adaptive music in ksp2

[jastrone]

many people have been talking about how they want more variety in music in ksp 2 and many have suggested that each celestial body in the game should have its own soundtrack. personally i dont think that would work really well since there are a lot of celestial bodies in ksp2 and there would hardly ever be 2 songs on one planet because thet would take very long time to make, instead i suggest we get adaptive music in ksp2 and a lot of base songs. on icy planets and moons the song would be pitched up and be slowed down or maybe a new instrument would be added. near a colony music could maybe change a little too. this would mean we get much more variable music.

[TheOrbitalMechanic]

Professional AAA games can have in the range of 20-30 songs in the soundtrack; for contrast, KSP 1 only had like 3. We don't know the exact amount of celestial bodies that will be in the game, but I don't think planet-specific soundtracks are too out there. That said, variable versions of the same few tracks based on location, as you suggested, could also help give some variety to the game.

[rextable]

As a creative audio professional in real life, I can say with some authority that having soundtracks-per-planetary-body is totally reasonable in an average game development timescale. These days, the ease with which one can knock out very decent library-music-type stuff using nothing but a sequencer and some NI Kontakt instruments is not to be underestimated. It's not as though KSP2 will necessitate hiring an entire orchestra to record an Grammy award winning epic original jazz-fusion-death-grind-core space opera the likes of which the universe has never heard. Though that would be awesome.  

Also, what I think you're alluding to (but maybe lacking the vocabulary??? Apologies if I sound condescending ) is 'generative' music? That is musical progressions that are self generative and evolving over time without ever repeating. Such processes can be setup to last hours, days, weeks, years even. This concept is all the rage in the sonic art and modular synth worlds. You can even get apps on your phone that'll do it all for you.

A self generating soundtrack that just atmospherically twitters away to itself in the background would be very appropriate for the VAB. Where one might spend several hours experimenting with the design and construction of one's next mission. 

The only downside is that such a system would be somewhat more resource intensive on a host system's CPU and I know how stingy game devs are with CPU budgets for sound in their games. Also, it would be far more challenging to nail this approach than just bashing out a pile of VAB musak.

There's no reason why generative music couldn't also be 'adaptive' as per the title of the OP. Where the music changes and 'adapts' in response to changes in the player's experience. EG getting to orbit, entering another SOI, achieving orbit, successfully landing... or crashing even.

These days, adaptive music in games is pretty much expected as far as I'm concerned. The trick to it is making it so it doesn't get annoying or repetitive - which it can (Fallout 4 battle music I'm looking at you). Adaptive music could be most effective/emotive during the decent and landing phases of a mission to a new celestial body. Imagine a soundtrack that responds to changes in altitude, g-force, airspeed and estimated time to touchdown or impact. The musical tension builds as you get closer and closer to target coordinates and then when you touchdown,  a "Tadaa!!!" celebration track plays. All this adaptive musical tension and release would be fantastic the first time you plop down on the Mun for example. However you probably don't need it after the nth Mun landing on any given play-through.

 

As per the music-for each-body idea. The same could be said for success and failure tracks. Depending the difficulty of the success or what the failure was, where and when it happened could all easily be dynamically reflected in the accompanying soundtrack. Easypeasy! It's all just a matter of how much CPU budget the devs are prepared to give to the game's sound engine and their creative vision.   

Here endeth the essay... soz. I'll stop typing now.

Edited October 1, 2021 by rextable
Dime... Bar...???

[jastrone]

13 hours ago, rextable said:

soundtracks-per-planetary-body is totally reasonable

as far i can tell there are abouut 15 planets and moons in ksp 1 in ksp 2 we have seen a few planets but they wont spoil everything of course so i expect something around 4 solar systems and about 15 planetary bodies but atleast 10. then there will have to be 60 songs and that is just one song per each celestial body if we want some variety we would probably need 3 songs on each planet and that is 180 songs in total.  im not saying this is entirerly correct but it could be

 

13 hours ago, rextable said:

generative' music?

no i mean adaptive. a few songs like in ksp1 but a few more than it and then audio effects are changing depending on where you are ex pitching a bit higher on a icy planet or something like that or adding one new instrument that is prerecorded.

[pandaman]

I like the idea.

I guess by adaptive you mean something along the lines of a specific 'base track' or 'theme' for each body.  This then gets certain elements (such as instrument voices, tonal qualities, tempo etc) added or subtracted depending on the situation (cold feeling for the poles,  or a bit ethereal when you reach orbit etc.)

Not unlike in many movies e.g  The Lord of the Rings 'Fellowship' theme.  The basic tune stays the same, but the 'atmosphere' changes depending on which, and how many, members of the team are present by adding in or taking out certain instruments.  The 'fuller' the sound the more complete the fellowship is.

[rextable]

4 hours ago, jastrone said:

as far i can tell there are abouut 15 planets and moons in ksp 1 in ksp 2 we have seen a few planets but they wont spoil everything of course so i expect something around 4 solar systems and about 15 planetary bodies but atleast 10. then there will have to be 60 songs and that is just one song per each celestial body if we want some variety we would probably need 3 songs on each planet and that is 180 songs in total.  im not saying this is entirerly correct but it could be

It's totally doable in a reasonable timescale dude . As I've already said, one dude with a decent PC and some sample and instrument libraries can be very productive indeed. 

'Adaptive music' = layered parts ( i.e. instruments, sounds etc.) and musical passages (eg passage A, passage B, interlude A, interlude B etc.) that come and go in response to the unfolding action. All totally, totally doable from a technical point of view. Easy even! Dark Forces II did it with a CD in the drive 25 years ago .

 

Years ago I studied game audio at university and a visiting industry professional told me that: the only limiting factor for a game's audio (music and otherwise) is the CPU budget allocated - which is entirely based on how much the dev team care about game audio. Typically, developers care very little about sound and music because it ain't sexy graphics that sell the game. The projects and experiments we came up with as students was far superior in terms of its adaptivity, layering and complexity to even modern games today. Why? Because we weren't constrained by a developer saying "you can only have 4 audio channels" or "you can only have one effect send" or "convolution reverb?!?!? Forget it" etc. The tools for creating amazing dynamic soundtracks and environments was there 15 years ago. To this day, those tools remain very underutilized because they're just too expensive computationally.  

 

 

[Bej Kerman]

On 9/28/2021 at 3:25 PM, jastrone said:

on icy planets and moons the song would be pitched up and be slowed down

This almost always sounds horrible. Instead, have the twangy and basey instruments on different tracks that can be faded in and out per environment.

[SciMan]

On the plus side, I don't think there's any way anyone could feasibly create a copyright claim against generative music, so there's that (I hate that particular limitation of modern content creation on the internet, because IMO the internet is not Hollywood, and more importantly people don't have "hollywood money" to make music licensing deals, so it really limits people's creativity).
On the minus side, generative music is probably doomed to always sound "generic" at best, and "grating" at worst. There's something to be said for music where you can depend on something to always sound the same at a certain point of the song.

So if it's "generative" or "get copyright claimed" as far as the music goes, I'll pick "generative" because I want to see lots and lots of KSP 2 videos, but if there's any other option out there for avoiding those copyright claims I'd rather we pick that other thing instead.
That includes going so far as to entirely re-write the entire copyright system from the ground up so that you can't make money off of music (or anything else) if you didn't make it yourself. It's that or some other method to get rid of these "music rights societies" and record labels and whatever that are lobbying for laws to get passed that hurt someone who's just trying to find a backing track to the 10 minute video they made, and doesn't have the hundreds of thousands of dollars that it would take to protect your video from the copyright claims that happen if you happen to choose a popular piece of music.

Ok, rant over, back to what it means for KSP 2.

KSP 1 really does not have enough music in it for my tastes (as others have said, less tracks than there are fingers on one hand), and yet at the same time the tracks that were used are not the type of tracks that really make me want to turn off the music after hearing them for 500 times, which is a feat in and of itself. The music in KSP 2 will have to have a similar "durability" and non-grating quality to it. However, it would be quite silly to not also include the very same tracks that were used in KSP 1, because this game has remained popular for so long with the same music that not having it would be a mistake IMO.

The idea of having different sub-tracks to the same basic piece of music is a very good one, however I think that it should be organized by solar system, and perhaps also by inner vs outer planets, all working towards the point of adding to the feeling of "you're very far from home".
I think that A variant of the current solar system's core track for each of "Orbiting Low and High, 'suborbital Low and High," would be a good start for bodies without an atmosphere, for bodies with an atmosphere replace "suborbital low and high" with "Atmospheric Flight Low and High" and then add in another track layer when you're near the surface and traveling at a high rate of speed, and one more "flavor track" that's different for each planet and moon, that should create a very immersive music experience.
Of course, these would all be variations on the core theme for which solar system you're in, and then on which part of that solar system you're in, (outer or inner planets, or some solar systems might only have one group), Kerbol might have 3 parts, one for "Moho", then one for "Eve Kerbin Duna", then one for "Dres Jool (and its moons) and Eeloo".

[jastrone]

8 hours ago, pandaman said:

The basic tune stays the same, but the 'atmosphere' changes

yhea kinda like this but not one base theme for each body but a few themes like ksp 1 and it would change depending on planet and biome. and there would probably be space for a few different base tracks

[t_v]

It would be really cool if each planet had a musical motif that could be layered onto the base theme. Also, for the adaptive soundtrack, I was thinking it could be something like this:

Hot or dry locations (not necessarily planets) would have more twangy instruments, whereas cold wet ones (frozen ones) would have more crystalline instruments. Hot wet ones like eve would have a distorted sound, sort of like a lot of “swamp themes” in other video games. In bases or really large ships, we would see the percussion come in and as ships increase their altitude in their orbit, the music gets simpler and less cluttered, mimicking the calm of deep space. I would also like the same thing to occur within the atmosphere, so the music is the most energetic when flying right above the surface. 

[Jack White]

Most likely in this regard, we'll see music for each planet and probably some different (random or rare) events. It also depends on budget and how much money they want to invest in this part of the game. Of course, that would be a great addition to the atmosphere to have there different types of songs this and there but who knows what it will be in the release. I bet that we will do something we discussed there but do not expect too much from devs in this regard. They should focus on other things more, to be honest with you.

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

 

Adaptive. Proven. 

[Guest The Doodling Astronaut]

3 hours ago, Jack White said:

Most likely in this regard, we'll see music for each planet and probably some different (random or rare) events. It also depends on budget and how much money they want to invest in this part of the game. Of course, that would be a great addition to the atmosphere to have there different types of songs this and there but who knows what it will be in the release. I bet that we will do something we discussed there but do not expect too much from devs in this regard. They should focus on other things more, to be honest with you.

I think with all the delays KSP 2 has had, I think it's reasonable to add music to each planet.

[Jack White]

7 minutes ago, The Doodling Astronaut said:

I think with all the delays KSP 2 has had, I think it's reasonable to add music to each planet.

This is also can be iconic for this game. I mean if you remember or just know any of these series: Tekken 3, Witcher 3, Oblivion etc. - they are because of gameplay, but also for the iconic theme music. They can mix different genres like classic, folk, techno music etc. I wish that kind of iconic music will be in KSP 2. 

[kerbiloid]

17 minutes ago, The Doodling Astronaut said:

I think with all the delays KSP 2 has had, I think it's reasonable to add music to each planet.

To let every planet have its own music style.  Announced in 2019. Planned on 2022.

[SciMan]

To be fair, we don't know WHY the delays happened. All we know is that they did in fact delay it a year from when they projected it should release, and that that happened during a world pandemic, which leads me to believe they did have a period of time where they were intentionally NOT working on the game in any significant way, in order to protect the health of the game developers (they're people too!).

Because of that, I don't agree that they "should add" anything "because of the delays", that's just not at all how game development or anything works. You get a reason to delay the game, that doesn't mean you "can" or "should" add more features to the game. In fact, it might be a reason that you have to CUT features FROM the game in order to meet your new deadline (even tho that deadline has been pushed back). I sincerely hope nothing has been cut from KSP 2, and since I've heard no news about it I'm going to continue thinking that nothing has been cut until I hear otherwise from an OFFICIAL source. This is much more likely with games that have a release date dictated by the publisher, which is why I think that particular approach to game design is inherently flawed (or at least that's one of the inherent flaws to that approach to game design, but I really dislike it when publishers push around the actual game development studio into doing things that that game development studio otherwise would not have done, and the best examples of that that come to mind are "Cutting/adding features without having a detailed knowledge of the game", and "overly aggressive deadline placement for the sole purpose of beating a competitor to market".

Believe it or not, if push comes to shove one of the first features that I think will be dropped from KSP 2 is "multiplayer". It's probably quite complex to get it working, and IMO it doesn't really add all that much to the game (or put more correctly, it's impossible to judge how much it adds to the game without having it in the game in the first place). Not to mention that the solutions to the potential "griefing" problems are both critical and not easy to conceptualize in a way that either makes it harder to work together or makes it too easy to harm others creations.

I just want a working, playable game, even if it does have "a few" non critical non save corrupting bugs like graphical glitches or potentially even parts that are just placeholders (or placeholder textures for those parts).
That's what happened with KSP 1, and it turned out just fine in the end as far as I'm concerned (yes, yes, there's still several massive issues with the core code of the game, but what I'm saying is that KSP 1 as it is RIGHT NOW is in a very playable state, even if things could have been coded better had the original developers had more experience making video games, and that particular objection has been quite soundly removed with the developers of KSP 2).

The music, while important, doesn't have to be finished when the game comes out. There's a lot of things that don't have to be finished when the game comes out. But the core of the game does have to be there, and that's what should be focused on first.

[Bej Kerman]

1 hour ago, SciMan said:

it's impossible to judge how much it adds to the game without having it in the game in the first place

Don't KSP 1 multiplayer mods do a good enough demonstration of the basic concept?

[kerbiloid]

Maybe someone can read Kerbal rap in reversed language?

***

By default - in reversed Spanish, but as Chatterer demonstrates, any other language is enough good, too.

Audacity, record, then Select All, Effects / Change Speed +33%, Effects / Reverse.

[SciMan]

20 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Don't KSP 1 multiplayer mods do a good enough demonstration of the basic concept?

As a matter of fact they do not.
They were never that popular mostly because at points they weren't even available on forum-approved hosting sites, and they weren't easy to get working if you DID manage to download a working version of them.
The way that they solved the time warp problem was useful however.

Judging by them would be a poor way to judge a fully functional, intended-from-the-start game feature that's well integrated into the workings of Steam (invite/block system, etc.).
However, I do imagine that one of the many types of servers to emerge will have craft design language guidelines based on the "Expanse" series of books and TV series, since we will likely have the propulsion technologies to make that work. I'm fine with that so long as nobody makes any torpedos without having PDCs available, or vice versa, so some mod that fills the niche that BDArmory fills in KSP 1 will likely be needed.

[Bej Kerman]

2 hours ago, SciMan said:

They were never that popular mostly because at points they weren't even available on forum-approved hosting sites, and they weren't easy to get working if you DID manage to download a working version of them.

It isn't hard to search 'dark/luna multiplayer', put it in gamedata and find a good server. Usually there's 2/3 people on these servers which isn't bad. I'm not sure what world you've been trapped in.

2 hours ago, SciMan said:

The way that they solved the time warp problem was useful however.

Exactly.

[SciMan]

Exactly my point. 2/3 people on a server is what most people would call a "dead game". For shoehorning multiplayer into a game that wasn't intended to have it, I guess it's respectable. But it's still nowhere near what I am concerned will happen with KSP 2 multiplayer.

I basically don't want it to turn into a 20 player server where the game becomes "find the griefer before they destroy your stuff", and furthermore I hope that very robust moderation tools are available so that you can prevent the griefing from happening in the first place.

That's why I never even considered playing Fallout 76. The chance that someone with ill intentions towards "someone" will do what is needed to launch a nuke in that game and destroy all the hard work you put in to build a base you made is just something that drove me away. And then I learned that it's a buggy mess and that it's not even hard to cheat your way to launching a nuke, and that just made me absolutely certain that I was right in my initial judgement of the game. I did enjoy Fallout 4's base building, but when Fallout 76 took that and made OTHER PEOPLE able to destroy YOUR stuff, that just made me think of that famous line about nuclear war, "The only winning move is to not play the game".

However this thread is about the soundtrack in KSP 2, not multiplayer, so I shall return to that topic.

The primary concern I have with the music is the hope that the game does not get delayed purely because the music is not yet done in its final form. I do hope for more different tracks in KSP 2, but if we end up with 5 tracks at launch I'll figure out a way to live with it. Hopefully if that does come to pass, they'll add more music tracks later as the game becomes more feature complete if it's not launched in a feature complete state.

Edited October 14, 2021 by SciMan

[Guest]

On 10/14/2021 at 7:17 PM, SciMan said:

Exactly my point. 2/3 people on a server is what most people would call a "dead game".

Only people that doesn't know how coop games work, I just finished playing an Enigmatica 2: Expert run (modded Minecraft) with my friends on a paid hosted server (a quite heavy modpack) and we had 6 slots for 6 people and usually were around 2 or 3 online only on the evenings.

That's not a dead game, just a small server between friends, on Stellaris, Europa Universalis, Factorio or a miriad of other games it would be considered a crowded server.

In Sea of Thieves each servers has up to 6 ships, every ship has a crew between 1 and 4 players, usually server aren't full and 4 people Galleons are quite a Rare sight.

Not every game is about massive amounts of players, and I bet KSP2 won't be either.

On 10/14/2021 at 7:17 PM, SciMan said:

I basically don't want it to turn into a 20 player server where the game becomes "find the griefer before they destroy your stuff", and furthermore I hope that very robust moderation tools are available so that you can prevent the griefing from happening in the first place.

I have been part of a Minecraft Towny community for almost a decade, 6 years of which I was in the management staff of the server.

At its peak the server had hundreds of active players and 40 people online was considered a dead day, we were the most popular server in my country (while the popularity of Towny RPG server lasted).

In all that time we got less than an handful cases of griefing (and it was in the middle of the Minecraft griefing YouTube craze) and all of them were quite limited in scope and solved with 2 commands, one to ban the griefer and the other to rollback the action of that specific player, leaving intact the rest of the server. If that was ever to fail we had a location based rollback function, a world-side backup system and a server side backup service.

But most of that wasn't for the griefing, and we never had to use them for that, Minecraft worlds just don't like being used for too long while often changing version of the game and of the installed mods.

Griefing in multiplayer is blown out of proportion by the popularity of the (mostly fake) videos on YouTube.

 

On 10/14/2021 at 7:17 PM, SciMan said:

That's why I never even considered playing Fallout 76. The chance that someone with ill intentions towards "someone" will do what is needed to launch a nuke in that game and destroy all the hard work you put in to build a base you made is just something that drove me away. And then I learned that it's a buggy mess and that it's not even hard to cheat your way to launching a nuke, and that just made me absolutely certain that I was right in my initial judgement of the game

Your loss, I paid 10€ for it, played it with some friends, built my base, never got griefed and met a PVP player only once or twice in the couple of months we played (and they ignored us when we didn't return fire).

Playing a typical Bethesda game in Coop is something else, I hope their next games have a coop option too (not MMO style like 76, I just want to bring a couple of friends with me in a dungeon or Dwemer ruin instead of a dumb NPCs).

 

Sometimes it really feels like half of this forum never played a multiplayer game in their life.

[SciMan]

I've played plenty of multiplayer games, from EVE Online to Battlefield to TF2, not a big fan of MMOs these days (I hate grindy game mechanics like "you have to do your dailies or you're gonna get FOMO"), and since I'm 33 now my reflexes aren't what they used to be so I don't play shooters anymore either (even when I did, I was lucky to pull one kill for every 2 deaths, and that's with me in a vehicle).

Oh and I also played a bunch of Gmod, and as you might know griefing in that particular game was always a problem because you had the toxicity of the "shooter player" type gamer, and the access to creativity tools like a sandbox game. So most people simply took to figuring out how to cause harm to whatever someone else was doing, myself included on a few occasions (but I never griefed people without them griefing me first).
Then maybe 5 years later, I started playing Space Engineers, and I never got the courage to go on a multiplayer server with that game because I saw so many videos of the same kind of thing happening as happened in Gmod (granted Space Engineers is a game about building spacecraft to fight each other, but that's not why I played it, so I never had a good reason to go online in it).
When I was playing Gmod, it got to the point where I couldn't play on any of my favorite Gmod servers anymore because if they were "open" enough to be fun, they were also not locked down enough to prevent griefing, and the griefers were everywhere.
Maybe it's just because most of the admins were teens that didn't know how to act towards their parents, let alone other people, so if you called an admin to report you got griefed, it was a 50/50 if they banned YOU instead of the griefer because the griefer was a friend of the admin.
You know, now I think about it it's the same reason that makes high school such a common source of mental trauma for people that aren't the "cool kids".

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I hope KSP 2 doesn't become like Gmod or Space Engineers, not that it shouldn't have multiplayer. Not having any kind of real purpose-built weapons systems is a good start to that I guess. It would be nice (but probably not practical) if KSP 2 also had "change roll-back" options available to the host and/or admins, as well as the ability for you yourself to turn on or off the ability for your vessel to collide and dock with other vessels from other players (or the admins would also be able to override that setting of course, if you're a griefer you get no service), that way if you expected to get griefed you could just basically turn off collisions between you and the griefer (or you and everyone else) and they wouldn't be able to harm you.

[Dr. Kerbal]

I agree with this. Certain planets in KSP have different moods and tones. Laythe is really different from Gilly. And both have different styles. Laythe is a blue ball and gilly a rock.  They deserve music of their own to fit their tones. 

[t_v]

I just rewatched the sounds of space video by melody sheep (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeYnV9zp7Dk for anyone interested) and there is a portion where music is played on mars. The temperature and density of the atmosphere affects the sound heavily and I think it would be amazing if KSP  2 replicated that. If the music producer for KSP 2 reads this thread, I would like to see tracks that are warped in ways that reflect different atmospheres even if there is no adaptive music in the game. It would be a great scientifically informed way of giving planets their own identities