StormyVenture
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Status Replies posted by StormyVenture
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Merry Birthiversary!
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I've got some real bad news, and I'm ashamed to admit it.
I've just discovered that RPG Maker XP's sound system does not support audio buffers. This makes it impossible to loop custom soundtracks properly or to resume BGM from where it stopped when a battle occurred.
Out of all of the things I was willing to compromise on, this wouldn't be one of them. Therefore, it has become more fundamental to switch over to a different, more modern engine and drop RPG Maker XP. However, the bigger problem with that is the scripting for not only battle configuration but also for extra features outside of battles. Audio buffering is something I can't live without, but the only thing worse is realizing I spent four months out of my life wasting my time on XP. Still, I can't have the soundtrack playback the beginning of the theme after each and every random encounter. That can get quite grating and annoying, and it would likely deter a lot of people from playing Final Fantasy Friendship.
It's probably not the wisest decision, and it's probably not a good enough reason to switch to another engine. But it's a decision I hope that will provide quality assurance to players in the future. It'll be very tough to build everything up again, but...with luck and faith in myself, I can try to do things this way from now on.
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If your objective is to be able to return to a particular section of the background music, why not just slice up the "soundtrack" into segments?
Surely you could programmatically select which segment to play when you return to the main map/world? Or is the playback too choppy for you that way?
E.g.
[ Full Soundtrack (15 minutes)] => [ST - Part1] + [ST - Part2] + [ST - Part3] + [ST - Part4] + [ST - Part5]
The idea here being to have a group of sequentially ordered parts of uniform length. You would just keep cycling through them. Going out to a battle should either restart the "current segment" if it was close to the beginning of it, or jump to the next one in the sequence if it was close to the end.
Depending on the technical ability of the person creating the music, some sort of transitional sub-theme might help to give a better impression of continuity.
Of course, I am assuming that it's possible to track this somehow, at least in a primitive fashion.
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