Interlopers.net Forum - Half-Life 2 News & Tutorials

I'm making a scifi map and want to have everything synchronized with a beat, with all the different objects in the map emitting some sort of sound that builds on the beat. Like Rez, but not nearly as complicated:


First question - what audio program should I be using to make the beats/supplementary sounds? I want a digital trance/techno-esque sound to it, so there shouldn't be a lot of nuances I need to worry about when adding melodic stuff. A more beginner-friendly program would be best.

Second question - Entity-wise, how do you think I should go about this? Right now my thought is-

logic_timer fires on each beat with outputs to:
-play beat sound
-make glowing things in map flash
-add 1 to math_counter, which counts every 4 beats and plays a downbeat

On top of that, physics objects and usable items should have unique sounds (i.e. a small riff when somebody throws an object), but what if the player triggers them off-beat?

Another idea would be to have basic background music as a track playing, and try to sync up the triggers to it, but that sounds like it could be thrown off beat too easily.

Ideas? Suggestions? Hopefully I can make this very modular and easy to add on to.

i have to say that City17 has a dynamic music system similar to your description and the best thing you can do is make a mod of this and install Fmod, instead of using Miles. With a little coding, Fmod allows you to do stuff like this with much more ease.

I'm kind of testing the waters with the idea of dynamic music, and am planning to keep this project as a small deathmatch map with just a beat and some accompanying sounds.

But... Fmod looks amazing. After this, I was planning on exploring the idea on a wider scale. So thanks for the advice! Though I'm not going to make a mod out of this, my next project is definitely going to use Fmod.

if you're going to use counters to do this, i recommend you look at this chart http://www.angelfire.com/in2/yala/9mustool.htm to figure out the timing coupled with the BPM of your music.

Many thanks.

Just make sure your BPM falls on either 60 or 120 (FL Studio default is 140, Ableton is 120, Reason is 120). Then you can set your math counter to every second (if 60) or every half second (if 120).