FreeDoom graphic/music rescources

Doom 2 uses unique lumps for repeating tracks.

Protox said:

Well if i'm not whong thats is impossible technicaly

You're not whong. That doesn't make you right. Your not Techni Cally either. Thats is the truth.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Seriously though, Doom does repeat tracks in certain levels.

Protox said:

Well if i'm not whong thats is impossible technicaly (unless mapinfo) because some levels REALLY use other music from past levels example is episode 4 of doom 1 they use musics from episodes 1 2 and 3, in doom2 and heretic the same happen. only strife dont repeate musics.

You're right that we can't control the music for Episode 4. I think that's something we just have to live with. It should be possible to set individual music for all the other levels though. Doom 2 reuses music but does it by duplicating music lumps.

More precisely, we can't control the music for Episode 4 in all ports but it's definitely possible to have unique music in Doomsday, Eternity, Legacy, Vavoom, ZDoom, and their derivatives.

Of course there's the issue that doing that would affect people playing Ultimate Doom mods that replace Episode 4 levels and don't have their own MAPINFO. So, wads like Crusades, but not wads like 2002ADO. Personally I'd be inclined to say that's not really important, because Freedoom's focus now is more on being its own thing than on being a seamless replacement.

If people desire for their wads to be compatible with Freedoom, they can just update them. That way they'll also be able to remove any stuff which isn't their own or free or whatever, if they so choose to, thus continuing the Freedoom experience, as it were.
Question: seeing as Doom's music was mostly either grunge metal or heavy metal, should Freedoom have a different but just as iconic style? I was thinking glam metal would suit it well.

i really think strong pwad compatability should be kept, we can still give freedoom its own identity trough mapping and an expanded texture set. but if pwad compatability reduces freedoom will loose a lot of what it has going for it

Maz Hades said:

seeing as Doom's music was mostly either grunge metal or heavy metal, should Freedoom have a different but just as iconic style?

Maybe something like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTkCM7HHN5U
Altough I don't know if this type of music would translate well to MIDI

This music is cool and will be a unique stily for freedoom but that remenber me of another game: Nexuis

I'd MUCH rather listen to glam rock while playing it, rather than that stuff. That music sounds too serious and kind of boring.

raymoohawk said:

i really think strong pwad compatability should be kept, we can still give freedoom its own identity trough mapping and an expanded texture set. but if pwad compatability reduces freedoom will loose a lot of what it has going for it

I'm all for PWAD compatibility, but I don't think we need to worry about "music compatibility" so to speak. In the worst case if you load a PWAD and the music doesn't fit, you can just turn it off. It's not the same as how eg. textures need to maintain a compatible look.

I think this gives us the freedom to choose any kind of music. The default if we don't put any thought into it is going to be the same kind of guitar/rock style that was used in Doom, but I'm open to any style of music as long as it fits the levels.

Maz Hades said:

Heh, I see what you mean. It's not the worst one, but it could certainly do with a little tweaking. I'd be happy to fix a lot of Freedoom's music, but it's kinda hard getting other people to want it replaced. Sometimes I feel like Raymoohawk and I are the only ones taking this project seriously.

What happened with the music is that a lot of the music was plagiarized (Licensed laundered if you will), so the project had to quickly find replacements for MAP09, MAP11, MAP12, MAP13, MAP14, MAP15, MAP20, MAP21, MAP22, MAP23, MAP25, MAP26, MAP27, MAP28 and MAP29.

Jute quickly contributed a bunch of music from some long-since-dead project which the FreeDoom maintainers then put in to FreeDoom so all of the levels had music again. Some of Jute's contributions are quite nice; others not so much. I found the music in MAP13 so annoying (those sustained high-pitched "guitar" sounds hurt my ears), I just replaced it (in my unofficial fork which uses random maps) with Jute's much better music used in MAP09.

FreeDoom development comes in spurts. Raymoohawk's recent sprite contributions have fixed long-standing issues FreeDoom has had for over a decade. Maps have gotten better over the years, but there are still a lot of maps which really need to be replaced.

I'm glad to see as much development as FreeDoom has had (all of the monsters finally have sprites, the music is no longer license-laundered, many of the single player maps are finished complete with difficulty levels, and Raymoohawk finally fixed those ugly Zombiemen and Shotgun Guys), but there's still a lot that needs to be done before FreeDoom 1.0 can be released.

I've opened up a GitHub ticket about the issue with the music in four of the Phase2 megawad's levels: https://github.com/freedoom/freedoom/issues/156

SavedYouAClick: I think the MAP08 (d_ddtblu), MAP13 (d_doom2), MAP21 (d_count2), and MAP27 (d_romer2) themes should be replaced with music from other levels. And yes, the composers of these themes have made some really good Freedoom music.