Transport Tycoon Forums

As OpenTTD nears completion to version 1.0.0, there has been some discussion about providing replacement music. The OpenSFX project just reached 0.2.0 and is now available, but does not include music at this time. This topic is dedicated to inspiring discussion of replacing the music, and for composers to offer their own original works for consideration.

What music format will be used?

At this time, only MIDI tracks will be able used. The current music player included in OpenTTD is cloned directly from the original used in Transportation Tycoon Deluxe, which only plays MIDI tracks. There has been suggestions of modifying or replacing the player with one that can play other formats (OGG, MP3, etc.) but one has not yet been developed. While there does appear to be broad support to replace the format, nobody has expressed interest in coding this portion of the project.

MIDI files (in the .mid or .midi format) are not sound files themselves, as OGG or MP3 files are. They are data files which contain information about each note used and the instrument that plays the note. In TTD and OpenTTD, the MIDI files are renamed using the extension .gm.

What style of music will be used?

This will be up to the community to decide. The original music from TTD was created by British composer John Broomhall, who was an employee of MicroProse. The music is recognized as "old-style blues and jazz" inspired by Herbie Hancock's "Cantaloupe Island" musical composition standard.

While the easiest thing would be to select music similar in style to the original, it is also worth considering that other styles and genres be included. Just as OpenGFX and OpenSFX have allowed developers and users to replace the graphics and game sounds included with styles not presented in the original game, the same opportunity exists here.

What license will be used?

After much spirited discussion, it has been decided that the MIDI files should be released under both the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license and the GPL v.2 license. This is to ensure that all music is not only covered under the proper music license, but can also be included for distribution with other software bundles.

Other collaborations for music packs are free to select their own licenses for independent distribution, but at this time for them to be included for distribution with OpenTTD and in-game download via BaNaNaS, the above licenses are the only acceptable ones.

How do you include the MIDI files into the game so they can be heard?

The included MIDI files must be renamed from .mid or .midi to .gm to be recognized by the game. The files are linked to by a data file ending in .obm. This file contains fives sections: Metadata (the name, version number and description of the music pack), Files (the file names of each file used), MD5s (the MD5 checksum of each file, to ensure that they are the original and correct file), Names (linking each file name to a human-readable title that displays in the in-game player), and Origin (expanded information about the music pack).

All of these files are currently placed inside the \gm folder.

OpenMSX 0.1.0

OpenMSN 0.1.0 was released on February 27, 2010 and includes four songs. As of r19259 you can download this pack from the in-game download.

Hi,

As I mailed to you, i'm interested in creating some midi tracks similar in style to the original tracks, so called sound alikes.

You might want to be a bit more specific about MIDI to avoid confusion: what you need is midi files that comply to the General Midi standard, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_MIDI to guarantee compatibility between different soundcards

TBH i have no idea if you could even license midi files under said license, so that's worth investigating. But i think it will indeed be far more likely that composers will donate midi files just for this free project and not to be available for other (commercial) projects as well.

And now for my own comments...

The last few weeks I have already been in communication with several composers whose works I found online through several MIDI archive sites. Sofar two composers have replied, both of them initially agreeing to have specific works re-distributed. I am currently waiting their approval of the CCSP license, so that they can be considered for inclusion of OpenTTD. If this is not available, then I may be able to secure their distribution individually through another license, and offer this as an independent third-party project. However, I would like to see OpenTTD used as a tool to give these composers an opportunity to distribute their works.

Sofar I have found 32 tracks which I myself think would sound good. Seven of these are classified as Ragtime, eight of them are Jazz, eight are variations of Funk and Groove, five are Pop, two are Country and two are Rock. The majority of them stick to the "classic" TTD style of music, while the rest I considered just for the opportunity to expand upon the idea that no one single style needs to dominate. For inclusion in OTTD, however, I don't think we should stray very far, and the "non-traditional" pieces I think inspire game play in the same way that the original music does.

Great! I was just getting ready to mention you in my previous post, but you've already introduced yourself so no need to do that now



Thank you for pointing that out. I'm no expert inanything here, I'm just trying to help get things lined out, so all tips, specs etc are greatly appreciated contributions.



I did just see a non-commercial version of the Sampling Plus license, so that may be more compatible. If not, we can figure out what works best here for the composers and developers both.

OpenSFX only 'chose' CC Sampling Plus because all (minus one) samples came from freesound.org, which licenses everything under CC Sampling Plus. Which is not free enough for some; under Debian's terms of freeness, CC Sampling Plus is considered non-free.

So if you can get the composers to agree with GPL(v2) that would be better, although I reckon that they want to be fairly restrictive about the use of their creations. Nevertheless, as long as it may be distributed via 'BaNaNaS' it should be fine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft

Interesting read.

Why does it need to be a pack, why not handling the midi files like newgrfs?

So someone can upload his midi file to bananas and others can download the midi files they like, it would be much easier for the license stuff and also wouldn't need a need of discussion, which song should go into the replacment pack, which not.

Greets
Ammler

You wouldn't be able to just download and install individual songs as with a NewGRF. There must be a "base pack" that OpenTTD loads before a game. For example right now you can choose to load either the original TTD graphics or the OpenGFX graphics, and likewise you can choose to load either the original TTD sounds or the OpenSFX sounds. They are loaded as an entire pack, although in this case there is no requirement for a minimum number of files required (although I can't say if there is a maximum, I haven't tested it that far yet). But there has to be a data file which links all of the music files being used to a human-readable name and there must be a MD5 checksum created for all of the included music.



The goal I'm trying to focus on here is to encourage the creation and approval of MIDI files specifically to be distributed with the game, so that it is closer to being a complete clone of the original TTD. Part of the TTD/OTTD experience is the excellent music that inspires gameplay and keeps the player engaged.

That said, it is still possible for somebody to develop an independently distributed collection on their own for users to download without all the discussion, licensing etc. All the user has to do is install all the files in the /gm directory themselves, and then select which pack they want to use when they start OTTD. I actually have my own ideas of putting together a replacement music pack of certain themes (holiday songs, ABBA's Greatest Hits, etc.) for users to download themselves, but as I said at the moment I'm trying to focus on getting a base set of MIDI files distributed with the game itself.

As far as downloading/installing packs via BaNaNaS, I'm not sure if the current OTTD 1.0.0 beta 1 can do this. As far as I know the files MUST be installed in the /gm directory where the OTTD installation is located, and not in the global file area. If it requires a re-write or inclusion of new code to accomplish that part, then I honestly don't want to hold this project up while we wait for somebody to find time to do that, if anybody is even interested in doing that. It's taken long enough just to get the OpenSFX project to a point where it was considered done enough to be released as part of installation and to get everybody to work on sound samples and such.

Is it acceptable to provide different distribution licenses for different files within the same distribution pack? If so, then the whole issue of licensing can be just reduced to agreeing with whatever terms the composer requires and putting a notice in the distribution of what those terms are.

For example, I just received word back from one of the composers. He was happy with giving his own, written approval for releasing some of his works for personal, non-commercial use, but when I brought up the issue of licensing he grew cold, and as he bluntly put it, "I'm 78 years old, and all this talk of licensing is just too confusing."). That would work for anybody who wanted to develop independent third party downloads, but I didn't know if the same could be said for including those items in OTTD itself.

There is a 31 file limit; 1 theme song, 10 new style, 10 old style and 10 ezy style. That only means that if you choose the e.g. ezy in game you get those songs. The style names can't be changed by the pack, primarily due to translation issues.

For the downloading/finding it works just like AIs/OpenGFX/OpenSFX, just instead of 'ai' or 'data' 'gm' is used. So it can also be in the 'content_download' directory. For the record: downloading of music sets doesn't work in 1.0.0-beta1 because I forgot to add some code, however from the next nightly it should work. Only BaNaNaS needs to be 'improved' to handle base music sets too.

As an idea for the website: Merge those base data sets in one page else you might lack of space there. And I don't think there will be many new data packs in the next time.

Base Graphics, Base Sounds, Midi-Music -> Base Data Sets

Greets
Ammler

I have been wondering for a while how i can help the openttd development, and my coding isn't good enough to help yet and norwegian doens't need another translator.
But music is something i have the skills, will and time to do . I would gladly try to compose some music and i wouldn't mind realeasing it under a GPL license. Maybe we should see if anyone are willing to compose some music just for the game, and set up a "team" to be in charge of it, or maybe we should just look for music out there wich someone can "donate" to openttd or a combination of both

Is that such a big problem? After all the song names are not translated either. Why not allow grouping them into custom (as in definable by the set developer) presets, even if they aren't translat[ed/able]? It could also be made possible to specify translations for the groups (maybe even for the songs themselves) in the .obm, like it's already possible for the set description. If no translation for the selected language was defined, fall back to english.

Maybe a new category like this:

[presets]
old = Old Style
new = New Style
ezy = Ezy Street

The pieces defined in the [files] category as {presetname}_* would then be associated with the preset {presetname}.
A new set could e.g. define instead

[files]
theme = awesometheme.gm
rock_0 = foo.gm
rock_1 = bar.gm
...
pop_0 = sub.gm
...

[presets]
rock = Rock Songs
rock.de_DE = Rocklieder
rock. etc...
pop = Pop Songs
...

...or something like this.

My old patch, which is lurking around somewhere, simply used an industry-standard M3U playlist file to store the list of files to play. There was no 31-file limit, and of course you could play MP3, Vorbis, FLAC as well as MIDI. While the mixing code probably needs rewriting, I don't see why the general concepts behind the patches, along with the decoders, wouldn't be able to be adapted for the current OpenTTD code base.

As for the "style" buttons, they were greyed out in my patch - I hadn't got around to implementing anything for those, but I can't see why it wouldn't be too difficult to define those in an overall data file if necessary - you'd have your .obm file or whatever, which would contain something along the lines of:

[playlists]
main=classic.m3u
custom1=ezystreet.m3u
custom2=oldstyle.m3u
custom1name=Ezy Street
custom2name=Old Style

Then you'd have the separate playlists for each style.

Just my 2p, anyway.

We have OpenGFX, then OpenSFX, and now OpenMSX!

What exactly does OpenMSX stand for? OpenMusix?

Would it be possible to make songs changing to other theme depending on circumstances?
Like in RT2 it was different depending on your profit - (plus original RT2 had awesome industrial sound, would love to see it)

We could also had more than 31 songs and be able to download theme (from bananas?) depending what player wants - Classic Music, Blues, Industrial, etc ...

That's what Ammler suggested, but it would mostly defeat the point of OpenTTD being a standalone game. Read this post: viewtopic.php?p=843492#p843492

Not at all, petert. One could have multiple base packs, just as one can have multiple graphics packs (eg, OpenGFX vs the TTD DOS graphics vs the TTD Windows graphics). Although I agree that it would be better to concentrate on one core pack for now.