Music in the Gold Demo

[Philippe]

I've been taking a look at the gold demo and I'm very impressed with the music selection. Someone clearly had a lot of fun playing music editor.

There are a few songs that suffer from really poor sound quality. I'm sure the music editor was aware of this, and those pieces are included for their iconic quality. I've only seen the demo version, and this may have been fixed in the patch, but I don't think there's a problem with a song sounding like a very scratchy long-playing record if it's iconic enough (it's the past talking to you, after all). But I do think it's a mistake to rely too heavily on the echo chamber effect in a sound editor to try to revive damaged old recordings (sort of the equivalent of trying to revive a patient with steroids). Again, this may have been toned down in later releases, but there are a few songs in the demo where the echo chamber as sonic emergency room effect was over-used, and when it gets over-used it creates its own problems. Please revisit some of the damaged ancient music and try again -- I made the same mistake when I was creating a musical jukebox for Combat Mission, and was chagrined when I heard the effects of some of my distorting sound-editing forays a few years later.

Just in case it helps, I think some of the US songs from WW I ended up in Hollywood movies in the 20's and 30's. Perhaps if you looked for early films involving James Cagney and George M. Cohan. Who knows, the studio might even let you borrow the song without charging an arm and a leg (with or without detatched crutches).

The following comes under the heading of unfair requests: it would be really nice if the songs that were being played were restricted to the side whose turn it is. This was a feature of the early Talonsoft Battleground games (I think they used separate folders for each side) and it really added to the immersion. I can imagine what some of the obstacles would be (besides time and money) but it wouldn't be difficult to add a national identifier to each piece of music (_GER,_FRA, _AUS, _RUS, etc), and then (a bit harder) rewrite the program so that pieces were only selected from the side whose turn it was. An impossibly complicated (though classy) variation on this would be to make the rule 1) play any piece of music from the side whose turn it is; unles 2) a specific unit had been selected, in which case only play that nationality until something else was clicked on. This would have the effect, for example, of playing French music for the Entente player until he decided to take a closer look at the Eastern Front, after which the game would probably play Serbian or Russian music until he decided to head back west. A programmer's nightmare, but almost possible.

[calvinus]

Hello Philippe,

all background musics have been taken for free from Internet...
that's why the quality is sometimes not good!

[Philippe]

vv