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I can't answer the Flash question because it's a technology I haven't concerned myself with up until now. Though that may change in the near future because I finally broke down and got Shogun 2 and I need to figure out how to get rid of the annoying static popping sounds that seem endemic to the music. It probably involves updating sound drivers, I just need to figure out which ones.
Though there's still some residual music in my mods, I've largely given up on music in the Napoleonic mods because the random selection process for music files that the game engine uses is so unfortunate. If you have a dozen files in the music folder, the game tends to play about four of them over and over, and the effective selection is so small that it's impossible not to notice the repetition. This seems to be a fault of many music playing programs from that era, though Tiller's programming of this particular feature seems to be the least robust of any on the market. Ageod's is a bit better (you'd have to ask Philippe Malacher how he does it) but the repetition is still there. I still remember being blown away by the music in Europa Universalis II, so Johann Anderson seems to have figured out how to do it properly ten years ago. No idea how he did it.
What's frustrating about music in the JTS/HPS Napoleonic games is that I seem to recall that the Talonsoft predecessors didn't suffer from this problem. Not only that, but I could swear that they only played French music during the French turn, German music during the Prussian turn, Russian during the Russian turn, and so forth. So in that sense the program that we're looking at now is a big step backwards from what we had ten years ago.
I recently picked up a copy of Campaign Overland and started playing around with modding it. One of the first things that I focused on was the music. Thomas Hook's taste in music is pretty questionable when you get outside of this continent, and I often disagree with it even when it stays at home, but over the years some of his choices for ACW music have been pretty decent (and I really wish I still had my Talonsoft ACW cd's, because I'm pretty sure there were some very nice piano renditions in a few of the early games).
After weeding out the anachronistically modern music I put together a selection of ACW music from the Tiller games over the years, loaded it into my music folder, and tried to get lost in the Wilderness. I immediately discovered two things. First, it had been a while since I had played ACW games, and hearing someone singing proved to be a big distraction. Second, repetition continued to be a problem.
So the first thing I did was remember that the music in Ageod's ACW game didn't use words, and there was a lot of it. So after putting together my own collection of wordless music (and yes, there were probably a lot of Ken Burns clips in there as well), I loaded up a new music file that would be atmospheric, reasonably authentic, and varied. And the blasted thing kept playing the same three songs over and over again in different orders.
I finally threw in the towel and pulled out my sound editor. I used to use Razor Lame but after it stopped working for some reason, Ed Williams (who is really good at sound) turned me on to a demonstration copy of Gold Wave, which is amazingly robust, well-designed, easy to use, and completely free (as long as I use it less than 1000 times). I mention this because Gold Wave makes it so easy to convert from one file format to another (MPEG to WAV is trivial) that I no longer notice when I've done it -- except when I notice that the quality of the sound is so high that the file is too big vis-a-vis bandwidth and downloading. But one of the other things that Gold Wave can do is to merge all the files in a folder into one single giant file. The songs in that file will always be played in the same order, but Tiller's program seems to have no problem playing the file repeatedly in spite of its size -- but because of the large number of songs in the file, the repetition is not jarring.
I'm not going to start doing massive sound overhauls to my Napoleonic mods for a whole host of reasons, one of which is that bulking up each mod by another 100 Mb of zipped wave files would anhilate my bandwidth. Using the marching and battle sound files of the current set of JTS Napoleonic games seems to work best, as long as you only play the games with headphones or when your significant other is out of the house (unless she happens to enjoy 19th century martial music). Mine is an omnivore who likes Wagnerian opera (what's not to like), but she has her limits and one of them seems to be about 250 seconds of Napoleonic military music (longer for Frederick the Great, but he was a good flute player and half-decent composer). So the only game I ever play while listening to the stereo is Mount and Blade, because she seems to like medieval music even more than I do.
For those that want to go the Gold Wave single giant sound file in the music folder route, I should mention that Ageod's first Napoleon game has a really good collection of French music. I don't play that particular game because the geographical errors are infuriating (and the French are supposed to be good at geography because they used to make you study it in school -- go figure) but there may be a demo that is still available on their site. If it's still there, it has all of the Napoleonic favorites.
A word of warning. Something weird happened to French taste in military music after the middle of the 20th century. It's gotten incredibly bad. So you probably won't want to spend money to buy modern renditions of the old songs, unless you're into that sort of thing (not that there's anything wrong with that). My favorite modern French military song is Opium, a soulful tune from the late '20's- early '30's about being lonely and homesick in some god-forsaken colonial town and turning to drugs for solace. The only versions of it you can find on the web are a horrible modern rendition with chanted chorus, probably because it seems to have become a kind of official theme-song for the French Marines. I can usually manage hit the 'off' button before they finish singing 'Dans le port de Sa-ai-gon', if I'm not cringing too hard.
Having said that, there also used to be some great sound clips on French re-enactor sites. The problem with the Napoleonic music though, is that everyone else is badly unrepresented: it just doesn't sound right for 85% of the music to be French (and almost none of it Austrian).
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Every generation gets the Greeks and Romans it deserves.
History is a bad joke played by the living on the dead.
Last edited by Philippe Divine on Sat Jan 04, 2014 9:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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