ectogemia
-
Posts
1,984 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
1
Content Type
Articles
Profiles
Forums
Events
Posts posted by ectogemia
-
-
How is the multiplayer human vs human, or via LAN with 6 people and no AI? If everything is great except the AI's combat skill, that's something to let the rest of us know about.
I've not played multiplayer yet, but if it's anything like Civ IV, and I can't imagine it being different, then you have 2 options for game flow:
1) simultaneous turns -- totally unfair, especially in war and VERY tight resource-grabbing races
2) sequential turns -- with as few as 2 people, this can almost double a game's length; imagine this with 6 people. my god.
I used to LAN Civ IV with a roommate, and we were soooooo booorrreed with it, especially if one of us were dragged into a war. At that point, one player would take 20 seconds per turn, the other 5 minutes. Player 1 has no choice but to play with himself for the remaining 280 seconds before he gets his next 20 second turn.
Civ has been and always will be a game best experienced in single player unless you have endless patience for multiplayer. Being that we're all from Generation Y'ish, patience is probably not something you or I have much of. Therein lies the problem, though. Civ V isn't a particularly memorable single player gaming experience. In fact, I haven't played it in a while because I clowned on the CPU on the 2nd highest difficulty on my 1st game. Any fan of prior Civ games know that just shouldn't happen. So what's left for me to do if it was that easy to begin with? Do something else.
21-year-old grandpa bitching and tl;dr alert: Civ V spoon-feeds you victory like most new games. I'll stick with older games where you can feel the passion and attention the developers applied to their games, where you feel like you're getting a "package" and not a "product", where the developers weren't afraid to challenge you. Planescape: Torment vs. Fable? Chrono Trigger vs. Pokemon Chartreuse? Counterstrike vs. Halo: Reach? Deus-Ex vs. Heavy Rain? Starcraft vs. Starcraft 2? It seems like not more than 10 years ago, the best the industry had to offer was lightyears better than the best put out today. And 20 years ago, the industry was offering games of similar quality to 10 years ago. So why the complete shitslide of quality in the past decade? Gaming is popular now, and I think that's a great thing, but it's pushed a lot of old-schoolios like me to the margin where the only new games that appeal are indie games or small-house games that still exude the developer's honest effort and have gripping charm and impressive depth. Minecraft, anyone?
Gaming is focused on a certain type of multiplayer these days such that developers no longer have to care about adding much depth to their games because the experience comes from interactions between players, not between the player and the game. Some have no problem with this, and in some contexts I don't either, but I fell in love with gaming as a single player experience, and this new direction in popular gaming isn't wooing me much at all. It lends itself to milling out shitty games until a "hit" randomly manifests to cover the costs of the failures (see: Hollywood movie industry). I'm starting to think Civ V is just another milled out game trying to be a hit rather than an honest effort just to produce a quality, challenging, mentally-involving experience.
If you read to this sentence, bless you, kind sir/madam!
-
Did you try going to Options > MIDI Settings and check the Enable box?
Parents who protest against them because they think violent games are bad for humanity.
Nooo, I mean that I'm having trouble mapping the knobs and twirlys and faders and so forth to FL Studio. In fact, I have no idea how to do it. I'll probably have to read a guide after I churn out this 12 page paper
I'm tired of college! Always getting in the way of my music!!Hah, I remember my mom thinking for the longest time that violent video games would make me murder everything. I wasn't allowed to have Mortal Kombat when it came out... so I just went to my friend's house and played it all the time. Kome to think of it, the first cheat kode I ever looked up on the internet was the blood kode for MKI. Take that, mom.
-
Hah, trust me, I'm not blaming video games. What kind of sick bastard would EVER blame VIDEO GAMES for ANYTHING!!?!??
That being said, I shirked a lot of piano practice back in the day to re-re-re-re-re-re-re-play Chrono Trigger or just about any other SNES JRPG. Meanwhile, the Chinese kid down the street was practicing piano 4 hours a day and playing Carnegie Hall at age 13 (no joke).
Yeeeaah. Having some direction from DarkeSword could help... I'm kind of going it alone here. Anyone else find the learning curve for electronic music stupidly steep? Can't wait to get over it. This MIDI controller I just got that isn't mapping automatically to FL Studio either is just more shit on the shit pile.
-
Thanks, that seems to have fixed the problem. Also, out of curiosity, how does a 14-year-old know this much about audio and computers? Impressive. Maybe I should have played fewer video games when I was a kid... nah.
-
I installed the ASIO4ALL driver and switched to the driver from the "Primary Software Device" (which works but has high latency). Upon doing this, I lost output and couldn't hear anything, although the input from my controller was still registering. My roommate, an audio engineer, tried to help and fiddled with the buffer length and increased it. Now, when I switch to ASIO4ALL from the default driver, my computer freezes?
Plan B is to uninstall the ASIO driver to bring it back to default settings and see if I can finagle it some.
Plan B.5 is whatever anyone else's advice is, maybe some other drivers, settings, or ways to fiddle with the ASIO driver as to prevent freezing and allow output.
-
Alundra... aaah.... the memories, I absolutely love the village in Alundra, it's classic. The music in the game is top notch too.. I'd play this game over and over again over a new Hyrule Rehash lol. This game is immortal in my eyes and ears
Just bought it again, even though I have the original Working Designs package sitting on my shelf. Getting Arc The Lad 1+2 when 2 is released as well. Games these days need to get their passion factor up because I still think PS1 and 2 beats the crap out of the PS3 era.
Yes. We should hang out.
-
So I just got my M-Audio Axiom 61 Pro controller in the mail today.
YES.
But!!! The latency is kind of annoying. I'm able to get it down to 43ms on FLStudio 9. I have no idea what a "good" latency is, as I've just recently gotten into MIDI, but I can tell it ain't 43 ms. I'm a pianist, so it's killing me to play sweeping passages and be able to feel the notes coming out well after I hit them ::shudder::
I'd like some input on how to reduce my latency. I'm aware it's either probably a CPU or sound card issue, and given that I have this laptop with a shitter onboard soundcard, I would imagine that's the problem.
That being said, I'm only computer literate, not computer brilliant, so my own diagnosis is operating from a not-so-grand working knowledge of things. Anyone have any advice? Thanks!
-
::SNES::
Earthbound $negotiable [Ectogemia] (10/10)
Chrono Trigger $negotiable [Ectogemia] (10/10)
Final Fantasy III $negotiable [Ectogemia] (10/10)
Breath of Fire II $negotiable [Ectogemia] (10/10)
Secret of Evermore $negotiable [Ectogemia] (10/10)
-
There were so many memorable songs for me on the NES, but the first song I distinctly remember busting out the tape recorder for was the Super Mario 64 credits song.
A few years later when my family got our second computer, I had my dad buy a microphone and a long cord for it so I could stretch it all the way to the TV to record the soundtrack for Super Mario RPG. That was also the first CD I ever made for myself. Going back and listening to it brings back all sorts of memories, even if the sound quality is crap.
EDIT: Ectogemia, you just reminded me, the first music CD I ever owned (VGM and in general) was the Banjo-Kazooie OST I got for preordering B-K at Best Buy in late-May, 1998. The second CD I owned was the Super Mario 64 OST, which was free with a Nintendo Power subscription renewal. And the third was my Zelda: Ocarina of Time 4-track sampler CD for picking up the game at K-Mart on day one. So many great memories of being 12...
Although the NES is easily my favorite system, I really grew up with the SNES and N64. About 99.999% of the reason I love video games so much is that I'm a complete nostalgia junkie. Seriously, if I had one wish, it would be to be a kid again. Since I don't have any wishes, I'll just have to be an adult who acts like a kid
not enough of those around, that's for damn sure. Hah, you reminded me of this... remember when Ocarina of Time came out, and Nintendo Power had this offer where you could buy your very own REAL!! ocarina for $60? My friend bought one, and he still has it in his room today like 11 goddamn years later.
1990s > 2000s > 2010s (1980s > 1990s!!? dare I say?)
I'd hate to be a kid these days, growing up on Halo and CoD and that crap. There's just no charm to anything anymore. Except maybe Minecraft. OK, definitely Minecraft.
And totally random aside: Anyone remember that super-fast, arpeggiated, delayed harp song from Secret of Evermore in the ancient Roman place? It's not on the OST!! I played through on a ROM and savestated it while that song was playing just so I could hear it, hah.
-
Actually, now that I think about it, Nintendo Power sent me some "thanks for reading our shit" thing about a decade ago where I got to pick between like 5 things for free. I picked the Banjo Kazooie OST... which is not the best.. but I guess that goes down as the first OST I ever got.
-
As a Civ IV fan myself with some pretty serious skills (could hold my own on max difficulty!
), I have to say that I'm not terribly happy with Civ V. My 1st Civ V game was on Immortal. I crushed everyone without effort. It took me a month to get to Immortal on Civ IV. That says something.At some point, it just becomes clear that you're going to win the game, but you have to grind through another 150 turns to do so. This isn't Civ. There are no miraculous CPU victories. They just kind of crumble. And they don't "get" the 1-unit-per-tile combat.
Rather than write a nasty diatribe about Civ V, I suppose I could sum up my thoughts that Civ V is like most games that come out these days: pretty, but only inches deep. The gameplay leaves a lot to be desired, at least in light of previous Civ games, especially Civ IV. And since I've never been one to care too much about graphics -- mostly just gameplay -- Civ V didn't draw me in.
Side note: My Axio 61 Pro was delivered as I typed this reply!!!!!
:) :) -
That's a tough one since just about all of my childhood was spent playing games. I remember loving Mario 3's and Kirby's Adventure's music, but I started to play music around 8 or 9 which is around the time I first tried Lufia II and FF6. I remember just turning on Lufia II and listening to the select a file music for a loooong time. No one has ever or will ever use an SNES harp to better effect than the guy who composed that game's music. Although, I didn't REALLY get interested in VGM until I downloaded some Uematsu sheet music for piano. I still have those 12 year old pieces of paper sitting on my music stand right now, and I play Terra's theme pretty frequently even today.
EDIT:
Oh wow. I just listened to a random Lufia II youtube song... turns out that's the melody I've found myself whistling but unable to place for about a decade:
-
Well, you've convinced me.
What? Smoke that weed? I don't kn... OK!
I love-ve-ve-ve Zelda games (LttP MMMMMmmmm), but yes, they are stupidly easy, hence why I don't really play them anymore. Thanks for reminding me it exists
Time to find a copy.
-
Yay, Arcana has seen the light!
The more I read, the more excited I get about it. I've always thought becoming in fluent in audio-ese would be years in the making, but this is expediting the process soooooo much.
I'd like to see what other people who have bought it think about it.
I have no idea what Ricky Snoman was thinking when he named it Dance Music Manual.
-
Sounds like a very interesting book.I should look it up. However, being taught how to do electronic music from a book might prevent you from figuring out your own style / sound. Usually somebody tries to emulate a style and ends up doing something very different because of equipment / knowledge discrepancies.
In response to the last 10 posts or so I have only this to say: Yes.
And this:
I don't recommend that anyone buy this book, read it, and proclaim themselves Earl of Musicton. That's certainly not my plan. Also, I think the title is awful and it misconstrues this book's shining feature: its survey of electronic music theory and how you start with some MIDI signal that gets shaped into something you want (not necessarily something you're emulating) for your purposes.
Having gotten through a good chunk of the first part of the book, the electronic music theory part, I can say that I've learned a TON, and it was ALL without emulation or listening to anyone else's music. I now know what pretty much all the knobs do IN DETAIL on all the effects in FL studio. For example, I now know that not just "turn up dis knob make sound go tweEEEeeT!!" but that the Q/resonance amplifies the frequencies near the cutoff frequency of a filter. Another cool bonus: I can make sweet-ass synths now with Synth1, 3xosc, and even the almightmy behemoth, Sytrus (!!?), all from scratch. The author goes into a lot of detail regarding common (and uncommon) parameters seen all over DAWs.
The book is structured such that by the time you choose/choose not to read the second part, the stylistic analyses, you should have a strong understanding of the fundamentals of synthesis and electronic music. This way, there will be few "knowledge discrepancies" that will keep people from falling short of emulating a style, should they so choose, or realizing their own.
Again, the title is completely misrepresentative of what the book really is, so I think. If I had to give it a more accurate title, I'd call it "Introduction to MIDI, Synthesis, and Production with Stylistic Applications" or something along those lines.
I don't mean to sound like a dick at all, I just thought I should make it clearer exactly what people are looking at on that there Amazon link in light of what you said.
-
We have a pirate's cove? Then we have to build a pirate ship...
wait for it...
in a glass bottle.
-
I'm with you on the tweaking. Electronic music as a product is a wonderful feeling and endlessly entertaining to listen to. Electronic music as a process is fairly often just painful.
Sooooo maaaannny knoooobbbss tooooo fiddddlllee wwiiittthh. And none of those knobs write your music for you
I've found that I can make some fairly decent beats by focusing on the type of sound I want rather than the rhythm. This way, I'm not thinking so much about rigid beats, but more about an overall sound. Basically, I isolate the instruments I want first, then, if the rhythms will be simple, I start fiddling with the step sequencer and create a few bars of percussion before I ever listen to any of it. If the rhythms are a bit complex, I'll open up the piano roll and write my parts there. More often than not, they sound fairly close to what I actually wanted, and I just kind of tweak the rhythms from there.
The "writing by feel" thing works well, again, for simple-ish beats. Things like breakbeat and D'n'b... really, what the hell? I have no idea how people come up with that, although I do know that there is a fair amount of delay involved in some beats to make them sound far more complicated than the notated rhythm actually is. I experimented with this and got some cool results. Give it a try.
Thanks for the heads up on those samples. I'll have to check them out.
-
Yes, it's down. If minecraft.net is inaccessible, so is our beloved server.
I've broken into a cold sweat, I'm shaking uncontrollably, and I've started shouting at my furniture. These are signs of serious addiction
-
OCR Minecraft server (hosted by fireslash!)
206.217.135.90:25565
Handle list (OCR name / MC handle):
Capa Langley / scytheful
Darklink42 / Darklink42
Deep Thought / howiec92
Ectogemia / nabecker210
HalcyonSpirit / HalcyonSpirit
Halt / HaltMusic
Mr. Bottle Rocket / FerrousCadaver
Necrotic / Sloogs
prophetik / prophetikmusic
The Mutericator / Mutericator
Current projects:
Glass highway
-Need a creative artist to put designs beneath the highway
-Need sand/glass in chest near spawn. Keep it comin'.
Massive strip mining
-To gather communal materials for larger projects
-To stockpile materials with no use as of yet (redstone, carts, tracks) in anticipation of update
Obsidian gathering
-To satisfy prophetik's craving for a tall, thick, black "monolith"
-
I'll go ahead and make an "official" Minecraft thread and keep a running list of OCR names and MC handles, assuming someone hasn't done so already.
-
I'm nabecker210. I live in La Chicken Itza, but the name doesn't make much since because my ziggurat isn't festooned in feathers yet.
My addiction became clear when I tried to connect to the server 15 times in a row to no avail...
...
-
on a related note: i remember downloading some SoE arrangements in the early days of napster. they certainly didn't have an amateur sound to them; could that have been bonus stuff from the OST release?
This news definitely calls for bumping:
To answer your question, yes, it is bonus stuff. Jeremy and Julian Soule arranged a few of their own songs with modern instruments. Very cool.
-
This is my kryptonite right now as well. And weird... I took piano lessons from a young age as well. Music twins, I guess. I except that I don't have any samples really at all. I've visited some free sample sites and downloaded a few dozen, but mostly, I'm unimpressed.
Where'd you find yours, specifically the drum samples?
Wish I could have helped
-
I've lost most of my guitar skill having not played in over a year, but basically, I just shredded. A lot. This built my dexterity veeeeerrry quickly, but again, I basically just shredded. I rarely played any chords, and in retrospect I'm sure that stunted my development both as a guitarist and a musician. I'm a very proficient pianist and guitarist, but I'm chord-retarded, and it makes composing and improvising difficult and my products are often bland.
Also, I quit guitar mostly because I felt like I wasn't getting anywhere anymore. I was also premed at the time, so that may have contributed... but I'm no longer premed, so it's back to music with me! Anyway, don't give up because you aren't progressing at the moment. Plateaus are adaptations to a schedule. In nutrition and exercise, I espouse "confusion" because it prevents the body from reaching a plateau and instead leads to constant progressive adaptation. The same principle can probably be applied to music. Whatever your "routine" is now, forget about it for a while and practice a different way. Confuse your neuromuscular patterns and force your brain to approach your guitar playing differently. Playing the same scales constantly? Try an exotic variation. Playing the same chords/chord progressions? Voice them differently, play them in a different key, etc. Doing things consistently and constantly will invariably land you on a plateau where your brain has formed the necessary neural network to accomplish the same task(s) you keep putting before it. Being creative, devious(?), and spontaneous with your practice will force your brain to commit more of itself and different parts of itself to your music.
So I guess my advice is this:
To optimize your growth as a guitarist, play what you love (in my case, shredding like hell) because you'll get good at your favorite style and its requisite techniques. You'll have the most fun doing this, and you'll be most likely to stick with it, that is, until you reach the plateu, in which case....
...to optimize your growth as a musician, play what you love AND what you must because you'll get good at EVERYTHING, even if practicing some things is really a drag (e.g. playing Good Riddance 5000x when you can't stand the song). It will pay off, and doing some of drudge-work is a small price to pay for shortening the distance between your mind and your fingers. I wish I'd done it before I lost my guitar technique. Oh well. Back to the keyboard for me, could be worse.
Civilization V
in General Discussion
Posted · Edited by ectogemia
The easiest way to win in Civ games has always been to focus on research and be nice to everyone to prevent them from declaring war on you. You get to future tech first, you build the spaceship way before anyone else, you win. It's not a very exciting way to win, but it works, and again, it's by far the easiest method. A research victory is even easier than it has been in the past, though. Even on Deity, I find myself well ahead of most civs in tech. There are, however, a couple of leaders -- one of the Arabic ones, whose name I can't remember, is coming to mind -- who will always blow you out of the water in tech and necessitate a different approach. Easy solution: build 8 swordsmen swordsman by turn 120 or so. Winner!!!
The hardest method has generally been domination victory, eliminating all of your opponents. In Civ V, not only is war so simple that domination has become the easiest (and most tedious -- moving 1 unit at a time every turn is a killer, as is fighting off endless hordes of obsolete enemy units) method of victory, they made it EVEN easier by requiring that you only capture the capital cities rather than wipe out all opponents' cities. The capitals always seem to be right by my borders, too...
Despite all my gripes with Civ V, I still think it can be fixed with a patch that rewrites the AI's approach to war, addresses the moronic happiness system, and requires that you capture all enemy cities, not just the capitals. Why wasn't any of this caught in playtesting? I'm just going to ride out the storm for now and wait to see what changes they make in the future before I pick it up again. There's still hope to pull a good game out of the fire, the developers just need to respond to the criticism.