Arcana

Hey, is there a chance you can consider moving around the "forums" submenu to display the forum subsections before the Chat and Social Networking/RSS? When I mouse over forums, I want to go to forums, and it takes more time to mouse down to where the forum subsections are listed at the moment because they're at the bottom of the list. Regards,

Okay I hate Aion's community even more than I hate WoW's community, it's official. Someone posts a poll up saying, Do you know a Casual who likes Aion? [ ] Yes [ ] No The original poster stands by his poll numbers and illustrates this his thread has 20+ pages of posters telling their "I am a casual who plays 5-10 hours a week and I like Aion" and goes into other threads and says, "If you look at this thread, you can see that 70% of people know a casual who like Aion, therefore Aion appeals to casuals." I made a mistake in calling him out on his bad poll setup and claimed that he said a majority of casuals liked Aion when he did not use the word majority. And then he told me that I was a liar and that I was a hypocrite for lecturing him about research methods. I've posted my apology, since I was wrong (I was thinking of editing my post after I went out to breakfast) but he had posted already. I am someone who tries to represent all sides of an issue as best as I can. I post my views but attempt to balance out both sides with neutrality, and attempt to ensure that I've covered all of the facts. If I make a mistake, you can ask me to clarify or ask me to explain, but to imply that I posted with the intention of lying is something that I cannot stand. It is a personal attack. So I think I'm done. The community is hopeless, even WoW's community is more positive than Aion's, where people insult each other for "being too casual" but yet the newest wave of insults is that the people are "levelling up too fast" and therefore don't deserve to enjoy endgame. It's sick. At least in WoW, the complainers for the most part were enjoying the game even if their posts were unrealistic. For some reason the Aion posters to go such extreme to defend their game, it's fanboyism at its worst. I'm going to delete my account because I'd rather read and post on WoW forums than on Aionsource now.

Because it's a thread about people being jerks in MMORPGs?

I see music as a piano roll. >.> Stop looking at me so strangely.

The Internet makes people so mean and it makes me sad Well, OCR is much, much nicer than a lot of communities for some reason... so it just can't be the fact that people are from the US

I'm trying to come up with stuff... nothing concrete is settling in yet. Going to try to submit though.

Well, keep in mind that most of the big sequencing and production programs (Cubase, Sonar, Logic Pro, etc) don't really handle notation that well. That may or may not be a problem for you but it's something to consider. Do you plan to record performances as well? You mentioned your piano so I'm guessing that may be something you want to consider as part of your needs, since almost always a well-played, well-recorded piano performance outdoes one done with samples. Almost every program has the ability to record MIDI, and most allow you to record audio. Keep in mind that if you wish to do MIDI you need to have the appropriate hardware for it - most pro sound cards have a MIDI in that you can use to connect your Clavinova to, or you can get a USB<->MIDI interface at most stores for $30-50. If you have a Mac, then Garageband comes on your Mac for free. That is a program that's definitely worth checking out. It's relatively simple but handles a lot of the simple needs very well and, considering the cost, is an extremely good deal. Most music software is set up similarly to Garageband too, so if you can navigate Garageband you can probably graduate to most other software without much of a big deal. I'm a Mac User so I personally use Logic Studio which costs approximately $500 now. Logic is a big piece of software - comes with a lot of good plugins and samples. The lower grade version which comes with less samples and plugins is Logic Express - a bit cheaper but also provides an upgrade path to Logic Studio if you wish. You'd have to talk with Windows folks about other options. Sonar is probably something you may want to browse (by Cakewalk). FLStudio may be an option as well since it's cheap and very easy to use, but it doesn't come with a lot of samples out of the box (correct me if I'm wrong please). I'm sure someone with a bit more experience can help you out with some more specific questions. In general the more we know about what your abilities are and what you plan to do, the more we can help you out so keep posting

I used to have a FInal Fantasy VII web page that drew at least half a million hits between 1997 and 2001. Some time in 2008 Tripod randomly took it offline and I didn't have it backed up for me to put it back online again It was a part of a number of web rings and partners (such as guestbooks and counters) that eventually all went away before the actual site itself went away. I still am kind of sad that it disappeared (and never really made it into archive.org either).

Happy birthday!

What's your budget like, and what type of computer are you using or plan to use? Also it seems that you only want this to preview your compositions, or are you planning to produce music as well as compose it?

Biznut mentioned this show to me like a week before it started. I live kind of close by but I had some deadlines

I Lulzed too.

I don't get the in-joke :(

Can someone give me a way to try this game out for free through a beta invite or something? I know I can get one by leaving preorder money but.. well, I don't want to pay for a game I don't know I'll enjoy.

In my opinion? No. I listened to it a second time and heard some signs that the source was Megaman III but even then it's a stretch.

Ars Technica. Their coverage is not that extensive but I find that they are very frank in their reporting. To fill in the gaps I tend to visit other sites once in a while (usually OCR) to see if there are word of mouth games to look up.

Oh yeah, a great way to get yourself involved and making music is to join some projects and competitions. Even though they're "competitions" they're not really competitive. It's a good idea to have some work you've done as a vocalist available to demonstrate your ability. But yeah, do One Hour Compo, we'd love to have you.

I associate AV in WoW with generally bad and annoying things, ha ha but I understand your analogy.

WoW from 1-80 is pretty entertaining, there's a lot to do and the world is pretty rich. It's just that I played it through like 5 or 6 times over. Aion's current problem is that it really slows down and becomes a grind fest after 35.

I think this is actually a pretty recent phenomenon and was kind of "crowned" by WoW. It's definitely a source of huge amounts of crying on Aion since in Aion it takes an average player 300 hours to reach max level. A lot of the players who are on Aion wanted to level faster than that. Others of course are concerned about a lack of content from Levels 35-50.

I haven't played DoTA, no. But your description helps a lot, thanks. I don't know if I'd be any good at this style of game really, and you guys seem really serious

This is pretty good for a first remix. The really wet synths at the beginning really set a good mood for the remix. The arrangement seems a bit conservative - I haven't really listened in detail to the entire source but the remix seems to reflect very closely the source material. A lot of the strengths of the composition are related to the strong source material (yes, I know what Touhou is and who ZUN is). I don't have timings with me, but there's a part probably about 1/4 way through the song where the lead seems to get out of sync with the beat. Maybe it's because you didn't quantize everything? May want to look at that. The song begins to get repetitive at the end after the "B" part, it's as if you ran out of ideas or something. Seems like the ending parts can use more work. If this was a club mix, you'd probably want to break down just to some drums. Another issue with this song is production. I like the reverb on the lead synth but when the backing synth comes in early into the song, it muddies up the song quite a bit in that mid-to-high frequency range. The instruments start to drown each other out. The drums sound really dry as well, you might want to compress the kick a bit more and put some effects on the drums to make them sound less weak. The sequencing itself seems quite good, you have a lot of variety in the velocities. It's a good first remix. I like the overall vibe going on and the atmosphere is great. It's not up to OCR standards though, but there's some cool stuff going on here.

This isn't bad for an early remix. The song, production wise, is still very crowded in the middle frequencies. You'll want to spread out the instruments, not only left and right, but also to get a good balance between low bass and upper ranges. The song starts to get muddy at about 30 seconds in. The main thing for me is that beat still doesn't come in early enough. When it does, the kick is simply not punchy enough. 1:37 is too late. I think this song would benefit from other percussion as well. Snares, hihats, you want them. The synth textures are nice. The "tonguing" of the backing synth is fun, and the accenting saws add some nice texture. The lead synth has a neat sound to it. The final thing is that the arrangement isn't really that innovative. It's interesting but the main theme is very much kept intact and there's very little variety. For this reason it isn't OCR material. Keep at it!

You can't hit 80 in 30 hours unless the character was already at Level 70... it's about 4 hours per level from 70-80. I levelled recently (over the summer) and it took about 5 /played days to level from 1-80, and I'm very familiar with WoW.