A Truly UserFriendly Game Audio Engine?

dallen writes "Do you wonder what Illiad of UserFriendly does when he's not coming up with comics? This article at GlobeAndMail.com reveals that his company, Condition30, is working on multiple videogame-related engines which create unpredictable but recognizable content. The company is working 'to polish its game-engine technology', but its public demo, a music creation engine, makes 'random' music that sounds much like music, not noise, potentially for games and other interactive products. Says their website: 'Our principal product, ZenStrings, is a music-generation engine that composes music and audio in real-time without taxing memory or processing power'."

Comments

dynamic music

[Dreadlord]

I've listened to some of tracks generated by ZenStrings, and I can say that it's quite impressive, it may be the first step on the process of creating a game with truely dynamic music.

Anyway, you can find some samples generated by the engine here.

Some Musicians are not evil

[Andy_R]

Rather than reinventing the wheel, why not just get a an actual musician to create real music for your game?

Contrary to popular /. opion, there are plenty of RIAA-hating open-source-friendly musicans out there who would love to create soundtracks and/or sound effects for games.

Try signing up for a mailing list where musicians hang out online (such as the music-bar list at ampfea.org) and ask around.

Re:Some Musicians are not evil

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Because that music gets repetetive and takes up a lot of space. Take a game like a modern Final Fantasy. Most people have 72hr or so games of that (not in a row of course, but still.) ~2hrs of music starts to get very repetitive. If the music was constantly changing ever so slightly, it would keep the game feeling fresh. Especially if you do what max payne (among others) did by having music get more intense during intense parts of the game (think about to enter a room with 5 people in it)