Audio Engine XT 1.2 Released!

Audio Engine XT 1.2

Version: 1.2
Release date: 30/04/2009
Author: Marco Di Antonio -> aka BulletXt (bulletxt@gmail.com)


The Engine is fully integrated into VX editor! You normally set your BGM as you did till now through VX editor... the engine will take care of the rest!!
The only thing you have to do is start "StartGame.exe" instead of "Game.exe" as you usually do. Test mode is also supported!


Features:
This audio engine will:
- pause BGM when a battle starts and resumes from where it stopped when battle ends!
- BGM is normally set from VX editor as you normally do!  The audio engine is fully integrated with VX editor!
- by turning a switch to ON, BGM will continue playing in battle!
- by turning a switch to ON, you will have support for Random Battle BGM!
- BGM always automatically loops!
- by pressing a key, it will Pause the game with BGM/BGS volume lowered/muted!
- at battle end, Victory ME will fade out (so ME can be as long as you want)!
- you can make a BGM loop making it restart at any seconds of the song you want!


Instructions:
To start the game, don't start it anymore from Game.exe as you normally do,
instead start StartGame.exe .

For more information, read instructions inside script bundled in demo (get below).


Supported CODEC formats are: wav | mp3 | wma
If you want to have other format supports, like OGG Vorbis,
be sure to install the codec for your Windows DirectShow Filters. If doing this,
when releasing the game you must be sure the players also have the codec
installed.
IMPORTANT: I can't guarantee the engine is stable when using other codecs, so
           I suggest to use only native supported codecs: wav | mp3 | wma


Technical Details about the Engine:
The engine is written in C++ with the Qt4 Framework toolkit.
The engine is released under the GNU General Public License 3. Sources are available at the following link: here


Special Thanks goes to:
ahigerd(#qt) general help on Qt4 and pointing me out some good solutions
bnagy(#ruby-lang) for helping out on sending data in ruby through a named pipe connection and general ruby help
Defty(#math) for the fadeout algorithm
Fabrizio Di Antonio for pointing out some solutions

Other users have helped me too, sorry for not mentioning your name but I can't remember


Bug Report:
Please report bugs and wrong behaviours of the engine. Be very detailed on how you can reproduce the bug so this will help me fixing it faster. Be sure to do a step-by-step description on how the bug is reproducable.

Download Audio Engine XT:

Download the demo to get all the files you need. If you want to install the demo to an already existing project, be sure to read instructions inside the script.

Remember to start the game from StartGame.exe and not as you usually do (Game.exe)!

Download: here

This is all for now! I hope you enjoy this!

Cheers,
BulletXT

 

This is a very nice script. Love the pause feature and the music resumes after battle. Thanks.

Looking good

This is a common request and I finally have somewhere to point them to. Great work.

This is a common request and I finally have somewhere to point them to. Great work.

No need, I found it on my own,
I remember asking in the script shop a while back for this but for XP.

Good job and I hope the bugs get worked out.

Hey, have you thought about making a way to set a looping position for songs, so that songs can have an intro section, but then when it loops it does so from another point in the song? A friend asked me for something like that, and so I was intending to look into it. But seeing this script I figured maybe that was something you were already thinking about. If so, then that would be a great feature.

Yes, this is fairly possible with a void MediaObject::seek ( qint64 time ) (it's not the ruby script that handles playing|pausing|stopping BGM, it's the c++ code. The ruby script "only" takes care of getting data from VX and sending BGM name to the engine).

I guess you want to be able to decide which BGM's must loop normally and which ones must do a seek at n seconds, and of course decide the n seconds... right?

ps: there are a lot of things in my TODO list for this engine, especially support for Audio effects..! Distortion and so on

Audio Engine XT 1.2 Released!!

A new day, a new great release!

Changelog:
- Qt4 upgraded to latest Qt 4.5.1 and compiled againts Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
- You can now make a BGM loop and restart at n seconds of the song!
- It is now possible to change Random Battle BGMs array at any time through a script call!
- Better integration of the engine with Test mode and Battle Test mode
- Compatibility mode with Worotana's Neo Save System script


If everything goes fine, next release will finally add support for a lot of audio effects!!

Cheers,
BulletXt

Sweet script. A few questions about the looping, though: Does the "Point A" marker have to be a whole second? also, can I choose a "Point B", or does it have to be the end of the song?

- What do you mean for whole second? Are you asking if it's possible to set time in milliseconds?
- Point B? No, I didn't think about it I'm not sure if this is possible... is it an important feature?

ps: just in case, BGM automatically loops without setting anything. You call loop on Point A only if you want it to start at Point A. If you don't do anything, the BGM will loop normally.

Yeah, I'm actually the one that MA was talking about earlier.

The reason I ask about milliseconds, is to get music to loop properly, choosing a whole second could leave some ugly sounding gaps. If it isn't possible, I could try moving things around in another program to make sure that any point that has to be looped back to begins dead on the second.

The second question I only ask because mp3 files usually have a bit of silence at the end of the track. This could also leave ugly gaps in the sound, but if you could choose the "Point B", then you could pick the exact spot that it should loop from.

Both of these things could be gotten around with a bit of fudging in an audio program, but I was just curious as to what the script gave you in that department.

Stop the madness. I'll satisfy both desires But don't get used to it


ps: In the mean time, can you confirm loop at Point A works correctly? Try different cases. Thanks.

<3

<3

What does that mean? 

lol nevermind

It's a heart It means he loves you very much and would like to know if you are still single.

hahahaha. let's just stick with the "it's a a heart" part.

I'm happy to announce that with the next release Audio Engine XT will reach a big new milestone. It will be the best, feature rich and stable version ever.
The very most important thing is that the engine natively supports Ogg Vorbis!! And to be more specific it will natively support all the following codecs:

AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, Intel Music Coder, Monkey's Audio, MP3, Musepack, RealAudio, Shorten, Speex, Vorbis, WMA   and more!

Yes, you read that! Even AC3 5.1 audio files.... everything natively supported by the engine!!

There is a lot more with this 2.0 release,

Stay Tuned!

I'm so glad that .ogg is supported. Amazing job, and +rep.

I have bit of a complaint. The Audio Engine seems to load the music slowly after the second battle. Is it because I didn't put in the right script in the event or is it the audio engine's fault? I mean its really good stuff, it is. But thats just one problem I've encountered.

I have bit of a complaint. The Audio Engine seems to load the music slowly after the second battle. Is it because I didn't put in the right script in the event or is it the audio engine's fault? I mean its really good stuff, it is. But thats just one problem I've encountered.

To make it simple and short, the play|stop|pause functions are asynchronous. But I think your BGM is actually loading correctly, maybe you don't like the fadein effect.. maybe it's too long? Also try with another BGM so you can confirm it's just a problem of fadein that is too long.

I'm having two issues with this script.
1.  is that the Audio Engine recover mode goes on as soon as I start or load anything meaning that none of my maps have any music at all, and neither do my battles. All my imported music files are Mp3's. I copied all the files I was told to do, in the correct order, and also try playing the game with Startgame.exe. There is something inside the script that was saying lines about having Autoplay BGM on or off inside the Map's Properties, so I tried playing around with that to no good.

2. I receive that fade in time that DarkUltima was speaking of, although I do not know how to get rid of it. I believe it is somewhere around line 456 of your Audio Engine_XT script, but if I do something wrong, it's over.

Other then that, although I cannot give my full opinion on this since I cannot use it, the demo is exactly what myself and many others like me have been looking for, for a long time.