Ideas on Yliakum's music.

[LigH]

If I had the choice who plays music for the masquerade ball I would always prefer someone doing it with "/me" commands over someone using the new music stuff in PS.

Thank you for "quoting" me:

Not that it would be a requirement to play them well, at all ... it is a roleplaying game, not a gamemechanics game, you know.

It is nice that we have now models of instruments to hold in our characters' hands. But we will certainly prefer using roleplaying elements than using the music system. It is still too unreliable and (incredible / implausible). And did I already mention that I am unable to practice it?

[bilbous]

It appears to me that you need at least three bars in your composition in order to get practice. Does not seem to matter if there are no notes and are nothing more than rests.

[derula]

Be glad Jamona's not around anymore. I would write horrible music and then play it badly and everyone would die from ear bleed.

(Seriously, I suck at making music, but still I do it all the time. It's like a curse.)

[LigH]

Don't be afraid too much, the randomizing of the notes for lower skills is quite obvious, so many people who are not able to spend weeks into "power-leveling musical instrument" will certainly play a cacophony.

I finally made progress. But only with a score of a surprising length. Another unrealistic part of PlaneShift: Absolute beginners in music would start with small scores (especially scales) and practice those to "perfection" before trying more complex melodies.


That would be my suggestion for the development of the music training: Define a range of acceptable note and bar counts per level (decade) to gain practice, and give progress per percentage of randomly matching notes, lowering the randomizing factor at the same time. Beginners only have to practice few notes in a score, but their chance to hit at least a specific percentage of them correctly will rise; on the other hand, too long scores will be too hard to practice – yet. The higher the skill, the longer scores are necessary as well as possible to gain practice, and bad luck in the note randomizer makes a mistake still possible.

This may even practice the notation skills of the player...

But I see that chosing these parameters can be complicated, and we already lack in Rules developers...

[bilbous]

I would think that there could be some kind of iteration count so that practicing one piece would improve its performance more particularly than in playing other pieces. Once it has been practiced to perfection it would not qualify for further skill practice but it also would have a very low error rate. Of course it is beyond the scope of the game to get too much realism.

It would be nice to allow for input from a midi device but that is pie in the sky thinking, must come from seeing pies on peoples heads.