Plan for Hammerfell

[Don Bernardo]

Hey everyone! TR Music needs a plan!

I’m a new music modder here and I’m pretty excited to pick up where others have left off and make an awesome soundtrack for Hammerfell (Redguard was actually the first TES game I ever played!). So here’s what I’m proposing. As you can see from my MS Paint desecration of somebody’s beautiful map, Hammerfell seems to break fairly evenly into four geographic regions:

[img]http://www.uploadthis.co.uk/uploads/benstox/mapHFmusicalregions.JPG[/img]

1. There’s a plains/moor region encompassing Goldmoor, the Helkori Plains, and the Corten Mountains, this off to the east.
2. There’s a large mountainous region in the north where 3 Crown cities and I think Fang Lair are located.
3. There’s the Alik’r Desert in the west.
4. And there are lots of islands and costal areas to the south.

So similar to what was suggested by Macar in this thread:
[url]http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/old_forum/viewtopic.php?t=20224[/url]
I am suggesting that we create a unique soundtrack of minimum 5 songs for each of these four regions. Town music though, I am thinking, rather than divide it with the regions, could be divided up into its factions. That is to say, make a Forebear Town soundtrack, a Crown Town soundtrack, and a Lhotunic Town soundtrack, again of minimum 5 tracks each. This would keep things interesting and save us the hassle of having to give each individual town a soundtrack, It would mean that you could stagger out of the Alik’r into Hegathe and hear the same tunes you were hearing way back in Dragonstar, BUT had you staggered out of the desert into Gilane it would be a whole other story!

I personally do not find this to be an overly ambitious goal. Five songs isn't a lot of music, and I think this should be regarded as a bare minimum for each region, hopefully we can end up with more.

If there are no real objections, I think our most immediate task is to finish up Helkori/Goldmoor and Forebear Towns for a release!

Go or no go?

[Don Bernardo]

Sorry for the double post. I had some other thoughts/questions I thought deserved their own post.

The Macar thread I linked to above talks about 6 songs (5 explore, and 1 town) that have already been reviewed and accepted. Searching around the Music Forum I found versions of some of them but not all of them. And I can't be sure if the versions I found were the final ones either. Is there some place that all these files are located?

Other than that, this thread from 2007 is quite interesting and worth a read through for anyone interested in music here. There are some discussions of style for the Goldmoor/Helkori Region, that I think are still pertinent.

Edit: Oh wait a minute. I understand why I couldn't find the files before... hehe.. silly me...

[Jedak]

Well its good to see some enthusiasm! The last time there was some was when I first got in - but firstly, before you 'decide' what will be done like this always ask if there was a plan before. Which, for the record, there was.

I have to thank you for putting up that linky! I was baffeled as to where that thread went and now I feel really stupid knowing that all that happened was it losing the ! sticky.

Macars plan was a good plan but it had holes in it. Music tends to go along a lot faster than the actual mod so initially we planned ahead for there to be 5 town, explore and dungeon tracks for each region. For goldmoor we already came up with 4 explore and 1 town. There was also another two tracks that I made that could have gone in, 1 dungeon and another battle. Unfortunately, Macar never noticed the dungeon piece (:P) and due to scripting issues, battle tracks can't really be implemented -- battle music is the same in ALL worldspaces.

I don't think your Idea is much better don - in one region you have a coastline, a mountain range and a huge plain field and you call them the 'plains region'.

Also, you'd have the same music being played in a rugged mountainous town as in a coastal desert town. I think the region split Macar suggested was much more intelligent.


I have a plan that I think works much better. We cannot plan yet to the distribution of music throught ALL of Hammerfell - no other part of the mod is even planning that far.

But a couple of things should be definite. These things should be the explore and town music groups. They should be placed in regions. This is definite.
The definite regions at the moment should be:

Goldmoor region music
Helkori Plains region music
and Ahik'r Desert region music.

We should leave the mountains till later when the rest of the project catches up and we know how each range will look, will they actuall be different ect. Its not a bad Idea though for us to start writing some mountain-region music and then when the project advances, decide where it goes.

We should leave the Hews Band and the islands for the same reason.

And we should leave the Totambe Forest because its small and far away and etc. etc.

This means that towns with music to be made so far should be:
Rihad (Goldmoor)
Taneth (Goldmoor, perhaps some Ahik'r)
Some of Gilane (some Ahik'r perhaps)
Hegathe (Ahik'r)

Other towns, again, we shouldn't worry about untill the rest of the project should catch up.

Dungeon music we should not plan about because for all we know, the dungeons might not be all that different from each other - Vanilla music fits anywhere anyways. THIS SHOULD NOT REFRAIN PEOPLE FROM WRITING DUNGEON MUSIC! Perhaps a dungeon track would be played in ALL the dungeons of Hammerfell. This can be discussed.

Quagmire music we should not worry about untill something more substantial is done. This is a tricky one to figure out so it is open to debate.

Battle music just doesn't work. If you write some battle track which is totally Jeremy Soule and it would fit in Cyrodill as well then it goes in. Otherwise we shouldn't really worry about this.

This I deem is the best plan because it works long term (because it won't be crippled by a major cange in the making of Hammerfell) and short term (short term because if someone like you who is enthusiastic comes along they can actually DO something).

[Troubadour]

I was reading somewhere in the forum, (no clue where, lost track) that all music should be orchestral in nature. Is this true? Because I am writing a guitar piece that I think would fit the desert well, but it's not orchestral. Should I just abandon ship on that one?

[Jedak]

Don't abandon ship! Just add sustained strings in the background.

Or if its really good It might not need even that. The great thing about S&M is that it shouldn't be just solo works. You can just post an Idea or a melody, and someone will make a piece out of it, then another will sync it and change it so that it fits the other tracks that will be used. Anything is appreciated.

[Bloodthirsty Crustacean]

Are you guys sure you can get regional music working? It's been a long time since I looked at Oblivion modding, but last I checked, it was a mod-worthy feat by itself.

[Jedak]

Really? I was told that regional exploring music was easy-peasy.

Civilisation music is just scripted in the town worldspaces.

I have no clue about dungeon music but that doesn't matter too much.

I thought it was the Battle music that is impossible to put in a region.

[Macar]

A lot of people said it was easy, but when Wogya tried to actualy do it he encountered a big problem- and nobody had a solution at the time. The thread should be here somewhere were we discussed it- but I cant find it in the limited time I have now. but look around for it- it is a problem.

[wogya]

Here's the thread:
http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/old_forum/viewtopic.php?t=19710

It turned out that a fully functional music script is impossible. We still can release different tracks to each region and recommend players to use these when going to Hammerfell. Then they can choose if they wish to fully replace the contents of the music folder only when visiting HF or if they wish to mix our tracks with vanilla music all the time. My guess is that most people go for the second option anyway. We can also release a separate esp that scripts our music to play in HF, but this esp would be very unreliable and buggy.

PS. Hi everyone, haven't been around in a while... Still working my ass of with RL composing, but I do hope to make some more tracks for you one day!

[Jedak]

Macar!
Wogya!
You guys live!

[Don Bernardo]

It turned out that a fully functional music script is impossible. We still can release different tracks to each region and recommend players to use these when going to Hammerfell. Then they can choose if they wish to fully replace the contents of the music folder only when visiting HF or if they wish to mix our tracks with vanilla music all the time. My guess is that most people go for the second option anyway. We can also release a separate esp that scripts our music to play in HF, but this esp would be very unreliable and buggy.

That's good to know then, what we can and can't too. Thanks for clearing that up! Good luck with your RL composing!!

[Lady Nerevar]

[url=http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=878782]check this out guys[/url], it sounds like it could be exactly what were looking for. its an OBSE plugin, so customised music with it would have to be optional for those without OBSE, but it could make region specific tracks possible.

[Gez]

IIRC scripts that use an unknown function are silently ignored -- they just don't run and the game makes no error report about them -- so it's possible to have the OBSE scripts in the main mod itself. It's even possible to use this trick to detect whether OBSE is available or not. I know COBL does that for certain stuff like alchemy ingredient storters to decide whether to run the OBSE or the vanilla version of the sorter script.

Best person to contact for info would probably be Haama.

[Don Bernardo]

Hey that does sound like exactly what we're looking for! Worth a test run anyhow. I'd like to play around with that except I only have Morrowind ATM...