Interactive Instruments & Tunes ? IDEA!! -- (Dev) Replied

So we've seen that a new stretch goal has been added... Interactive Musical Instruments. How awesome is this?!

Sure, we saw the piano get played in the demo, but nothing else. Imagine you take up the barding profession and are able to reproduce the tune "Stones" on your lute and you visit the cities, playing that awesome tune.

What if it was possible to record and "memorize" a tune by writing the chords down on sheet music? Then, after practicing and practicing on your lute, you finally get it down, you "memorize" it and now when you select your lute, there is an option to play your memorized tune!!

What if we took it a little further and said you could even SELL your sheet music? w0ot!

Of course, the option to be able to turn music being played by friends/non friends would be an excellent addition to prevent spamming of music.

What if you were in a lost tomb, or deep in cavern and happened to come across ancient sheet music that was very rare, kind of like in Skyrim finding books throughout the world...

 

Nice! LOTRO did a great job with this, and the sheet music idea is also great, RelExpo! I'd love to see the music all over the place.

 

But NO BAGPIPES. A fundamental medieval instrument. Who approved that?

 

VERY cool ideas by Jouten about ways to use instruments for quests!

 

I love the idea of sheet music where one player can sell their songs to another, in game, rather than relying on out of game "scripts" to exchange music like in LOTRO.

 

All I want is to see a tour of three or four players going to various theatres in different cities playing Music with Rocks In.

 

I like this idea RealExpo. Yes, Lotro implemented this very well and i have seen players which assembled around great musician. This gives the world live.

 

I would love to see in-game instruments playable with USB MIDI controllers.

 

I'm a musician irl, so I can totally dig this idea! I was also hoping maybe buffs could be attached to instruments and music. Something as simple as "Song of Strength, Life, Death, etc." would be really cool for characters with high experience with instruments. ORRRR, perhaps crafting instruments (and songs as you suggest) you can add your own buffs to the instruments/songs. It would be like crafting spells in Oblivion! (I'm sad that they removed that in Skyrim).

 

Would great as a bard/provoker too as you would be able to change up your little tunes. Interesting idea.

 

We are always looking for ways to fictionalize game features to enrich the world. Sheet music as a method to exchange songs is a great example of this. Some details to iron out but great stuff.

In regards to MIDI controllers to play instruments, we have discussed this as a possible programming task we could look to the community for help with. Write a Unity MIDI plugin that we could use for the game. It is hard for us to spend development time on this feature right now but it would work well as a compartmentalized external task.

 

I'd add to wish of frimsah, with the MIDI integration. That makes the instruments really playable, as opposed to clumsily clicking around with the mouse So I hope you get some input there.

The sheet music idea is excellent, also. It may even be a kind of alternative, if MIDI is not feasible.

 

The use of .abc files is very cool. Since it has already been done in Lotro, i wonder if it is feasible in sota? I would be extremely excited to have musical instrumentation of this kind coming to SotA.

 

I am always pushing for the .ABC file implementation myself - I am a huge fan of the implementation in LOTRO, and also the huge amount of ready-made content that would be available if we did this.

 

A few people have mentioned LotR and I wasn't sure what you were talking about, as I didn't make it that far into the game. But here's a link to it and this would be great to see in SotA for sure! As I mentioned before, there could be puzzles that need a tune played to progress that might be learned from a bard, or heard being whistled or even a book or sheet music.

 

please do not just have them the say way as UO please for the love of all the UO gods of old please let them accually serve a purpose and I don't just mean for peacekeeping\provocation but for the skill training side of things, like each instrument takes various amounts of skill to train in and your ability to play the instrument gets visually better as you practice and skill up and also please let there be a selection of music we learn and not just the same old tune played by the instruments

Thanks,
Matheryn

 

So now can we get something like Eurovision?
Players represent different areas of the game and compete against each other while letting the other players vote for who is the best?

 

This is Stones from Ultima played in Lord of the Rings Online, but played from an .abc file. Lotro has a setup where the player types "/music" to queue the instrument, and the player can use ctrl or shift to change octaves while pressing numbers 1-9 for notes. Conversely, the .abc file is played after typing "/music" by "/play stones.abc" There is also an option to sync instruments if players want to play together which is shown in this video. I am certain that the SotA team could easily put their own flavor and genius into this. Also, .abc files are universal and are used in midi players and in many other conversion type players. I have seen some people on the internet that create their own scores though extensive knowledge of how to create the .abc files to play their music. I would love to have Every SotA song, even old Ultima songs, like New Magincia town music, or Moonglow music, as an .abc so that I can play a song while in the tavern.

FireLotus could have her own NPC while she's not online, that plays her favorite playlist of .abc songs, for instance, if she's not too busy of course

 

Exactly.

I don't want to hear failed lute and tambourine use in town all day while someone AFK macros their skills.


I want to sit by a fountain in town and bust out a lute and play a song and tell someone about my adventures.


My MIDI guitar better work with this stuff.

 

I'm so glad you posted this. Hadn't seen it in action but the ability to "link" instruments is phenomenal and would be epic on a grand scale (bands, orchestras, etc). I kind of hope there will be more than that one animation of playing the instrument but other than that, this type of system would be such a great addition to SotA.