UPDATE 12/02 - Version 0.72 released. It provides no features for a typical user, but provides many new commands and functionality that a modder would find interesting. Those interested in using EMC for modding should take notice. List of changes below in that nifty CODEBOX.

UPDATE 11/28 - Version 0.71 released, and should fix many of the problems reported here. Alas, aside from this simple fix release, I likely won't be investing more time in it in the short term. Maybe if I'm egged on. Lol!

UPDATE 9/30 - Version 0.7 is out. This version adds the playlist control commands and fixes some bugs. I hope the "no title music" bug is squashed in this version. Let me have your feed back! Download link at the end of the post is still the one to go to.

Enhanced Music Control
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Enhanced Music Control is an OBSE plugin that enhances Oblivion's music playback and provides script commands to further extend manipulation functionality to scripters. Its still a work in progress, but the progress has come far enough along that I'm now ready to get input on it.

This release adds commands for manipulating playlists, allowing you to build your own and replace the default music. Create new music for your mod's world, and swap out the Explore music with your's. Got a maddening boss? Swap the battle music with your boss's theme. Well, you can do that now in this release. Take a look at the Commands List in the download for the list of available commands and their usage.

This release requires Oblivion 1.2.0416 and OBSE version 15, simply because its the version I was working with. I've not tested it with other OBSE versions, but give it a try if you desire.

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What It Does
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What it does passively:
EMC effectivly removes control of Oblivion's music from the game's own code and places it solely in the hands of the plugin. None of the game's functions are used to play the music. A DirectShow powered player within the plugin renders the music in it's place. This gives the plugin absolute control of how the music is rendered and gives the capability of enhanced effects such as fading between tracks and resuming a previous track from earlier.

From a gameplay stand point, some of the first things you'll notice is that the previous track will resume after a battle is concluded. This prevents short Mud Crab beatdowns from interupting the regular exploration music. This is great if you have enjoyable custom music and get aggrevated that it gets cut off by battles before it gets to the good part. You'll be able to listen to the entire track all the way through to the end even if you continue to run into minotaurs and timber wolves over and over. This was the main reason I wrote the plugin. Kept stopping my lovely Eternal Sonata music...

Further, short music changes will result in a resume as well. So, if you pop into an Inn (and the music changes as a result) then decide you don't need to do anything there and immediately exit, if it was within 10 seconds, the previous track will resume instead of a new one being selected. It also does it with battle music too, so if you kill one guard and exit battle, then get spotted by some more, the battle music will start back up where it left. Its really cool!

I'm unsure if this was an issue in vanilla Oblivion, but each song in each music type's playlist will play once before you'll hear a song again, and the playlist is automatically reshuffled after each full playthough. You're guaranteed not to hear the same song twice in a row or too quickly in succession (unless, of course, your playlist only has one or two song in it). The more music you have, the better it all works.

Also, tracks will appropriately fade gently in and out instead of a sudden hard change. I find this more pleasing to the ears and disturbs the atmosphere less.

The music control system was designed to try and mimic Oblivion's as closely as possible. You'll still find some things are a little different. Like the title music plays through until you're in game. Not by design, of course, and I'll try and find a way to fix it soon as I can figure out where to place a sensor for the load screen.

What it does for modders:
For modders, it will allow you to control whats being played. Let the player explore your mod's world with it's own custom soundtrack thats completely seperate from Oblivion's by creating your own playlist and substituting your's for Oblivion's where appropriate.

Reliable GetMusicType commands. OBSE's GetCellMusicType command does not allways return the music that SHOULD be playing for a particular location or situation. I found that in IC's Marketplace district, this command incorrectly reports the musictype as Default (Explore) when it clearly should be Public. While now I realize that it is doing exactly what its supposed to do, it didn't help me any. Now, I'll provide commands that accurately let you know exactly the type of music that is being played, where ever the player is or what ever the player's state.

What it will do for modders:
In later releases, there will be an override mode that will allow a plugin to take ultimate control over the music. Tell it to play Battle music even though the game wants to play Dungeon music. Stuff like that. I will attempt to create a compatibility framework so that more than one plugin can perform the override if they are aware of one another.

Cool things I might do with it in the future:
I was thinking a heartbeat effect would be cool. When the player's health gets low, a heartbeat will fade in and the music will fade out as the player gets closer to death. Would definately add some amount of urgency to the game.

A script command that would affect playback speed would also be pretty cool to mess with, seeing as DShow has the ability. Slow down and speed up the music to screw with the player's mind. Perhaps a plugin to make the Shivering Isles' dungeons a little more insane? Or how about an inebriation mod where the music starts speeding up and slowing down irradically? Combine this with The J's OblivionEAX plugin and you can add a powerful echo to the sounds all around you. Ha! That would be awesome!

I was thinking of providing the ability to support multiple Special music tracks. For instance, you could have more than one MP3 for the title music allowing it to play from one randomly. Add more musical variety to the sight of your lifeless body flying backwards after taking that final hit from a Clannfear! Play any one of the many, many different Final Fantasy victory themes (not to mention OverClocked Remixes therein) when you level up! Imagine the possibilities!

Support for more than just MP3s. I don't know how this will work as I don't have any experience in DirectShow graph building. If DirectShow's RenderFile() function builds a poor graph, who knows what will end up happening. Technically, this is supported allready, but not officially. You can change the playlists to select non-MP3 files and it'll add them, but I have no idea what will happen when it tries to play them. Until I get a chance to play around with other music types and make sure they work, I'm not saying its offically supported.

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Known Issues
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One of Oblivion's volume variables keeps changing, fading out, then back to full blast. It is not stable for use. Anything that relies on this variable (like other OBSE plugins) will likely have a fit.

The music player does not pause when a movie, such as the Opening Movie after starting a new game, plays. This should be no sweat to fix. Just need to find the point in code where BINKs are started and stopped. Okay, maybe it is a little harder than I say. Anyone have any ideas that will get me along faster?

The Success music does not stop playing until its played through totally once. I would like it to stop playing as soon as the levelup menu is closed, instead, but I haven't figured out how to do it yet.

One time as I was playing, I got killed and the Death music played, then went back to the Combat music when it finished (it was supposed to stay silent until it reloads). I don't know the particular circumstances that caused it to go back to battle music, but I'll hopefully find out sooner or later. Its a rare problem, as far as I can tell and haven't been able to reproduce it yet.

Any mod that relies on the StreamMusic command won't function correctly yet. I haven't put in the hooks to handle this command yet, so it won't play the music. Any mods that rely on this command will fail to play their custom music.

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Known Non-Issues
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When you save a game, the current music type is saved with it. If you die, no music will play unless you're loading a save game that has that music data saved into the save game, or your save requires a loadscreen to complete. So, when you first use this plugin, you might notice that after you die, no music will play even after loading a save game. In order to fix this, just make a save and load from it when you die instead. Similarly, when you load a new game from the title screen that hasn't been saved while this plugin was active, the Title Music will continue playing until the loadscreen is dismissed. (Actually, this might be resolved now. I haven't gone and confirmed it yet though.)

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Version History
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0.5  -  Initial Release0.70 -  Commands for Playlist Control were implimented.        Setting bMusicEnabled to 0 now mutes music (but it is still doing it's work)        Master volume now properly affects the music volume.        Fixed some assembly errors.  Luckily, they didn't cause problems.        Added a timer to the battle music.  This should reduce (but may not elliminate)            issues where low confidence animals, like deer, engage in combat mode, then            flee immediately afterwards.  Second, if the battle music plays more than            45 seconds, the previous track will not resume.  A new one will be selected            instead.        Added useful debug text for the log file.        Title music filename should now be lifted from the INI file.        Fixed problems regarding my poor handling of COM objects.  This will probably            fix the 'no title music' problems people have been reporting.0.71 -  Fixes the problem where the Explore playlist was not randomizing.        Fixes the problem where one file is always missing from the playlists.        Fixes a problem where directories and non-files could be added to a playlist.            This would not actually cause a noticable problem, but it could result            in the creation of an empty playlist, which would be a problem.0.72 -  Fixes a problem where non-files could be added to a playlist if not using wildcards.            Should now be next to impossible to create empty playlists.        Added ability to specify more than one path to build a playlist.        Added ability to modify existing playlists.  This new ability does not apply            to the default Oblivion playlists.  Modifications can only be done to            inactive playlists (IE: ones not associated with a music type).            New Command:  emcRecreatePlaylist; Similar to emcCreatePlaylist, except it                operates on existing playlists.            New Command:  emcAddPathToPlaylist; Adds a new path to a playlist and then                rebuilds that playlist.            New Command:  emcIsPlaylistActive; Determines if a playlist is currently                active.  If it is active, it can not be modified.        Added ability to disable/enable the battle music.  This does not cause a silence            during battles.  It just does not allow the player to switch to the battle            playlist.  Care should be given when using these commands; If your mod did            not enable the override, you should NOT disable it.  Doing so may interupt            the program flow of another mod.            New Command:  emcEnableBattleOverride; Enables the override, preventing the                music type Battle from occuring.            New Command:  emcDisableBattleOverride; Disables the override, allowing the                battle music to be played once more.            New Command:  emcIsBattleOverridden; Indicates if the Battle Override is active.        Gave the command emcChangePlaylist a new optional Queue Mode.  If you use this command            to swap a playlist that currently has a track playing, instead of interupting the            current track, you can tell it to wait until its played through fully or stopped            due to a music state change before making the swap.  For more details, check out the            commands list.        Command emcRestoreDefaultPlaylist no longer forces a music change when restoring a specific            playlist to default, unless the playlists are actually changed.  The music will allways            be restarted when passing -1 as a parameter, however.        Added command (emcPrintAvailablePlaylists) to print all available playlists to the console.            This should assist in debugging mods based off of EMC.        Added command (emcPrintActivePlaylists) to print which playlists are associated with which            MusicTypes.  This should assist in debugging mods based off of EMC.

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Credits
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Credits to the following:
Scanti - His SoundCommands plugin was used as a base for this one. While only a small amount of code from his plugin is used in mine, it provided me with the orientation I needed to get started. He also provided me with some help when I asked. Thanks alot!

Kumar Prabhu - The DS Player sample application from CodeProject gave me my orientation into DirectShow. Hope my implimentation is allright.

Peter Chen - For providing CPath for general non-profit use. I've allways hated paths. Resolving absolute paths from relative ones. Using this class, I felt like I was cheating.

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Final
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This OBSE plugin is not only a modder's resource, but also a general enhancment to the music. That means anyone can download and install it and reap benefits from it without having to get a mod to go with it. If you've allways been a bit dissatisfied with the way vanilla Oblivion handles music, you now have a choice. Do you dislike sudden music changes and your relaxing music getting interupted everytime you walk past a rat? If so, give this OBSE plugin a shot!

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Now then! You no doubt want some links!

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=19772
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=OblivionMods.Detail&id=5141

If you try it out, please let me know of any issues you have, especially those not covered in the Known Issues section above. Also, have any suggestions or comments, well, thats what the thread is for. Lay them on me! There could allways have been something I missed, some really cool thing that I just didn't think of that it should do.

Well tbh I think the idea is AWESOME, alot of mods could benafit from this. The StreamMusic command is crap and using playsound is a rather crappy method aswell. So I this will solve alot of these issues.

Good job and good luck

wow and I've just disabled music and "musical immersion" to play music-less...seems like this could bring me back! Great work

There are definitely some possibilities here--good job!

Wow awesome work Hawkley. Alot of modders will be extremly thankful for this :goodjob:

This looks really promising !!! It seems like a lot of the things that I have wanted to do with music, have just been made much easier to accomplish. And I believe a few features, like the ability for music to playback at the point it was interrupted, where just impossible with scripts alone. Thanks a lot for working on this man. I for one, will greatly appreciate this.

I have a few questions and comments about the specifics though.


One of my favorite features, as I could never have gotten this to happen with scripts.



Is this now an automatic feature that happens when any song is played, or a function that can be utilized by modders?


So modders will be able to easily assign specific music to any cell they want, AND have that music play within the new rules of EMC?


Can you also control music by telling it to fade into silence? I really want to be able to have silence at times as well.


{EDIT}:

Oh, I forgot to ask one more question. Will this be able to alter the mechanics of Combat Music, or will modders still have to play with disabling music to prevent combat music from detecting enemies for you? For example, in Musical Immerison, I keep music disabled until I want it to play, at which point I reenable music to start playing a track. This prevents combat music from starting until certain conditions are met, which in my mod means that the enemy is within your line of sight.

If EMC doesn't handle this process, then my mod would have to continue disabling music to control Combat Music, and I am not really sure the effect that would have while using EMC.

I would really love to see this played out. I'll definitely install a stable version of this mod when it comes out.

Yes to all of the above. This mod is sort of sectioned into 3 parts. The Player, the Playlist, and the Control.

The Player is what this release is. It plays the music and tries to emulate Oblivion's rules while it's not been overridden. Plays battle music when battle starts, public music in towns, ect ect.

The Playlist allows you to alter what tracks are played for each music type, Explore, Public, Dungeon, and Battle. It would work something like this:

;Create a playlist with this name and path.;You'd only have to do this once.emcCreatePlaylist "MyExplore" "data\music\explore\mymod\*.mp3";Change Explore's playlist to your new one.emcChangePlaylist 0 "MyExplore"

The Control is where you can have ultimate control, but with control comes responsibility. EMC will require your mod to register itself and any mods it is friendly with, that is to say, mods that also override musical control that you have tested your mod with an make sure they don't conflict. If you don't register, then your mod can't gain control, and if you don't register any friendly mods, and your mod's script initiates first, then all those other mods won't be able to gain control. Its kind of a difficult system, I suppose. You'll have to ensure your mod can sort of not function in the case it didn't register first. But, in the end, I hope this system will promote compatibility where it is possible. Obviously, some mods, perhaps like your Musical Immersion mod, would require so much control it couldn't share it with others (except the playlist switching, which doesn't require registration) without making the music go crazy, in which case, the player would have to decide between one mod and the other (or a version of it that doesn't require the control).

Once you gain override control, you can do pretty much anything. Stop, Play, Pause, Resume, advance the playlist, and control the MusicType thats playing (you can see how it would be dangerous to let multiple mods that aren't aware of one another issue these commands all at once). You can also specify fade effects when you initiate a MusicType change or a player state change, like fade to a Stop over 2 seconds. Also, EMC will no longer automatically update the MusicType. If you want it to play battle music, your script will have to tell it to do so. You can use the previously mentioned GetMusicType commands to see what Oblivion would want to play given the location and situation.

Well, thats about all I can say about the inner workings. I believe that the commands I will explose would satisfy just about anyone for anything.

Thanks for the clear explanation. "Yes to all of the above" is exactly what I wanted to hear, music to my ears . Ill try to help test and provide feedback until this thing is finished.

Thanks for sharing and the linky, will add this to the list ! ! ! !

Bump, I'd really love to see this progress

Heh, bumping after the thread has been inactive for, what, about a day? Seems a little excessive.
Thus, to avoid the staggering irony of this being a mere bump-commenting bump itself:
Fantastic work! It's such a small and easy thing to install and works practically perfectly from the get-go. The fading between tracks as well as continuing briefly interrupted tracks already makes the music experience a lot better. I'm also looking forward to seeing people use the more advance features to good effect in the future. Heck, being able to control the music and play special music based on scripting might even be enough to get me to start modding; music is such a powerful moodsetter, and being able to control it could lead to being able to set up much better scenes.

Simple example: hero enters last chamber of long forgotten, abandoned crypt; creepy ambient music plays as per normal dungeons. After a few steps in, he hears a creaking noise behind him and
whirls around to see the gate slamming shut. The music fades subtly into a much tenser track. The hero casts about for another way out when a dessicated husk of a human being floats out of the darkness as the music suddenly slams into the dramatic bad-guy's personal theme, which only plays in his presence.
All you need to set up that scene apart from the music-scripting would be a script which closes the gate when the player enters a certain area a couple of steps into the crypt. The imagination takes care of the rest with some help from expertly orchestrated (ah ha ha, puns sure are funny...) music-scripts.

Anyways. I'm enjoying the mod as-is already, so anything else is just symphonic gravy

It would be neat if we could add more folders to the music directory and be able to tell oblivion to play tracks from a particular folder. So you could have your Church music. your Cave music, your Ayleid ruin music, rather than having it all bundled under 'Dungeon'. I think being able to store this by folder might be better than using mod controlled playlists, as that way the mod doesn't have to worry about scanning for new music etc, it can just play music from folder X and the user can add whatever music they want.

From the above posts that looks pretty easy .

Indeed. It is what it will do. When you create a playlist, you specify the folder which the files come from, so you can have your church, cave, and Ayleid playlists, all of them being unique lists of music in all their own folders. All you have to do is swap, say, the default dungeon list with your Ayleid list when the player enters the ruins. Swap the default public list with your Church music upon entering the cathedral. Simple stuff, can do it with just one command (provided your unique playlists are built and ready to go, also one command).

And, by the way, it does do that now. I've got the playlist system working. Just waiting on those opcodes. I'll probably take a day off and play Spore a bit, then I'll try and smash a few of those issues I mentioned, hook StreamMusic (almost done with that one, actually), and then begin the Music Override commands. As soon as I get my opcode range from the OBSE team, I'll make a new release with useful commands.

This sounds really awesome, I'll give it a go. Thanks.

No no no no no. Don't take 'a day off to play spore a bit'. That game willsvck you into a black hole and keep you there. On second thought, that's where I am now and why I haven't accomplished anything this week. Stage 5 takes SO long and you'll have to start over at least once because you have no idea what you're doing the first time and you'll get crushed. Anyway, off to hunt more binary star systems....

Don't worry. I have a Blackhole Key.

Hehe, so I'm not the only victim of The SPORE :ninja:

Wow. I've been waiting for this functionality since around 2003... (for Morrowind first). So sounds very good, to say the least.

I hope it's easy to leave battle music out altogether. Imho plain silence during fights is best for atmosphere, sort of bringing you to a here-and-now kind of state of focus. And it's hard to pick suitable battle music because you tend to hear only the first couple of seconds of those tracks. On the other hand, silence might be even more excessively disruptive in cases when a distant mudcrab starts chasing you and you'd rather just not mind it at all . But well, at least it will be possible with a blank mp3 file, so that's probably what i'll do.

Anyway, nice work there. \o/

I just tested it, and I am pretty sure this mod will work alongside my mod, Immersive Music.

Basically you'll get silence in-between tracks, and will only have combat music play if the timer in my mod cycles while you're in combat. Add that on top of the fading that this mod does and it should work pretty well.

I do not know however how it will interact with the "track memory" features (i.e. remembering what track was playing and where it left off) features of this mod. Further testing is needed.

Just tested it, works like charm

Just one suggestion: In case the combat music has been playing for quite a long time ... like 30 seconds and more, I don't think the default music should continue where we left it. I wouldn't even remember what track was played back then.

Apart from that, very neat work! :goodjob:

I am actually working on a system for Musical Immersion that might be helpful to you when it comes out. It will detect the threat level of enemies, and only activate combat music if they are sufficiently dangerous, and if they are in your Line of sight. You could then simply overwrite combat music with silence on your own, as that wont be a feature of my mod. I hope that ends up being helpful to you.

Good suggestion. I'll see to implimenting it. I think I'll also expose a command to allow you to customize these timers, or turn them off if its your preference. I'd guess it would just be a command for players to customize their experience.

Cool. It's great to see that you've finally got this plug-in working. :thumbsup:

It looks like it will be a worth while successor to my sound commands plug-in as my plug-in relies on using the existing Oblivion sound system. To use a pythonesque anology: my plug-in is like a castle built on a swamp and yours is like one built on a huge tract of land.

Good luck in any future additions you may add.