Sengin

Fixed some more changes. Lowered the volume on the strings after the bluesy section, finally figured a way to make the transition easier (adjusting timimgs and tracks in audacity), panned the pads near the end, and edited some panning on the pianos. And a couple other small changes I can't remember at the moment. http://www.box.net/shared/goowvjl0k0 Thanks for listening.

What? That didn't make a whole lot of sense.... Anyway, DrumUltimA, I definitely like where you're going with this. A little critique though...at 2:55, it seems to be dragging out. The three notes you have going in the background are BEGGING to lead into a new section (either a transition of funkiness or just leading into 3:09). I'm looking forward to making the end of the current version less copy pasta Oh, and where's the review you said you'd do?

Oh nice transition from the end of the previous version to the new one. I think it's a tad bit loud on the last note (1:45), but it's good. The reverb on the drums is great. At 2:24ish, it gets a little dissonant because the notes are quick - maybe reduce some note lengths there and see what it sounds like. Also, I'm lovin' the style of the piece, especially the newest section (~1:42-2:30). It reminds me of jazz, but with different instruments (play some notes here, more here, a quick burst, more notes, etc...). Keep going with the same style and this will be amazing.

Ok, worked on it a bit more. Changed volumes and panning around between 1:15 and 1:51, also changed a instrument in the first Hydrocity Act 2 part, edited key velocities and note spacing at the end (to seem less synthesized), added a few notes here in the part before the beginning. I also added a couple notes in the transition between Hydrocity and Ice Cap, but the transition still isn't smooth (because they are 2 different Reason files because I started it before Reason 4 came out, so each tempo part had it's own file - yes, I did the speedup in Reason 3). I'm still trying to find a solution, I might have to add another measure in between or something. Anyway, there's been some changes, would appreciate another listen! http://www.box.net/shared/goowvjl0k0

First off, nice choice of song . At about 29 seconds in and for the next 2 or so seconds, it's a little loud. Also on that lead I think it could use a touch of reverb (or a little more than you've got). I also think that there should be somewhat more of a bassline than you've got (perhaps raising the volume on the lower-playing notes would help). I'm looking forward to this getting longer.

Ok guys, got it finished (note-wise). Here it is: http://www.box.net/shared/goowvjl0k0 Let me hear anything! I think I'm going to change the transition between Hydrocity act II to ice cap, and put the bass piano more in the background from 1:15 to 1:51.

Sorry, but I am not getting a myspace to download this and hear the better quality...I also vote for uploading somewhere else. That being said, I definitely like your mix and have listened to it a couple times. I definitely like the changes you've made, especially in the "repeat" of the main theme late in the song. And I definitely like your original section starting a little 1:30...killer. I do notice that a lot of the drums follow the same pattern and then a measure near a transition is different. It sounds a lot like the drums in the second original section (2:45) are the same as in the first section and throughout the whole piece. I suggest that at least during the second part (2:45 onward) that instead of a measure resolution on the drums that you do a 2 measure resolution (instead of the drums being programmed for 16 16th notes, it's programmed for 32 16th notes with the drums 17-32 being a variation on 1-16 (which you already have)). Does that make sense? Man, and that guitar is sweeeeet.

So? I can play melee if I want even though most people are sticking to brawl for tournaments (at least for now, who's to say down the road?).

Hmmm...I don't remember hearing about scar. Damn he's good. And I think I am now going back to melee definitely, and using brawl completely for FFAs and non-serious matches.

Sigh......I miss the old falco. And that is a damn fine video.

I go to vgmusic and listen to the midis that sound accurate. Then import them into Finale. Remove the drum track and any "echo" tracks. Then I replicate it as much as possible for piano (left hand and right hand - it helps that I can play piano and know what's possible to play). I use that as my base to start remixing. Save as a midi when finished with the main remixing/notation. Import into Reason and move stuff around, add instruments, add background sounds/pads, drums, etc...

I've already got Chipamp, but it screwed up winamps supported types (for example, mp3 isn't listed, so I have to scroll through the list until all files is selected everytime I want to open a file, plus it didn't detect that it knows how to read each of the chiptune formats). I haven't kept up with chiptunes in a long time, and didn't know there was a new format for genesis...I'll check it out. Thanks.

In the chiptune formats (gym, spc, etc..), is there any data to say "repeat when you get to the end to go to 0:7.4543"? I ask because the chiptunes are usually just one loop through the song, which is not enough to enjoy classic Sonic music. So I was wondering if there was a preference option I missed to include repeat data from a chiptune format, since if the gym file is supposed to be an accurate representation of the song, it should have a point within it to tell the genesis to continue the song at 0:7.4543 or at bit 3216 or something. And if there isn't, I think it would be a great feature to add, that way the song would loop endlessly as it would on a genesis (without the intro played everytime).

One thing that could really help is to offer a graphics course. I recently took an OpenGL course here (I'm a CS Major) and I can see the appeal it could have on people who don't know about it. "Do you want to learn how to make your own animations from scratch? Are you a physics major who needs to see a simulation but can't find one? Program it yourself!" You can even extend it to other interests, as "Do you want to learn how to create a game? Come and see what a major in Computer Science can do!" And then have courses in OpenGL, code optimization (or the optimazation can be a part of the Computer Systems courses where you learn about caching, virtual memory, how CPUs work (pipeling, etc..)) and other courses that COULD be used in game programming (for example, Human Computer Interfaces (make your GUIs pretty and easy to use!), and I HIGHLY recommend a course dealing with creating multi-threaded applications (parallelism)).

Well, if you're getting a dual-core CPU, the virtual machine should run on a separate core from the OSX OS processes, so you shouldn't have much of a problem with overhead (depending on the clock speed of each core). My roommate uses VMWare and has a quad-core, and I'm pretty sure the entirety of the virtual machine is run off a separate core than his default OS (Vista at the moment, used to be Ubuntu).

I say kudos to the developers of Bejeweled for being fucking awesome about it though. Rather than starting a lawsuit or just being pissy about it, they are flying the two out to their honeymoon and giving out copies for wedding favors.

Whatever happened to the 2-day thing? If you haven't played your match in 2 days, the one who has been trying to get in contact gets to move on and the other misses out.

Right, because there's gotta be tons of overhead for running an OS on top of an OS. Right, but without the backwards-compatibility, everything can be more efficient. Still, I may not be able to buy new software, but my old stuff will still work. And besides that, I'll either still be in college (depending on release date) or my brothers will be, so I should be able to get it at a discount. So for me, it's pretty sweet. But for others, maybe not so much. But at least there still IS a form of backwards compatibility.

Sweet. Can't wait. And damn, this sounds pretty amazing for a "hey, let's just record this song in minor."

Wait wait. You're telling me that 2^64 bytes is equivalent to approximately 127.5 gigs? No no. With a 32-bit system, you can have 4GB of RAM installed (though you can't utilize the whole 4GB, only about 3.5 like you said). But with 64-bit, that's approximately 18 QUINTILLION bytes. Basically, that's saying GB? What the hell is that? TB? Ancient. Petabytes? Well, at least we're starting to barely push the ball rolling. Exobytes? There we go, but with ~18 of them. With 4 exobytes of RAM possible to install, there is no fucking way the system would only leave 127.5 GBs to use. We aren't anywhere CLOSE to hard drives containing an exobyte, so we definitely aren't going to be installing nearly that much RAM, but still. And with 128-bit, well, that's just WAY too damn much. I don't think we have prefixes for the numbers around those areas yet. Unless I read the article wrong, didn't it say that everything will be backwards compatible with virtual machines? So that it will come installed with a virtual machine on it. So everything you have you just need to install and it will work fine, or work fine already. Well, I definitely have hope for Windows 7. Is it supposed to come out at the end of '09?

Aaah...I can listen to this song for a long while. Sax and piano = mmmmmm. I think that at a couple points, the piano could bit a little more involved. By that I mean, the rhythm doesn't get very complex (which is good for this style), but sometimes I feel there should be either 3 sixteenths or a set of triplets (the 3 notes and the note that comes after, 4 in total) in the higher range of the piano, around the octave between the C after middle C and the 2nd C after middle C. An example would be at 1:47 and 2:22, I keep wanting to hear a triplet (but not very loudly) in that range leading up to a note or two in the higher range I described earlier, and then resuming what you have. At least I think I do, it's hard to know for sure unless I were to hear it. If you do add some cymbols or percussion, keep it very light and in the background and it should sit well. Also, just out of curiousity, do you have plans of eliminating the saxophone clicks? They are fairly prominent in some places if you're wearing headphones, but otherwise it's not too bad.

FFX. Omega Ruins. Open 12 treasure chests in the correct order, that order being random everytime you load a game. Slightly different, yet a very small chance of happening. Besides, I didn't think they'd do something as stupid as random tripping, but they went ahead and did that. At this point, it wouldn't surprise me if air tripping wasn't a glitch ("OH NO! I MOVED MY FEET AND THEY GOT TANGLED AND NOW I FALL TO MY DOOM.") based simply on the fact they made it so characters will trip in the first place. It doesn't matter if the probability is 1/(2^32) (2^32 is the amount of values represented by a standard integer) for air tripping, it's not that difficult to implement it. I assume that everything that needs to be calculated (say if you air trip, air dodge, etc..) is calculated once per frame: void doWhenInAir() { ....//other stuff if(rand() == sucksToBeYou) //assuming rand returns a pseudo-random integer and //sucksToBeYou is defined as the integer chosen that means you will air trip { airTrip(); } ....//other stuff } The above code snippet would cause a trip 1 out of every 2^32 times (if the number was truly random, but we'll not get into this here). There would probably be other things (say that decrease the chances of tripping if your character is on the ground, etc..), but because I don't know how the developers chose to implement it, I can't comment on. But it's still a very easy thing to do (bother with something with a very small chance of happening). If they wanted to make the chance REALLY small, they could have used a double instead of an integer, and then you'd have a trip every 2^64 times (roughly 16 QUINTILLION times). But yeah, just because something won't happen very often doesn't mean it wouldn't be coded. Of course, it could still be a glitch, but if it wasn't, it's not that difficult to implement.

Towards Jam's essay: You've got some good points on bringing the wii to the casual market. Because that is their goal, they need to re-introduce gaming, sort of. Games need to be easy to not scare off the casuals or the people that are considering getting into the gaming scene. But, who's to say what Nintendo will do once they've established this? Perhaps after they have succeeded, their philosophy will change. "Alright, now that we have everyone, we can make games harder because no one will want something so easy, because after they've played it, it'll be even easier, so they need something harder to be entertained." Perhaps this will lead to the reverse: the next platforming mario game will be what to us, already gamers, mario galaxy should have been, a sequel to mario 64 in the sense of gameplay (more in difficulty for a platformer). Smash 4 will be what brawl, to us, should have been, the sequel in gameplay to melee, as melee was to smash 64. With this, they might change their online policy, as if their goal is to bring in more gamers, then they indoubtedly haven't played games online before, and Nintendo would want it to be easy and enjoyable for those who haven't played a game online before. Who's to say this will happen? Who knows. But I for one hope it does. I got a wii because I thought I would enjoy the new aspect of gameplay it'll bring (and for brawl, of course) with it's intuitive controls. But if Nintendo keeps doing things as they are and NOT appealing to people who have been playing video games a while now, a lot of people, including myself, will be disappointed.

Fuck Charter. Do not get them for an ISP if you have a choice. I pay for 5MB down and 1.5MB up and yesterday I found out I was getting 130KB down and a 30K faster up. What the hell Charter. Did you not think I would notice a half second of response lag online (from hitting the jump button to actually jumping, but it's too late because that giant fucking energy ball already hit me)? Or that it takes about 5 seconds to load google.com (most of it was in my cache) and about a minute to load speedtest.net? For the most part, you get what you pay for with Charter, but this whole week it's been fluctuating from 130K to 1MB down. And it's not the first time.

And I suppose that "Sengen" is referring to me?