EQ Music: Reimagined

[Shendare]

Those bastards. Not that I'm entirely surprised, though. We've got a fair amount of hard-coded stuff in EQEmu that would really be better read from the DB instead.

[Grimluck]

Not liking the sound of that.

[Shendare]

Does replacing the actual eqtheme.mp3 file with your custom pickchar.mp3 do what you want, though?

[Shendare]

On my lunchbreak, I figured out the cooldown options, which clarified the unknown field before the x,y,z coords and the odd behavior of the fields between Range and xmiIndex.

Here's the updated field list for .emt files:

;?,SoundFile (wav=sound, mp3/xmi=music for volume sliders),Unknown (0=OK 1=OK),WhenActive (0=always 1=day 2=night),Volume (1.0 = 100%),FadeInMS,FadeOutMS,LoopType (0 = Constant, 1 = Delayed Repeat),X,Y,Z,WavFullVolRadius,WavMaxAudibleDist,1 = RandomizeLocation,Range,MinRepeatDelay,MaxRepeatDelay,xmiIndex,Echo (50 = Max),IsEnvSound (for option toggle)

LoopType affects sounds (.wav files) only, separating constant sound effects (campfire, waterfall) from delayed repeating sound effects (bats screeching, water dripping, rocks rumbling). Music (.mp3 and .xmi) is unaffected. It always loops immediately after finishing.

If LoopType=0, both MinRepeatDelay and MaxRepeatDelay need to be 0, or the client doesn't know what to do with the conflicting information.

If LoopType>0, the client will wait a random amount of time between MinRepeatDelay and MaxRepeatDelay milliseconds before repeating the sound effect. If both are the same, it'll be a constant cooldown between each activation.

Note also that the delays must include the actual playtime of the music/sound. If you play a 5-second sound effect that should pause for 25 seconds after playing before it activates again, you'd set the Min/Max delay fields to 30000. 5 seconds to play, 25 second wait, 5 seconds to play again, etc.

[Shendare]

Also, the semicolon doesn't tell the client to ignore the line like I thought it did. The client just considers the semicolon part of the first field value, which appears to be ignored, but I can't know for sure.

So the client is looking for "SoundFile (wav=sound, mp3/xmi=music for volume sliders)" as a file in the EQ directory, and ignoring the line when it can't find one that matches.

Oh well. That works, too.

[Grimluck]

All replacing the eqtheme.mp3 with the pickchar.mp3 (renamed) does is change the repeating opening theme into a repeating character selection theme, as it was doing before. No change.

[Shendare]

It's also weird that it only plays the first several seconds of the theme. The mp3 itself is over a minute and a half long. Probably just a case of faulty coding. Sorry, man.

Once you're in the game, though, it looks like we've got total control over music and sound effects for any zone. Artistic freedom!

[Grimluck]

I tested the fade ins/outs of the various files I have configured for GFay work perfectly. Still, the only thing that needs to be fixed is the ambient environment sounds for the zone to be played simultaneously with the updated music. So, what you're saying is we need a separate line of code for the .wav enviornment sounds?

[Grimluck]

Yes, i think we'll just have to overlook the pickchar issue for now. Hopefully once Secrets fix is implemented it won't be an issue to change the pickchar music with the updated theme. No sweat!

[Shendare]

Yep, and I've made good progress on a converter to make the appropriate .emt file entries from the .eff data. It'll all be good.

[Grimluck]

NICE! Now, I have a lot of work ahead of me. Not only do I need to finish working on the rest of the music themes with the updated virtual instruments, but now I have to go through all of the old zones and figure out the parameters for the new themes. What a big project ahead of me.

[Shendare]

The .eff files contain the music entries for the zones as well, so those will carry over into the .emt file as you convert them. You'll be able to just change the entry's reference from, say, qeynos.xmi with xmiIndex 3 (pretending that's the theme for the Qeynos Monk guild area) to Qeynos_Monks.mp3 or whatever you'd like to do.

[Grimluck]

Even better!

[Grimluck]

So, I guess all I have to do is work on remaking all of those .xmi files into updated themes, and then once you get the files converted, just go within the files and change the files triggered into my updated themes. I love this stuff!

[Shendare]

It's possible you could even find a program that would convert the old .xmi files into individual .mid files for each sub-song, which would be a headstart to upgrading them to nicer mp3s.