Musical Instruments



In games like “Lord of the Rings Online”, the ability to not only play freeform but also play music from predefined files was a giant step forward in the ability to become a true bard.

In “Shroud of the Avatar”, when a player has an instrument that can be carried, they will equip that instrument into their character paperdoll to define that instrument as ‘selected’. They may then at any time type “/play” to have their avatar pull the instrument out and be at the ready for freeform playing of the instrument. Using simple keypresses along the number row (1-8) and just two modifier keys (SHIFT and ALT), the player will have access to a full two octaves of notes, sharps and flats included. As a matter of course, all instruments will sound like the instrument they represent (a horn sounds like a horn, a cowbell sounds like a cowbell, and so forth).

Players can also type “/play” to automatically play a song that they have loaded onto their local machine. There is a directory within the installation of the game where players can put files to make that happen. These files are generally known as ABC files, but we are also supporting the MML file type.



Possibly one of the most exciting features within the entire Musical Instruments system is the ability for a group of players to have synchronous group play. Avatars can join a party of like-minded friends, choose the song from their machine’s loaded files to be synchronized to the group, and then the party leader will begin the playing for all members. In the game “Lord of the Rings Online” this was done to great effect – we hope to have some great performances in our world that can match that high bar.

While many instruments will available for players, for Release 22 only two will be ready for everyone – the lute and the piano. This will allow players to begin proving out both types of instruments; equipped and stationary. (The list of planned instruments is extensive: drums, flutes, cellos, harmonicas, bagpipes, vuvuzelas, triangles, and more!)

Holt Ironfell and the Bards of Poet’s Circle plan to adapt some of their music that has been licensed for Shroud of the Avatar to ABC or MML format for bundling with the game! Additionally, the Space Bards plan to make music from their Neon Milk album available to players who pledged during their Kickstarter.

Music System
The music system in generates events for notes that need to be played. It takes notation strings from files, parses them and "plays" them. MML and ABC are two popular text notations for transcribing music into simple plain text; MML has been used to play music on instruments in Mabinogi and Archeage, while ABC notation is used more generally as well as in Lord of the Rings Online. All of these games have online repositories of ready made songs transcribed into MML or ABC.
 * Mabinogi Music
 * ArchAge MML Library
 * LotRO-ABC.com

One of the easiest ways to generate MML or ABC files is to convert music from MIDI.
 * For MML there's 3MLE
 * For ABC there's:
 * BruTE
 * Maestro

Additional information about the music system can be found in this forum post.

Trivia

 * Special thanks to community member, Eniko, who developed the ABC and MML code library that are being used in SotA. Eniko made the code library free (MIT licensed) to give back to the community. There’s more information about her code library on her forum post here. Eniko is also a game developer and has a game called MidBoss that will be available on Steam.