A Suggestion for the Implementation of Music

[Mixo]

How about being able to specialize in a specific instrument?...as a future idea perhaps.

[Entevir]

I think its best not to make skills for different instruments, while that would fall well into realism it would be at the cost of enjoyment which I think is a bit ludicrous. Besides, one can easily roleplay a person who only knows one instrument simply by virtue of using only one instrument.

Personally I would hope that if players wrote songs for PS the dev's will leave the door open to submissions into Planeshift. And seeing as I cannot code I will leave my contributions on this at that. Although the note scenario sounds higly complicated in my head merely by virtue of the language of notes. Dynamic changes and sincopation and polyrhythmics can require some badass notation. So it might end badly.

[Gilrond]

Another idea, if someone has time to implement it. Currently music is using some PS XML notation. It could be useful to write some convertor which could take a MIDI file, and convert it into PS music XML, similar to the one which makes SVG -> PS map XML. Since writing music IG isn't easier than making maps, using some decent MIDI editor and convertor can be a big aid. I might try to do it, if there is an XSD schema for PS music XML notation.

[weltall]

it's music xml quite standard...

[Gilrond]

I'm not really sure what that means. Any links can be helpful.

[bilbous]

This, I imagine. it would be nice if the functionality could be tweeked into exporting formatted  -- read properly indented -- xml instead of the giant blob that it currently does. I suppose that is a feature request for the tracker.

[Gilrond]

I see. Well, that's way better, that it's a standard notation (I never used it before, good to know). Looks like even rosegarden supports it (for exporting at least). So the question is, how fully does PS support MusicXML and what are the limitations?

There should be a plentiful amount of tools to autoident XML. No really a need to build it into the exporter. For example, on Debian / LMDE / Ubuntu do:

Code: [Select]

sudo apt-get install geany geany-plugins geany-plugin-addons
And open the XML in geany. Enable XML pretty printer plugin, and use it from the tools menu. That's it. I'm sure there are more tools for it around.

[weltall]

the point of not nice format is to save space with the server so i don't think it will change.

[LigH]

PlaneShift even uses some malformed XML files (e.g. with more than one root node, like in art/itemeffects.xml). So don't expect externally edited XML files to be reliable.

[Talad]

We will not specialize skills by instrument, at least not now.

As for XML, it's what weltall said on improving server/client interaction, so the current format will stay. You can still create a converter for existing music sheets XML formats into the PS one. Being only text should not be complex. This will not be done by PS team for now.

Buffs/debuffs based on song can be interesting, but not sure atm how to implement this algorithm. Suggestions?

[Gilrond]

Since it's a standard MusicXML if I understood correctly, you don't need any convertor if music editor can export the notes in MusicXML, right? Unless PS deviates from MusicXML schema (full XSD can be found here: http://www.recordare.com/sites/default/files/musicxml30.zip and note that MusicXML has several versions, 3.0 is the current one, looks like PS uses 2.0?). That what I was asking about (are there any limitations or other hidden details). End Of Line layout of the XML document is irrelevant, since whitespace between tags doesn't change schema compliance, and only affects human redability (same thing as in C/C++ and most other programming languages where the amount of whitespace in most cases is irrelevant).

For an experiment I'll try to get Rosegarden to export some music in MusicXML (after I'll figure how to use it ) and will try PS to import that.

[Gilrond]

UPDATE: I wrote some simple test with Rosegarden and exported it in MusicXML. PS failed to load it reporting: illegal XML syntax...
UPDATE2: just noticed that Rosegarden uses MusicXML 1.1 this can be the issue.
UPDATE3: Looks like PS uses a very specific subset of MusicXML. See:
http://planeshift.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/planeshift/trunk/src/common/util/music.cpp?revision=7772&view=markup

[bilbous]

Indeed I got the same error trying to load a score from Project Gutenberg. It was full of midi commands which are not supported apparently.

[Gilrond]

Strangely, PS supports only one <part> tag in the list (i.e. one channel in MIDI). I'm not sure still how it implements bass (I'd expect it to have two channels for that). Making two channels in the XML screws it up greatly... May be I should contact the developer about what he had in mind.

[weltall]

what's so strange in not supporting unneeded features of music xml?