[CJA]

How about: if the frequency is negative it plays at half volume? It sounds kludgey, but it offers at least some control with no or little file format change and no broken compatibility.

[Sai'ke]

Oh I actually meant channel as in mixer channel, so a whole mod or ogg rather than a mod channel.The behaviour you describe could then easily be done by just making one channel mods. While the same doesn't apply vice versa.

[weasel]

Having a bit more control over sound effect channels would be pretty good for me, too, because while MZX does support stereo OGG/WAV files (you could "bake" it into the sound yourself), if I wanted to play the same sound from a different position, I'd have to "bake" several variants of the same file, which would end up bloating the game more than needed.

[Frobozz]

ThDPro, on Jan 23 2010, 12:26 PM, said:

On another note of what cja said, MIDI would be pretty bloody cool. That would make my day.

It might make your day, but for anyone else who either lacks decent software playback or hardware it would either not work or sound completely awful. I think the last time I tried to get MIDI playback in Linux, for example, I had to make my own MIDI player that used Java (Java has a ridiculously easy to use API for MIDI playback and simply uses a sample file). It sounded absolutely horrible even with their biggest patch file.

weasel said:

Having a bit more control over sound effect channels would be pretty good for me, too, because while MZX does support stereo OGG/WAV files (you could "bake" it into the sound yourself), if I wanted to play the same sound from a different position, I'd have to "bake" several variants of the same file, which would end up bloating the game more than needed.

You could always try implementing a rudimentary tracker system in Robotic. Something that reads a script file and plays various OGG-format samples at various points.

This post has been edited by Frobozz: 24 January 2010 - 10:21 PM

[ajs]

MIDI was considered; the best solution is probably timidity with a decent soundfont, so it runs the same on all platforms.

The issue is that soundfonts aren't small, even crappy ones are 2MB+. It's just too big to distribute. We have OggV support now, so MIDIs can just be rendered to Oggs.

@WW: I'll add it to the list. Controlling the PCS/SAM/Music volumes independently is easy (can already mostly do it from F2) but support for pan control requires a bit more work.

--ajs.

[ThDPro]

ajs, on Jan 24 2010, 02:31 PM, said:

@WW: I'll add it to the list. Controlling the PCS/SAM/Music volumes independently is easy (can already mostly do it from F2) but support for pan control requires a bit more work.

ajs, why do you have to rock so hard?

Seriously, you just made my day.