First, this mod is brilliant! Like many here, I've wanted a smoother music system in Oblivion for ages. There is so much potential here. First, let's quote qzilla:


This is exactly what I've wanted for a long time. Lumping much of the music as "Dungeon" is just plain dumb. So will it be possible to make it so at least all vanilla Oblivion could benefit from separate music? I guess it would have to detect where you are and use the appropriate folder. That would be great.

Anyway, thank you! Keep up the good work, and don't play too much Spore.

Detecting in which kind of surrounding you are should be easily achievable by using the "You Are Here" resource. It's working great in "Ambient Dungeons" as far as I can tell, using "Screen Effects" to provide different atmospheres to different surroundings. It would make it necessary for this to be a mod, though, as I don't think a pure OBSE plugin can use functionality from an ESM.

Anyways, it's really nice to see there are such great achievements in altering engine mechanics, and I'm looking forward to next improvements and other mods making good use of this. :drool:

Yeah, that is the challenge, but there is a great mod called "You Are Here" that I saw being used with Soundscapes plugin that can determine where you are specifically, so that practically takes the difficulty out of it. (Ah! Drake beat me! Well, thats what I get for proofreading 5 times.)



I never considered my plugin a replacement for yours. The only command where my plugin would be incompatible with your's is the PlayMusicFile command. My plugin doesn't have the vast variety of volume controls that your's does, and I don't plan to put those in. Just one command I will expose does volume control, "Set\GetRelativeMusicVolume" which allows you to control the player's volume without actually changing the game's volume, so a mod can have some control over the player's volume without altering game variables to do it.

Oh, that reminds me. I never took Master Volume into account... I will have to do that. Like now... There. That was easy.

Also, "42." That means I'm probably done with Spore (for the most part). That game needed more variety in it's gameplay. Maybe I will pick it up again when they release expansions or gameplay altering patches... If any of you wishes to mess around with my creations, you can find my Sporecasts and creatures via my name, HawkleyFox.

Yeah, I figured it could use "You Are Here". So anyway, if anyone is able to make it so we can separate our music into different folders and have it work I'm sure it would be a very popular mod. At least, I'd like it.

And about Spore, yeah it was fun for one play through, and I'm glad they made the game but it did feel more like a test-game to me, a proof of concept type game. But I also felt that way about Black and White. Anyway...

You're not actually done until you kill all of them. Or everyone else. But that's not happening any time soon . I've put Spore away for now, still haven't beaten crysis (or bioshock...)

Personally I liked the game a lot, the critter stage is probably the most fun, but the space stage is pretty awesome when you realize how massive it is. Eventually you can just start playing it to have fun and make cool planets etc. But I'd rather play the sims 2 for that kind of stuff.

I also enjoyed the game, and yeah the space stage is massive. But strangely, I lost interest in the space age pretty quickly.

But back on topic, did I mention HOW TOTALLY AWESOME this mod is!? I just can't get over fighting an enemy real quick and having the explore music come back and fade in beautifully to right where I left it! So great.

But btw, HawkleyFox, did you say the music works for videos yet? When I load Oblivion I really miss hearing the title track. Thank you so much!

The title music doesn't play for you? Hmm.... Thats a new one. It should. The title music isn't a part of the movie, and the issue was that the music doesn't stop during a movie.

Anyways, I guess there is something differen't about your system from mine. Ahh... I know what it is... You (or something else) changed the SMainMenuMusic value in the INI I bet. I forgot to get the path to the title music from the INI. Right now it is expecting it to be "tes4title.mp3" irregardless of what the INI says. I have just fixed it for the next release.

Now, if only I can get my opcodes, I could make a new release. I think I'll PM someone on the OBSE thread. I don't think it should take this long... Maybe they've been getting spammed alot and my email got tossed into the junk bin.

Actually, I've had the same issue with title music, and I use the original filename. It's not the original file, but I renamed the new music to tes4title.mp3 rather than edit the ini. Everything else works fine, so I didn't mind much, but since it's been brought up I thought you'd probably want to know.

Yep ... same thing here with the title music... I thought maybe the fact that I'd disabled the splash videos in the .ini had something to do with it. :shrug:

Question: I know you said music info was saved in the savegame, but would using multiple profiles mess with the music listing? The reason I ask is that when switching profiles I kept getting the same first tracks over and over, like the info hadn't been saved at all. Love the fade-in, fade-out, though -- that's awesome!

Actually, I use the default title track and name and I've never messed with the .ini in regard to the title track. What happens is the title music won't load UNTIL I go into the load game screen and start loading a game, then while it's loading it starts to play. I should mention I also have all the opening videos removed in the .ini. Would that matter? Anyway, if you can fix it, I'll love you a lot.

And about getting your OP codes, I PM'd scruggsywuggsy the ferret recently on this board and he responded within hours. Did you say you PM'd him yet?

Lastly, I saw you mention about adding new features, as perhaps optional add-ons. Here's one idea. For a long time I've really wanted two types of battle music, a "basic" battle music and a "final battle" type (in two seperate folders). The basic music would play by default and would be ideal for fighting mudcrabs, rats, and other easy to medium enemies. This music is sort of upbeat like the default battle music but not the super-intense climatic battle type music.

When fighting, the game would transition into the heroic type music only when multiple factors are present like battling an enemy with much higher strength and abilities, or battling for over a minute, or based on total damage taken from a single enemy, or getting low on health against a strong opponent several levels higher. This way the user could pick out short segments of "final battle" type music that would transition smoothly when fighting a really tough battle.

You could further customize it to the popular mods like FCOM so that when fighting the special bosses added by WarCry or major monsters added by MMM like Giants or other huge enemies the heroic music would play right off the bat. Anyway, I know that's a big request and would be tricky perhaps, but I think it would totally make the game better. Let me know your thoughts.

Well, now, this will be interesting to figure out. Since it works for me, this will be difficult to debug. Well, I'm out of town at the moment, so I can't do anything, but I'll see what I can do about this problem when I get home. The title music was one of the more difficult parts to impliment, so I guess its not suprising there is a problem. I just wonder whats different between all your computers and mine...

I PM'ed Scruggsywuggsy. Says Ian is swamped and hasn't been around to handle such things. If I haven't gotten anything from him in a day or two, Scruggsy will bug him. So, a bit longer. Gives me more time to address some issues, I guess.

Brumbek:
My plugin isn't designed to make widescale changes to the way the music works on it's own. It merely emulates the normal system, and exposes commands to make it so someone else can make widescale changes. You may understand that, but I just thought I'd clarify. Seems alot of people are sort of expecting me to impliment these ideas myself, and that was never my goal. I just wanted to add fading and playback resume to vanilla Oblivion's music system, and expose commands for people who want to have the control to make drastic and sweeping changes. But, these are some things that you will easily be able to do. Just swap the normal battle music playlist with your heroic one when your conditions are met. Just know I won't be the one to do it.

daemondarque:
I don't really understand whats occuring. Is it playing the same track over and over, or is the music it starts playing wrong for the location, or is it that the music doesn't appear to be randomized? The music type is what is saved, not the list, and since its saved into the save file itself (from what I understand) it shouldn't be affected by profiles. Well, give me a bit more information if you can.

Anyways, I'll be back home tomarrow night and will be able to look into all this the following day. Keep me up to date with any problems you have, even the seemingly insignificant ones. As evidenced by the title music problem, something that you might think I know about, I might not. If its not in the known issues list or in one of the posts above, I probably don't know about it.

Now... I should try and get some sleep for my meeting tomarrow... If I can... The person I'm sharing a hotel room with is hard at work sawing logs... This might be a long night...

Thanks for the response. Regarding my mod idea, I didn't mean you specifically should do it, I just wanted to get the idea out there. Sadly, I don't know any scripting at all, so I'm at the mercy of others to implement my idea.

I'll keep watching the thread for progress on the title track problem. Thanks again.

Just completed the last bit of Shivering Isles, came back to Cyrodiil, and noticed something: Combat music likes to kick in all the time, just for one or two seconds. I'm pretty sure this is due to wildlife that is scared of my character (Hey, am I that ugly !?!): Deer, Mudcrabs (nasty little critters), rats and so on ...
As far as I remember the whole thing, they have a very high aggression (so that combat starts) but a very low confidence (so that they flee immediately). Would a check after 2 seconds if the player is still in combat do the trick?

Okay, then it's a misunderstanding on my part... I thought the music would pick up from the last track played and continue from there, not start over from the beginning. The music is right for the location, no prob there; and I really do love the fade-in, fade-out. I just have a lot of songs in my music folder, and usually don't have long blocks of time to play--my day is pretty broken up--so playing each song in sequence (which it appeared to be doing) resulted in hearing the same tracks I'd heard the last time I booted OB up. :shrug:

BTW, not sure if this is my sound card's fault or not (it does not have its own proc but relies on my CPU), but I seem to get a tiny bit of frame rate loss compared to OB's sound system ... but for all that it sounds 10 times better.

I've seen this too as I mercilessly chased after deer to slaughter them. I'm betting something even shorter, like a quarter of a second would be better. I wouldn't want a noticable delay in the battle music. I'll see what I can do. I'm betting its just a single frame between when the creature enters combat and then switches to flee. In such a case, a 0.25 second delay would work for people playing the game as low as 4 FPS. Luckily, I think few people would tolerate framerates that low.

But, I'll play around with this idea, and others failing this, to see what works.

Good to hear, I hope it's going to work


Dang, same here, I didn't post it because nobody else seemed to have noticed it. And to be honest, It was pretty noticeable :mellow: I have a SoundBlaster Audigy by the way ... I'm probably going to do some benchmarks today ...

I too, do not have titlte music after installing the plugin. Any progress on finding out why this is happening on some systems? I use XP (in case you were to ask).
Is there a way to check that your plugin is loaded from the console?

Thanks for a great addition to Oblivion!

Well, here is an update:
Nothing has happened.

I still don't have my opcodes, and frankely, with learning to fly and having to program other things, I probably won't have time for a while to take any large steps on this project. Plus, with the hold-up on the opcodes, my interest waivered. Perhaps if I can get them, I will get a shot in the arm, but until then, I have other responsibilities.

But, the playlist stuff is ready to go (pending opcodes). Don't know about this title music problem, still. I haven't installed Oblivion on any other of my systems to test it out. I guess one thing I'm curious about is who IS hearing the title music? Anyone? No one? And also post your system configurations. Some of the pertinent information I could use is the number of physical cores your CPU has, your operating system, and if you use any codec packs (which would affect Direct Show). I also found out recently that my music player class takes several runs of my sentry thread before it actually initializes. I don't understand yet, at the moment, why it isn't initializing the second I call Initialize(). Perhaps this is why the title music doesn't play. The music player hadn't initialized when Oblivion issues the command to play the title music. But, we'll get to the bottom of it... eventually.

In the mean time, I'll go hound the OBSE team once more with another set of emails to the three addresses listed in OBSE's readme. If they don't give me any in short order, I'll release a refresher build which should fix some small bugs but adds few new capabilities. I imagine that once I get those codes is when the real fun will begin.

Not hearing title music.

AMD Dual-Core 6000+ (slightly OC)
Windows XP Pro
M-Audio Revolution 7.1 sound card
No codec packs ... I use Foobar for music and have only the standard install of Media Player (which I generally don't use)
In other words, a pretty basic system when it comes to sound processing (without heavy drivers and such) ... very much on purpose--I had enough of codec packs and Creative, lol, and never looked back.

A quick update. Got the opcodes. In the middle of the morning too. Us programmers... Night people. But, I gotta review some notes. I'll make a release, soon to come.

And now a quick edit update: New version is out. Let me know of any problems. Check out the command list document available in the download to see what you can do with EMC. Also, this version, unfortunately, does not hook StreamMusic yet. Any mods that use that command still won't work properly.

Great stuff, thanks for your efforts!

I second this! I really appreciate your hard work and persistence, I will update you tonight on whether the title music bug is fixed for me or not. So again thank you, and I'm really glad you're taking your valuable time to work on this mod for us! Just know, as a fellow modder, I thank you kindly.

I thought I would give everyone a quick rundown of how to create and use a custom playlist. The way it works is the game has some slots, Explore (0), Public (1), Dungeon (2), Custom (3), and Battle (4). You put a playlist into those slots and Oblivion plays music from that playlist when appropriate. So, lets say you have a sailing mod, and you want to make some new sailing music play whenever the player activates the ship and enters sailing mode (one of my first ideas of how to use EMC, actually). Lets assume the music is in "...\Oblivion\Data\Music\Sailing\" and they are all MP3 files.

;Because playlists aren't saved into the save game, you will need to recreate;them each time a game is loaded.  Heres a good way to do it.;Assume we have a short variable created called "failed".if (emcPlaylistExists mySailing) == 0    ;Create the playlist.  We use a wildcard and search for files that end in ".mp3".    ;We are also doubling up a check to make sure the playlist created.    if (emcCreatePlaylist mySailing "Data\Music\Sailing\*.mp3") == 0        ;The playlist didn't create properly.  You would put code here to handle a failure here.        set failed to 1    endifendif;As long as the playlist was created successfully, its safe to continue.;Furthermore, we shouldn't attempt to change the music if the music is switching.if failed == 0 && emcIsMusicSwitching == 0    ;Now, to put the new playlist into the Explore slot.    emcChangePlaylist 0 mySailing    ;At this point, the music should change, provided the music playing is the Explore type.    ;Later on, you'll want to change the music back to Oblivion's default.    ;To restore the default music when the ship is deactivated, call the following.    emcRestoreDefaultPlaylist 0    ;Now the regular explore music should be back.  But, remember to check to see    ;if emcIsMusicSwitching is 0 before calling it.endif

And there. Could be errors in this code sample, though. I'm not exactly an experienced modder and don't have intimate knowledge of the santax. This is just a really simple piece of code to get you started, and help you see what each of these functions do. As allways, there could be weird things that occur. I found out recently that you can create empty playlists if you don't specify a wildcard to search for, which should not be possible, but I'll deal with it later. Just remember the wildcard IS needed. Should have put that in the Command List.

I hope this mod lives to its ultimate fruition. This has become one of my most anticipated mods. Good luck and thanks for your work!

Finally getting back to report the new version fixes the title music problem! Thank you so much again, this is a must-have mod, I'll never play without it. Keep up the great work.