cases, DOS is considered obsolete). The main problem here lies with reserving those resources, because they aren’t discarded with Windows XP and are captured as long as the DOS app runs in the background. The consequences could be dire even with the different addresses usage for both Core and the Extension, and the loop for sound rendering may “lock” the sound card, or the most of its part. However, this is only the worst scenario - in majority of the cases only the sound init does the mentioned lock, so if you initialize the sound card with some software that points to the “Media Player” mixer (e.g. Winamp) and run the DOS app at pretty much the same time, you get a result based on priorities; preset or the default setting having the upper hand, so Winamp with its internal error handling resolves the issue - and the background CMD line app is freezed by the Windows core. My impression with the main Mixer app is that of a system driver that doesn’t have a way of handling exceptions, but the Primary Driver has some discretion over this.
You get the picture with the above mentioned examples - in most cases there is no alternate choice for the Primary Driver. It defines the versatility of the hardware and based on that sends information to the sound mixer system driver. If you engage in forcing a third-party driver whereas the Primary one stands it is possible that the mixer won’t accept input, altough a mixer with the app itself can stand in between your code and the actions that the Primary Driver parses to the system mixer.