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Dynamic Jams dynamic music scripts

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EatThePath:
Dynamic Jams creates a middle ground between direct FRED event managed music and FSO's dynamic music system. Normally fredding a mission with cinematic musical timing results in either a rigid mission or flaws in the musical continuity. The DJ SEXPs allows for aligning mission event and musical transitions to the beat, and with the right music files this enables FREDers to get that cinematic effect without rigidity or sacrificing musical flow.

This does require musical segments (I gather they're possibly called stems in the industry?) designed for this use. I've collaborated with Shadows of Light on this project and used some music he made specifically for it. Right now WM isn't ready to release those full tracks, but a small subset is included in the demo content for this module. My initial tester found it feasible to cut up existing music for use with Dynamic Jams, but that was Serial Mascot, so if you want his commentary on it's uses you'll have to go find him to get it.

Some videos of the demos, with debug information put on screen

In demo 1 a 'holding loop' plays until the lead bomber is targeted.  Once it is a synced up voice line and musical transition will play, but only once the transition properly aligns to the loop. Everything lines up regardless of how long you take to target the bomber.

Demo 2 has more going on with the music than may at first sound like. The music advances through a short sequence of clips(A, B and C) smoothly, then an enemy wing spawns aligned to a moment in the music (in clip C), then advances to a holding loop (D) until you defeat the wing. After the wing is defeated it advances again (to E) and a final event is aligned to that transition as well.
The looping and some of the transitions are less satisfying because this track wasn't originally made for this, but overall I feel it shows the potential.

These videos were taken in a Warmachine context but the demo missions included with the package are designed for a retail base.

Download package here, with demo files and documentation included. It has also been submitted to the FSO scripts repository but not yet merged in. I'll update the package here if any changes come out of the review process.

DJ uses Plasma Core and Fennel for config file loading. See the Plasma Core thread for more about that. All the files needed to use it are included in the "lib" folder of the package, separate from the demo missions sand assets.

Colonol Dekker:
That's beyond cool.   Thanks for sharing dude

EatThePath:
I should add, even if you have only a traditional music track or a single loop, so long as the file has a consistent and unbroken meter you can still use DJ to sync events to the beats and measures, or even get weirder; in Demo 1 the bombers alpha is set based on how far from ends of a measure the music is at that moment. You could time important ship entries or exits to the beat, do something like guardian things and have a sexp kill 1-health ships on the beat, whatever.

ShadowsOfLight:
Very satisfying. It's been really amazing seeing the progress on this, and being able to contribute some music for it :)

I know that it has been lots of work to get it to this point; can't wait to see it in action for Warmachine, and hope that it quickly starts to make its way into other mods, too!

Great work, ETP!

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