Music in skirmish/practice mode

[stefanhendriks]

I have recently reinstalled D2K on my Win 7 (64 bit) machine. It works well, although I could not help notice that the music in the practice mode is always repeating the first track.. (ie, it is not randomly). It also does not seem to change when you're under attack or attacking...

Anyone has this problem as well? Perhaps it is a bug that has always been there.

FYI. I have patched the game to 1.06

[Gruntlord6]

I have recently reinstalled D2K on my Win 7 (64 bit) machine. It works well, although I could not help notice that the music in the practice mode is always repeating the first track.. (ie, it is not randomly). It also does not seem to change when you're under attack or attacking...

Anyone has this problem as well? Perhaps it is a bug that has always been there.

FYI. I have patched the game to 1.06

ever since 1.6 you can change the music via the menu.

[stefanhendriks]

Yeah I am aware of that. But the problem is that it keeps repeating the selected number. There is no 'logic' for music in skirmish mode :(

[MrFlibble]

It also does not seem to change when you're under attack or attacking...

This is something that was exclusive to Dune II. No other Westwood RTS titles have this feature.

Anyone has this problem as well? Perhaps it is a bug that has always been there.

I think it's hardly a "bug" since Skirmish/Practice mode uses multiplayer logic regarding many things, and music as well, and music would often be turned off in multiplayer games back then, to increase game performance. For example, in Red Alert before v3.03, music would not play in Skirmish mode, unless you manually started it, and music volume was automatically set to 0 every time you'd start a Skirmish game.

[stefanhendriks]

Never really noticed this. I do know that for multiplayer it was a CPU/performance related thing to disable music. I can't recall what games did have proper logic (was it RA1 perhaps?).

But good to know it isnt a bug ;) Then I can stop looking for a fix :D

[Nyerguds]

yeah... I had to do some serious messing around (read: hacking) to enable the music in C&C95 skirmish/multiplay.

(and even then I screwed up... enabling a random start theme in MP seems to cause desyncs because of the method the game uses to select a random theme can take longer sometimes - basically it just generates random numbers until one matches the ID of an existing theme)

[stefanhendriks]

basically it just generates random numbers until one matches the ID of an existing theme

Actually that sounds like a complicated way of selecting a random song? (or is there some other logic involved?)

I can imagine every song has an id, lets say you have 10 songs. 0 till 9 (or 1-10). Randomly selecting a number would be simply calling your random number generator with the given range and done :)

[MrFlibble]

What's a real bug in Dune 2000's jukebox is that you pick up a theme, press play, and another theme starts playing instead, and the selection cursor jumps to it as well. I guess this could have something to do with House-specific themes: although all tracks are available for play for all Houses, the random selection seems to cycle through themes designated for this particular House (e.g. The Atreides Gain and The Fremen play for the Atreides, Rise of the Harkonnen and Harkonnen Battle for the Harkonnen, and Enter the Ordos and Robotix for the Ordos).

[stefanhendriks]

Ah that would make sense, to have house specific scenes. Hmm, although I never noticed playing another song. Most of the time I start with "Fight for power" and it always seems to play correctly if I select another song as well. Do you also use V1.06?

Who knows, if d2tm gets refactored well enough, it would be even possible to make a d2ktm (which is actually not that much harder...)

[MrFlibble]

Ah that would make sense, to have house specific scenes. Hmm, although I never noticed playing another song. Most of the time I start with "Fight for power" and it always seems to play correctly if I select another song as well. Do you also use V1.06?

I was talking about the singleplayer campaign. Some tracks indeed do play correctly at any time, but others don't. I think this issue was not fixed in v1.06.

[Gruntlord6]

I was talking about the singleplayer campaign. Some tracks indeed do play correctly at any time, but others don't. I think this issue was not fixed in v1.06.

Yea it wouldn't make sense in multiplayer, although I have never encountered this glitch.

[stefanhendriks]

Actually logic for music would not differ in multiplayer/singleplayer. It is just that since most multiplayer games switch it of, the feature to make it work as it should when you *do* use it seemed to have a lower priority. A shame, because it is not hard to do so :(

[Nyerguds]

Actually that sounds like a complicated way of selecting a random song? (or is there some other logic involved?)

I can imagine every song has an id, lets say you have 10 songs. 0 till 9 (or 1-10). Randomly selecting a number would be simply calling your random number generator with the given range and done :)

It's related to the fact the random number generator has a set list of randomized byte numbers from 00 to FF, and uses the current time stamp or something to select an index from that. I can't help it; it's how WW programmed it. It retries the  random number generating until the result is A) inside the range and B) not the previously played theme. This obviously caused one hell of a program freeze if the themes list was either empty or contained only 1 theme; another issue I fixed :P

Modern algorithms usually generate a floating point value between 0 and 1 and multiply that by the maximum, but this one (in C&C95 anyway) is all with pure byte values.