By DeltaRomeo
Published: June 28, 2009
Updated: June 28, 2009 PrintEmail
Thinking about Melodies and creating ideas for the Track: THE BATTLE BEGINS
It is 8PM night time, right after I just came home from work and school. I fired up the computer, mixer, keyboard, and other connected devices all ready to start composing music for TNE. During a brainstorm session and a piano improvisation session, I was looking at the New Wallpaper Sebastian Kreutz have created. I thought to myself although an ambient track seems more appropriate for menu music, I was requested to provide an epic track, presumably relating to a space battle. This required some referencing to several of John William's previous works with Star Wars. Stylistically, the track "The Battle Begins" is a combination of William's earlier Star Wars pieces from The New Hope and more recently Revenge of the Sith.
Writing, Recording, and Mixing While John Williams was writing Star Wars, he was only responsible for writing music. In my case however, to bring high quality realistic orchestral sounds to Star Wars The New Era, I had to write, record, and mix this time. All of these three can be quite time consuming.
Notation
First, I open up the Music Notation program called MakeMusic Finale 2008. I open a pre-existing sheet music template for a full orchestra consisting of woodwinds, Strings, Brass, and standard orchestral percussion such as Snares and Timpani. After setting the tempo, timing, and key signatures, I start composing music and the orchestration process begins.
Recording
After completing the score, the next step would be the recording process. Instead of using a VST softsynth called Garritan Personal Orchestra provided from Finale 2008, rendering the new piece with the East West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra is more preferable since the samples provide realistic reverb trails and are recorded in full stereo sound.
Essentially, I opened up a sequencer, imported the MIDI file which is the music score in MIDI format and began adjusting notes through Piano Roll view. Before the adjustments, it is extremely important to load the instruments from the EWQL VST (Virtual Studio Tech) plugin and properly assign the Virtual Instruments to their respective MIDI channels. For example, you want to assign the first violin patches to the first violin MIDI channel. Assigning articulations and effects are more advanced and complex, which I will not go into right now.
Mixing
The last process would be the mixing process, where I mix all the instrument .wav files into one multi-track audio mixing process. Here I can do equalization and putting in audio effects.
And here is the final result for your hearing pleasure:
By Lindsey
Published: June 25, 2008
Updated: June 25, 2008 PrintEmail
The first video dev diary, about ammunition pickups, including the design process, ingame shots and early concepts. Narrated by Jean, team mapper and Zaswed, team render artist/modeler.
By Millz
Published: March 17, 2008
Updated: March 17, 2008 PrintEmail
Hey folks, I'm Emiel Regis - The New Era's coder. Although there are
many things I work on, I'd like to share my experience with dynamic
scope system I finally got to work lately.
Dynamic scope means
that there is a texture in appropriate place in the viewmodel (the
scope of course) which is a render target. What does that mean? The
current view of the character is drawn dynamically into the scope,
which, combined with ironsights, gives a very realistic feel for
zooming with scope-equipped weapons. Instead of just drawing a
full-screen zoomed overlay, you see a realistically zoomed image appearing
on the three-dimensional scope.
Question arises - how to do it? I started with
MirrorView article on developer.valvesoftware.com. Theoretically, the
code there would work for scopes with only little modifications. The
reality proved otherwise - after many hours of coding, changing the
render target texture (which needs to be compiled with an external
tool) and cursing over, it became apparent that the method lacks a
certain detail - initilization of the very render targets. Without
this, a purple checkboard or just a plain black texture would appear on
the scope. After searching the MP SDK which TNE is built on I was quite
puzzled: There wasn't any reference for render targets initilization in
the code - but it must be done somewhere, otherwise things like water
reflections would not work, while they did.
At this point I
started asking fellow coders from hlcoders mailing list. It was not
until I joined their IRC channel and talked with guy named omega, who
happened to have working render targets in his mod and willing to share
- huzzay I thought
After another few hours of work and cursing, the thing actually started
to work! Here are a few screens of dynamic scope on the A-280:
Looks
cool, doesn't it? The obvious disadvantage of this method over a simple
overlay is that all pixels in the view need to be drawn twice -
however, with current optimizations of Source Engine and moreover
multi-threaded Orange Box code, which is out there and waiting to be
merged with existing TNE codebase, the problem does not seem so acute
anymore and peformance decreases only slightly.
Yzmo - March 18, 2008Looks nice.. however.. why does the edge of the scope look like aluminum foil xD
MadMax - March 18, 2008Yep.. was wondering the same thing :P Good job though.. and by the way; make sure to make a diary for the lightsaber development(whenever that is).. im curious as hell about how your gonna do that
Jaze - March 18, 2008i made this for insurgency mod isit any use? to help you
http://img509.imageshack.us/img509/6007/insadvancedshottingrangmh5.jpg
Darth.Hunter - March 18, 2008thanks, but unfortunately, no use for us. They're using an entirely different method of rendering the scopes.
MindHunter - March 18, 2008Looks awesome. Can't wait for trying it in the real game.
grim_mind - May 16, 2008"Looks nice.. however.. why does the edge of the scope look like aluminum foil xD"
'cause it was just a "prototype" i guess.. anyway, nicely done..
I just hope that the method you're going to use in TNE is even better...
deathcapt - February 25, 2009Looks great, all it's missing is a red dot.
Sorry, your account does not have access to post comments.
After another few hours of work and cursing, the thing actually started
to work! Here are a few screens of dynamic scope on the A-280:
Amazing work ^^ <3 keep it up. I believe TNE will have one of the best soundtracks that game can have ;D