[Tox]

I thought it was 'lather, rinse'?

[Pancake]

This is a stupid suggestion that's most likely not going to happen because of the way MZX was made, and is, but whatever...

It'd be cool if we could take the edges off of chars, the same way as taking away the white boarders of certain gif images when you first make them (depending on what software you use). I'd just want to make a game that's similar to an NES game. I'd have to use sprites and smzx mode 3, however, it'd be more like a real consol or computer game without the backrounds or edges of the chars.

Like I said, it probably won't happen :( . It just crossed my mind the other day.

Edit: Another small suggestion; maybe, mp3 support. I, as I'm sure some other members might be a little scetchy on this because of how people could submit copyrighted material. I know that ogg files are similar to compression, and MZX already supports it, however, mp3's are more globaly known. Speaking of sound support, I'd kinda like to see MZX support more music formats. Such as MIDI, ...uhhh... some other ...ones. I really can't think of any right now :( . However, would there happen to be a converter, or converters out there to change other formats of sound into modules?

This post has been edited by Commander Pancake: 28 August 2006 - 01:11 AM

[CJA]

Commander Pancake, on Aug 27 2006, 09:00 PM, said:

However, would there happen to be a converter, or converters out there to change other formats of sound into modules?

modplug tracker

[MadBrain]

Quote

Edit: Another small suggestion; maybe, mp3 support. I, as I'm sure some other members might be a little scetchy on this because of how people could submit copyrighted material. I know that ogg files are similar to compression, and MZX already supports it, however, mp3's are more globaly known.

Bah, come on, it's so easy to convert that this is a non-issue. (It also takes less bandwidth for roughly the same quality.)

Quote

Speaking of sound support, I'd kinda like to see MZX support more music formats. Such as MIDI, ...uhhh... some other ...ones. I really can't think of any right now . However, would there happen to be a converter, or converters out there to change other formats of sound into modules?

There's a couple of MIDI to module converters, but the results aren't too good due to the formats having quite different structures for music data. As for supporting MIDI, it would involve either using the OS's built-in support, which usually has crap quality, sounds completely different on every computer and possibly isn't so universally supported (especially under Linux systems and such), or using a softsynths, which usually involves a ridiculously large sample set (multiple megabytes). The general consensus is that it's a poor format anyways and that if you want to put megaman music on your game you can learn how to do it yourself.

[zombieguy]

Use modplug tracker to open MIDI and save as IT.
MP3 is the devil. Convert it to OGG. There's plenty of programs, just search for one.

[Dr Lancer-X]

TIMIDITY~!!

No, MIDI sucks unless you have MIDI equipment. Seriously, it sounds awful.

And yeah MP3 is the worst. Convert it to OGG, as well as anything else you want. Honestly, except for file size considerations, there should be no more requests for music formats since a proper, compressed audio format is available. Just convert everything to it.

And use aoTuV or else you suck. Don't use xiph ogg encoder.

[ajs]

Don't be silly Lancer, the Xiph encoder is fine, it contains all of the aoTuV beta3 tunings (widely certified to be the best version) as of Vorbis 1.1.

Also, why does it matter when you're promoting TRANSCODING MP3s?

Also, I can confirm, it is unlikely that MZX will support MP3s because there is no good technical reason to. It's an inferior format, larger (which is the primary concern), suffers at low bitrates (which we're trying to promote) and the libraries are of a comparable size to vorbis, which bloats the executable.

--ajs.

[Dr Lancer-X]

It matters because people can keep their rubbishy music at q -2, which last I looked the basic ogg encoder didn't like encoding at (evidently I'm out of date), so that their crappy music doesn't need to waste unnecessary disk space and bandwidth if they absolutely must include it.

EDIT: And don't try to convince me that commanderpancake has MP3s that are actually worth including in a game. =p

[ajs]

You're misinformed, the vorbis encoder will happily go all the way down to quality -1 now, and there are bitrate differences between them. auTuV's -2 mode is likely to be what -1 is now (this option did not exist in the Vorbis betas, and was very broken in 1.0).

It's not great at matching the bitrate on the scale, but it's much better now than it used to be.

Here's some benchmarks, I just ripped this from a CD:

[alistair] 14:55 [~/test] file The\ Four\ Seasons\:\ No.1\ in\ E\,\ \'Spring\'\ -\ Allegro\,\ Baroque\ Period.wav
The Four Seasons: No.1 in E, 'Spring' - Allegro, Baroque Period.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, stereo 44100 Hz

[alistair] 14:56 [~/test] oggenc -q2 The\ Four\ Seasons\:\ No.1\ in\ E\,\ \'Spring\'\ -\ Allegro\,\ Baroque\ Period.wav
Opening with wav module: WAV file reader
Encoding "The Four Seasons: No.1 in E, 'Spring' - Allegro, Baroque Period.wav" to
         "The Four Seasons: No.1 in E, 'Spring' - Allegro, Baroque Period.ogg"
at quality 2.00
        [ 99.6%] [ 0m00s remaining] -

Done encoding file "The Four Seasons: No.1 in E, 'Spring' - Allegro, Baroque Period.ogg"

        File length:  3m 33.0s
        Elapsed time: 0m 09.3s
        Rate:         22.9421
        Average bitrate: 76.2 kb/s

[alistair] 14:56 [~/test] oggenc -q1 The\ Four\ Seasons\:\ No.1\ in\ E\,\ \'Spring\'\ -\ Allegro\,\ Baroque\ Period.wav
Opening with wav module: WAV file reader
Encoding "The Four Seasons: No.1 in E, 'Spring' - Allegro, Baroque Period.wav" to
         "The Four Seasons: No.1 in E, 'Spring' - Allegro, Baroque Period.ogg"
at quality 1.00
        [ 99.6%] [ 0m00s remaining] -

Done encoding file "The Four Seasons: No.1 in E, 'Spring' - Allegro, Baroque Period.ogg"

        File length:  3m 33.0s
        Elapsed time: 0m 09.5s
        Rate:         22.5680
        Average bitrate: 63.4 kb/s

[alistair] 14:56 [~/test] oggenc -q0 The\ Four\ Seasons\:\ No.1\ in\ E\,\ \'Spring\'\ -\ Allegro\,\ Baroque\ Period.wav
Opening with wav module: WAV file reader
Encoding "The Four Seasons: No.1 in E, 'Spring' - Allegro, Baroque Period.wav" to
         "The Four Seasons: No.1 in E, 'Spring' - Allegro, Baroque Period.ogg"
at quality 0.00
        [ 99.6%] [ 0m00s remaining] -

Done encoding file "The Four Seasons: No.1 in E, 'Spring' - Allegro, Baroque Period.ogg"

        File length:  3m 33.0s
        Elapsed time: 0m 09.4s
        Rate:         22.6495
        Average bitrate: 49.8 kb/s

[alistair] 14:57 [~/test] oggenc -q-1 The\ Four\ Seasons\:\ No.1\ in\ E\,\ \'Spring\'\ -\ Allegro\,\ Baroque\ Period.wav
Opening with wav module: WAV file reader
Encoding "The Four Seasons: No.1 in E, 'Spring' - Allegro, Baroque Period.wav" to
         "The Four Seasons: No.1 in E, 'Spring' - Allegro, Baroque Period.ogg"
at quality -1.00
        [ 99.4%] [ 0m00s remaining] -

Done encoding file "The Four Seasons: No.1 in E, 'Spring' - Allegro, Baroque Period.ogg"

        File length:  3m 33.0s
        Elapsed time: 0m 08.7s
        Rate:         24.6334
        Average bitrate: 34.0 kb/s

Just for kicks, I'll try Mono too:

[alistair] 14:57 [~/test] oggenc --downmix -q-1 The\ Four\ Seasons\:\ No.1\ in\ E\,\ \'Spring\'\ -\ Allegro\,\ Baroque\ Period.wav
Opening with wav module: WAV file reader
Downmixing stereo to mono
Encoding "The Four Seasons: No.1 in E, 'Spring' - Allegro, Baroque Period.wav" to
         "The Four Seasons: No.1 in E, 'Spring' - Allegro, Baroque Period.ogg"
at quality -1.00
        [ 99.7%] [ 0m00s remaining] -

Done encoding file "The Four Seasons: No.1 in E, 'Spring' - Allegro, Baroque Period.ogg"

        File length:  3m 33.0s
        Elapsed time: 0m 03.9s
        Rate:         54.8118
        Average bitrate: 27.1 kb/s

Vivaldi would be disgusted with the result, but as you can see Ogg Vorbis is absolutely excellent at scaling the quality setting with bitrate. 27kbit/s is perfectly adequate for baseline streaming. The resulting 3.5 minute file is under 750KB, which is smaller than a lot of XMs or ITs.

EDIT: Also, you're quite right, I doubt CP has anything valid to use MP3 support for, and indeed one of the reasons we didn't include it was because vorbis is more obscure and therefore people aren't going to drop Christina Aguilera MP3s straight into their games. I still maintain that for samples, or small snippets of voice or music, Ogg Vorbis is superior to crappy Module hacks, and the official encoder is rivalling the performance of any other.

--ajs.

[ajs]

Since the quality is just so good (we love you aoTuV), you should give it a listen:

Here.

This is the worst quality encoding, -1 in mono. Not bad for sub-dialup bitrate, is it?

--ajs.

[paulguy]

you forgot the %20s

edit nevermind I just red the thread RIGHT after you posted the old one.

This post has been edited by paulguy119: 28 August 2006 - 02:09 PM

[Pancake]

Oh, okay. Thanks. Never mind my suggestions, then. I'll just open my songs and sounds through ModPlug Tracker or Audacity or whatever and convert them there.

Also, ajs, that ogg file really does have high quality.

[ajs]

My advice for settings. Make sure the application you use to export or transcode is running with a recent vorbis DLL, at least version 1.1.

Do not use "managed" or "average" bitrate mode. Specify "quality", not bitrate. This has a substantial effect on the Vorbis encoding algorithm, and will ensure VBR is used, minimising total bitrate, maximising quality.

Convert samples to mono (1 channel) where stereo (2 channel) has little or no effect. Vorbis does joint stereo natively, but it still has a subtle impact on bitrate.

Do not bother to downsample the WAV quality; the difference between 22050Hz and 44100Hz is negligible (~10-15%), and the difference between 48kHz and 44.1kHz is even more negligible (5%), in terms of resulting bitrate. Always use 16 bit or more, Vorbis is not optimised for encoding 8 bit PCM and will produce worse results.

However, if all you care about is size, and not quality, the best settings are probably 22050Hz (or lower), 16bit, mono PCM, with an ABR (Average BitRate) profile in the ~15kbit region.

EDIT: I managed to get a file down to 18kbit/s without using Speex, just the regular Xiph encoder. Anybody feel like beating that?

--ajs.

[Dr Lancer-X]

There, 12kbit/s, but it should be a crime to do that sort of thing to music =p

q -1 in the official codec is still nominally ~45kbits (approximation), and q -2 is still unavailable in the official codec. I wonder if they'll add that later.

[Sai'ke]

Poor Vivaldi, he must be rolling around in his grave right now ...

and yeah ... don't downsample the wave beforehand, downsampling gives an extremely annoying hiss D:

[CHEZZY]

Just a small suggestion that probably won't happen, but I just had a brain wave. Why not add a gravity setting in global settings where if "gravity" = 1 then every object type thing excluding walls and doors and floors fall to the ground. eg. move all "object" south, but on a larger scale.

[zombieguy]

CHEZZY, on Aug 30 2006, 05:24 PM, said:

Just a small suggestion that probably won't happen, but I just had a brain wave. Why not add a gravity setting in global settings where if "gravity" = 1 then every object type thing excluding walls and doors and floors fall to the ground. eg. move all "object" south, but on a larger scale.

I don't think things are added simply for ease of use. If it can be done in robotic already, it won't be added.

This post has been edited by ZoMbIeGuTs: 31 August 2006 - 07:00 AM

[merder]

here is an instalation suggestion(maybe if mzx is out of its beta stages).
but using an windows installer file. that way newbies that don't know how to make file linkups wont need to. also there then can be standard icons for mzx worlds(i do have some maybe i'l release my favorite later).

[Pyro1588]

i submitted some icons awhile back, but they never got implemented. check out both these if you want.
i don't think an install is neccesary for file associations and icons. heck, i really don't think file associations are all that important, but if someone wants to add them, go ahead.

[merder]

these are good and some have more of a tech look then mine but i think the pal files are generly used to be able to associate and give mzx icon.

[Koji]

Associations to mzx are useless for anything other than mzx files. Since that's the only file to my knowledge that mzx is programmed to possibly be associated to in some way without massive bugs.

[paulguy]

you know what sounds really bad? A 8kbps CBR mp3 file. D:

[ajs]

A MegaZeux installer has been tried. I released a few versions not long after Exophase released his port, but I gave up on it because nobody would take over the responsibility. At the time, I was using Nullsoft's installer, because it generates very small, single-EXE installers that work on Windows 9x/NT and don't require Microsoft crap.

If somebody's still interested, I'm sure I could come up with a decent script for it again.

Oh, and regarding the icons, I think it might be possible to automate the embedding of these with the new build system. You'll have to generate more versions though, you seem to only have them in one size (unless my ICO viewer is playing up!). Obviously this would have to be cleared with Exo, but I think it's a good idea.

What would be ideal are alpha PNGs at 128x128, 64x64, 48x48, 32x32, 22x22, 16x16. I've written a small C program to convert a series of PNG files into an ICO library, which can be embedded into the EXE's resource section. It also means that other platforms could benefit from the icons, like KDE on Linux, or Mac OS X, which do not use ICOs.

--ajs.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Unless they are quite different, why not just 128x128 and scale down with interpolation? That's how they'll probably end up being created anyway =p

[ajs]

This is fine, but the systems I've noted require all sizes. It would be idiotic to require 'convert' or some other commandline graphics utility to build MZX.

Also it's not even necessarily true that icons are made by resizing a larger version. A great deal of work went into the KDE icon theme, for example, to make smaller sizes (16x16) contain fewer details (and thus be more clear) at smaller sizes. You may find that some pixel pushing is required at the smaller sizes to make them look right..

--ajs.

[Val]

This has been bothering me for a long time. The "commands" counter should be local, not global. Making it global screws up like everything.

[Dr Lancer-X]

NO, it DOESN'T screw up everything. YOUR PROGRAMMING screws up everything. Fix it.

[Frobozz]

Guy, on Sep 2 2006, 04:29 PM, said:

This has been bothering me for a long time. The "commands" counter should be local, not global. Making it global screws up like everything.

*cough* WAIT ONE *cough*

[steel_dragoon]

Could a command be implimented that simply CALLS the load and save menus and disable the default load and save keys. This would allow for more simple custom loading and saving techniques.

[Dr Lancer-X]

steel_dragoon, on Sep 8 2006, 08:18 AM, said:

Could a command be implimented that simply CALLS the load and save menus and disable the default load and save keys. This would allow for more simple custom loading and saving techniques.

Yes, that could be implemented. It would be very easy to do.


Will it be implemented? Probably not.