*Snip*

i recently did some poking around in that one. im sure you can do what you have in mind, but it'll be a whole lot more work than i'd want to do. i'm almost tempted to say a rewrite would be easier, just using BMS as a template.

Shouldn't you ask mod makers before taking these initiatives, BTB?



Are you sure? Let me see some proof about what you said, my tests and several other people reports state that Explore music cause NO fps impact at all, even with all the optional features activated. And only a slight fps impact on old computers when battle music starts. So I think the damn thing is not bogged at all.

They are good features, most of optionals have been suggested by the community so they ARE going to be used ( the fact that you don't use them doen'st mean everyone will do the same).



The 3 unused HP levels are there because they were once used for final boss music. When I created a new playlist script for f.b.'es only, I left those 3 uncovered to let users fill them if they wanted to.

You can even double those HP levels and nothing will change. It's not that, it's the main battle script that may cause a little slowdown but as I've just said things now are much better as I've already rewritten the scripts in the last version.



Already said everything above, I don't know why you think that if you don't like or accept something, it must be the same for everyone else. And I repeat myself these features have no impact on the general stability or FPS of the game.



I don't know what's wrong in using an object, a lot of mods do this. Yeah it may be a bit annoying but calling it a "cardinal sin"...


Well, glad you like the mod, but frankly I found the rest you said quite pointless and unfounded. Configurabilty is the BEST part of this mod, so why on earth would you want to cut that out, and with almost nothing in return.

However, you can make your own version if you want, but PLEASE leave it for yourself, don't release it anywhere. This is not an old mod you can pick up and modify and release your own version cos its modder is missing or else, mine is still being updated, I'm going to make at least 1 more version. So I ask you to follow what's stated in the readme regarding this matter.

FPS in Morrowind is notoriously variable, the same test repeated different days on the same system can show a mod to slow or boost FPS. Only some very obvious things will reliably cause problems while testing, and manipulating sound tends to be one (can often cause disk access, which is one of the slowest operations available).


It actually just means someone is using them, not necessarily everyone.


Cardinal sin it may not be, but scripted and script-controlling objects certainly aren't the best way to handle things.


If a mod is recreated from the ground up by a different author, you have no right to prevent release, nor does any permission need to be asked or given. While IP rules may apply on the basics, something to change music is simple enough that prior art almost certainly exists, meaning it's not an original creation.

And on the same hand, BTB can;t use any scripts, resources or the name without permission. That would be plagiarism and we have a no-tolerance policy for that throughout the community (with the exception of the Nexus). A very similar feature-set would be questionable, but if the other mod was created from scratch, then it's just someone else's take on the concept (and there have been at least a half-dozen takes on the better-music concept over the years).

As long as none of your work is used, it's simply not your mod and you have no control over it. In business, the term is competition, and the solution is to make a better product.


Edit: Although, for the record, it's generally recommended you ask permission and at least be friendly when you're remaking a newly-made mod. Required, perhaps not, but common courtesy, certainly.

I think the issue here is that BTB is insinuating that he's going to take the well-known Better Music System mod itself and redo it, claiming whatever he makes as his own, presumably still under the Better Music System mantra and system. Not to mention he kind of insults Xiran's work in the process.

Presuming you're right, then that's obviously not allowed. As I stated, the concept is fair game (and only the concept, as it's been done and redone over the years by a number of authors). Neither the name nor any content is included, and those are obviously Xiran's property. As for insulting Xiran's work, that's between them, but generally considered rude.

That's what Xiran said.



I think the problem here, other than the rudeness, is that BTB intends to use Xiran's mod as a template, when Xiran is still developing the mod and has said not to edit and release in his readme.
If BTB intends to rewrite it, I'm sure Xiran would have no problems with that at all, but BTB said in the OP that he was going to edit the battle script.

FPS may be variable ok, but you can see very well when a mod or a mod's feature is slowing down your game if you test it well. I think you know it better than me. In previous versions I could and anyone esle could see that the battle music feature could slow down the game a lot. It was something obvious for me and for people which weren't a modder (infact I recieved a lot of complaints for this). Now I can see that it's not that way anymore, and other people reports confirmed this.



That's not the point. You cannot say who will use some feature or who will not. How can you say that a feature is not used, you asked each person about that? What I'm sure is that I've never ever been asked to eliminate a single optional feature, and that is enough.



Alright, I trust your experience, but just tell me another way to pop up a menu whenever you want without using MWSE Keypress function, I had problem with it in the past, don't know maybe it's just me. However I don't think it's the main problem here.



I know that, but I think the issue here is different, as haplobartow stated too. I won't allow someone to take my mod, cut some features and re-release it (oh and forgot the battle script matter, thanks Dirnae). Simple as that (maybe it will sound silly for a lot of people, but I've put a lot of effort on this mod, as my first one). And I cannot stand someone that says unfounded things, painting this like a bad mod with questionable affermations. I always accepted fair criticism, but not this type.
Finally, the main point is: make your own mods from scratch, or at least ask permission to use parts of other mods.

If you've done proper testing and had others try it as well, then I'll take your word as to the speed. Be aware though that music, since it has to read from the disk, is second-slowest after trigonometry (GetDistance).



Scripted spells are ok. My personal favorite is a scripted spell that summons an invisible NPC, who then ForceGreetings to start dialogue. The menus are in the dialogue, so you can add restrictions and such pretty easily, as well as making random effects without much work. That's just personal opinion. There are a few minor issues related to objects with scripts on them, especially having them in inventory, so that's something legitimate to watch out for.




Agreed. And while I also agree the title is flame-bait, the idea is solid, and the better music idea has been around too long for anyone to claim it. Editing your scripts is obviously out of bounds and the community would obviously support you in a blatant case of plagiarism, but if BTB wanted to rewrite the whole thing to his tastes with all-new code, then that's fair game.

I never do. But just so we're clear, no, I don't plan on releasing this publicly like all of my other edited mods. As you pointed out, this one isn't either abandoned or just flat-out in need of an obvious fix, so there's really no way to justify releasing it on my own.

Yes, I really should have reworded the topic title... but it was late, I was tired, and I wasn't really what one would call "coherent" when I made it.



From the front end, maybe not. On the back end, I suffered four consecutive heart attacks when I read the scripting.

But, the honest truth is that this is just an excuse to justify my compulsive need to hack everything out of the mod that I don't intend to use. It's a sickness. Pity me.



I dunno, I've had people suggest some pretty insane [censored] to me before.

But, again, we're talking about opinions here. Those are pretty hard to argue when operating under the understanding that they are, in fact, opinions.

Plus, you seem to have missed the implied "by me" part of the phrase "these aren't going to be used". >.>



I see that. The six tiers is just a bit much... plus a mite unnecessary if you're also configuring it to not start battle music for the lowest tier (thus rendering the first level unnecessary). I actually miscounted, though - I'm configuring it down to four, not three.



I've never once made the assumption that anyone in this world thinks the same way I do. At most, I berate them when they don't.

In your case, though, I won't. You did good work. You should be proud of yourself.



Under many circumstances, object insertion alone is grounds for immediate disqualification. The last thing I want to do when starting a game is have twenty amulets, pendants, and rings of configuration dumped in my bag before I get kicked out of the Census and Excise office.



Because in my mind, there is always only one *proper* configuration, leaving all other choices both invalid and moot.



I'll be good, I promise.

I am uncertain why you would want to strip out night music. The atmosphere at night is utterly different from that of the day, especially taking into account the deluge of popular mods which make gameplay-altering modifications and additions to it (TLM, Creatures, etc.) Nighttime should feel different than daytime, with a concomitant shift in music to something more tense, more quiet, more mysterious. Daggerfall, which featured the best music system thus far in the Elder Scrolls series, utilized night music to great effect.

Like I said, this is a matter of opinion. This isn't the sort of subject I can pick up and beat people who don't agree with me to death with like I do in the documentation for my own mod, because it's a stylistic choice.

Also, I use a different soundtrack for main exploration music that fits day and night settings equally well.

@peachykeen, thanks for suggestions and advises, they will be useful.




You should!



The way you started this thread (or simply the fact that you started a thread to make people know about a "future" modification of yours) just made me (us) believe the exact contrary. I hjope you were actually not so "clear-headed" while starting this thread, although it's hard to believe...



What are trying to say? That it's bad scripting? Well, ahem, I think that at an expert scripter glance it may appear a little confusing. I mean, I had to jump through hoops to make all optional features work well together, it wasn't so easy (at least for me). I think that is a part I will manage for the next version, maybe re-structuring some of the scripts.




I inserted only the best suggestions, a few others were really insane though.



It didn't seem so implied, to be honest.




1st lvl is unnecessary if you never use it, of course. For example, I start playing with normal mode, then when I get stronger I swicth to the alternative one. This thing is also justified by mods that strenghten (weak) enemies.




Thanks.




That's a good point. Never thought about that side of it. Maybe cause I don't use many mods that add objects.




Well, that's your problem




Very good.

Haven't seen a thread with heat in it since The Daywalker last dissed Morrowind


However the mods haven't shown up which is kudo's to everyone holding back from saying what else they might be thinking

And i've learnt a bunch of stuff from this thread as well - summoning an invisible NPC to act as a menu seemed like a good idea

Still this really could have been contained within your Release thread as suggestions for optimizing it - posting when tired or drunk or tired and drunk never makes for quality conversation - not saying you were drunk BTB

And if anything Xiran - its good advertising for your mod even if its not in the way you wanted, just looking for the positives that's all

'tis better to beg forgiveness than ask permission >.>



I think given my history of taking mods and "fixing" them, it was wrong of me to assume that it would be taken any other way. If it makes you feel any better, what I was actually thinking when I made this thread is how long I've had this mod on my radar and that perhaps you might be glad to see one the loudest, most opinionated voices on these boards finally take an interest.

Granted, the *real* reason I avoided it so long is because I knew I was going to customize the hell out of the soundtrack (I think I came up with a pretty solid setlist, by the by), and the thought of wasting days of my life doing so intimidated me. I'm amazed that it only took me one day... though I've yet to get the plugin edited, which may very well take me longer.



No, not bad. Just excessive. Bad would be if I could make a smaller script that did everything yours does. Yours does everything as efficiently as it can from what I can tell, my opinion is simply that you ask too much of it.

To a very large extent, this is going to be unavoidable. I fully appreciate the significance and magnitude of taking something that's so deeply (and so poorly) hard-coded into the game and override it completely. It's for this exact reason why that every optional feature you throw on top of that already massive pile of crap is just one more straw onto the camel's back.

If it were me, I'd have broken BMS up into modules, with one "core" plugin, and one for each additional plugin. Gets rid of the problem of needing an item to configure it, at any rate. Might make the download size a bit big if you have too many options, though. But I don't imagine you'd mind, given that the music pack contains several copies of the same song you've used in different places (which I will cite as the only real "mistake" I think you've made).



Again, that's my fault. My apologies.




Yeah, I'm actually going to have to edit either your plugin or Morrowind Advanced for that one, since it raises the HP of Cliff Racers to 75, but diseased Cliff Racers still have 45. The only question is going to become if I want to include Cliff Racers in the group of enemies that don't set off the battle music.



Well, again, you've done good. I've never run across a mod (or modder) that I was 100% happy with without adding my own personal touch, and I think you did more than a good enough job in your documentation to tell me enough about how your script works so that I will know how to change it to my liking.




In any other forum, this would have been the case. One of the things that I like about this place is that we're all advlts (or, at least we act like them sometimes).



I probably was >.>

The reason I made this its own thread rather than posting it in mine, though, is that I was hoping to catch XN's attention on the off-chance I had to start asking him questions about how his script works. Though, I probably should have played up the whole "customizing it to suit my needs" aspect of it (like raising the HP threshold for weak creatures thing, which I may very well end up asking fro help with) rather than talking about hacking his beloved child to pieces in front of him.

Again, I blame the alochol.

EDIT: and see, speaking of questions, I'm trying to figure out why some towns have far less slots available than others do. As in, I wonder why it is I can't just add more? It seems that there is some arbitrary limit in the CS about how long scripts can be, but if that's the problem I would presume I can just steal unused slots from other towns.

That sort of thinking will get your head torn off. Best not to assume people are the forgiving type.

A lot of things I do aren't very conducive to making friends. It's one of the many reasons I don't have any >.>

whao!! thats going in ma sig!

On an entirely separate note, I figured out why the limits on the number of tracks per town were as they were - apparently, the town script is overloaded and very close to reaching the max size limit.

So, I just moved a big chunk of it over to the Music_Other script. Made sense. I imagine that they'll function just as well there as they did in the Towns script.

EDIT:

And something else. I love the concept of the music delay when transitioning cells. The implementation seems iffy, though. Opting for either no delay, a small delay, or a delay until a song is finished each causes its own problems. The latter quite obviously can result in wildly inappropriate tracks carrying over into new cells. The former will result in harsh music changes between cells that feel like they should be contiguous. What to do?

Well, here's my idea:

1 - For every areal that should have an immediate music switch when entering it (i.e. dungeons, Ghostgate, Red Mountain, etc.), add a line to the music script to set the xn_music_delay variable to 0 *before* the music starts. This will allow an immediate music switch even if the delay was previously set to "until the song ends".

2 - For every cell that should transition smoothly into another (most regions and towns), add a line to the music script to set the xn_music_delay variable to -1 *after* the music loads. This will allow the music to change to that of the current cell if you're moving into it from one of the above-mentioned "type 1" cells (i.e. leaving an Ancestral Tomb) while also allowing its music to carry over into another "type 2" area .

And the best part is it's yet another decision not to leave in the hands of the end user

Yay happy ending.

I too did some personalisation a while ago, without a grand announcement:
I also removed the cube and preset the options- I just feel that the PC carrying an mp3 player takes away from immersion. But of course Xiran can't expect everyone to do it in the cs, and spells aren't really much better.
Night music and individual town music is definitely not a bad thing, but for me it makes the music for each area very limited, and it seems a "waste" if you mightn't ever visit the place, or if you'll only get to hear it very briefly once. So I devised a system where each the "capitals" have their own theme and the all the smaller towns share the same music depending on their affiliation/architecture, and the even smaller villages share their own. For example Ebonheart will have its own music, Caldera and other imperial towns have the same score, different from Ebonheart's but sharing the same motifs, and likewise with Seyda Neen and other small imperial villages, with all having the "Imperial theme" but lowering in grandiosity and length according to scale.

Of course I haven't played, so I dunno if anything actually still works.

And thanks again for the Ghostgate playlist ^_^

That's another reason why I will have to structure some scripts better, some are overloaded, very close to explosion.



Simply moving some blocks from music_towns to music_other won't work. You have to change the main town script to tell the script to start music_other when you are in a town whit the blocks you moved in music_other. But you may have just done that.



Well yes, it's the way it has to work. If you prefer not to have music suddenly changing every time you change a "region" or a "town" (not a single cell) it's the price you have to pay.



When the delay is activated, music will suddenly change when:1) you move from a exterior cell to a dungeon or, if the option is activated, to a shop ro a temple. If you're in the Bitter Coast Region and change cell, but that cell belongs to the same region music won't change, so I think things are right. Or maybe I didn't get what you meant.



Well, there are things that the users can't change of course, but concerning others, I give the toy, the user will have to choose how to use the toy. And I'm not going to modify it thousands times for each person that thinks about it differently




Each one has a different opinio about how music should be handled in the game, there could be one hundreds different music mods like this around, mine is only an example about how it could be. Good for you that you found your configuration, and for GG, again, you're welcome

I'm actually quite lucky on this one. Since I choose to use the same music for most outdoor regions and the same sets of music for sets of towns, it's therefore unnecessary to have them each listed separately. I should be able to consolidate the scripts down to a much smaller size than they were before.

Also, the message boxes notifying the end user of the random town music seem to be taking up a lot of space. Their removals alone reduced the size of the script by about 20%.



Well, funny thing about that. I can find the parts in the main script that start the regional scripts, and and I can find the part that start the dungeon script. There seem to be no parts that activate the towns script.

(EDIT: nevermind, I'm an idiot. Found it)

Furthermore, it seems that if I use your mod - unedited - the game almost always wants to crash when I reload. After I got done editing it - and for reasons I can't explain - this behavior has changed to simply town music not starting when I reload a game (if I'm in a town), or the game still just crashing (anywhere else). And I'm pretty damn sure it has to do with the way the script run when the game is loaded combined with the game's very nasty habit of not flushing out data when it should.



Yeah, I said "cell" when I meant "area". Here's a more concrete example:

-Start in Seyda Neen. Seyda Neen background music plays. Move into the Bitter Coast. Seyda Neen background music remains (until finished). Go into Smuggler Cave. Cave music plays.

-Leave Cave. Bitter Coast music plays. Travel back to Seyda Neen. Bitter Coast music continues playing (until finished).

Granted, you seem to indicate that the caves would have responded this way whether I [censored] with the setting or not. Problem is, I can think of at least one indoor dungeon type (grottos, natch) that I'm trying to make contiguous with the overworld music.

Furthermore, there are several towns/regions that I'd want to behave like you say dungeons do (like Ghostgate), where entering causes an immediate music switch, and leaving causes a switch right back.

The biggest thing I'm still trying to figure out is why the xn_tws_included doesn't seem to work. Regardless of its setting, town music always changes to region music when leaving town. I have no idea why.

EDIT: w00t! Found the *one* line of code I had to remove to fix that problem.

Interior cells will always change music when you enter them, be them dungeons or shops (when shop music is enabled). If you want to move grottos list from dungeon music to region music, you have to do just that: move the list of grotto's cells from dungeon script to the region script. For example, a grotto located in the Bitter Coast must be moved to the Bitter Coast section of the region script. I think this is the simplest way and not a huge work since grottos are only a few. And yeah you have to fight well with script limit, I remember region script to be one at risk. And attention to conflicts with other cells, may cause more than one track triggered simultaneously, or even a crash. You will notice several "stop" vars that works as blocks to avoid conflicts. Using CS try to save before editing, you may get script limit errors, since the main scripts haven't been saved and compiled in the CS but in MWedit (major mistake I think, not recommended).



Don't know at this point, it's quite frankly depending on computer configuration, mod list and casuality (and obviously some instability that this mod may carry). I got rid of another MWSE mod last week and now in one week (maybe ten hours of playing) I got only one CTD,and not upon loading. Actually a miracle, never happened before to me. So the causes of your crashes may be different.

Yeah, that's pretty much the same thing I was thinking.

As much as I was trying to avoid it, it looks like what I'm doing is turning into a complete rewrite. Again, because I group certain types of towns together and have a lot of the same music for the overworld, I'm able to condense the scripts drastically. For example, all of the "fishing villages" (Hla Oad, Gnaar Mok, Khuul, Ald Velothi... and Seyda Neen) all use the original explore music. Thus, all are assigned the same town ID and share a random list in the town music script. The same goes for all Telvanni towns, Hlaalu/Redoran cities, and Nordic towns (Dagon Fel, Skaal, Raven Rock).

By the by... you consistently misspell "Dagon Fel" in the mod. And at one point, you reference "Vanderfeel" >.>



Actually, no, it's the town script that's ready to burst. And I've been using MWEdit, which isn't giving me any compilation problems so long as I also load the original three .esm's.



This is one of the main reasons I avoid MWSE-dependent scripts... my game without them is fairly stable, and I don't want to compromise that. I run into problems when loading a new save roughly 25% of the time, but your mod pushes that number up to 100%.

So, yeah, I'll have to see what can be done about that.

Come on not a big deal, anyway, for MW, and in particular when you use GetPCCell function, "Dagon FEL" is the same as "Dagon FELL", but "Dagon FELL" is different from "Dagon FEL", got it? :tongue:


I used to use five of them, this comprised, now I used 4 and the game is pretty stable, quite happy with it, I mean I have more than 170 plugins checked.