Hi +some questions

N

Nexus

Spaceman
Hi everyone, I´m a great fan of the WC series since over 8 years now. And I am glad in having found this forum.

However I tend not to follow the news and so I would like to ask you what is the future holding. Will the initially planed WC Prophecy trilogy be ended? Will there be any further WC sequels at all? Or is Origin only limited to Ultima Online now?
And finally, is there any place where I can download the scores/sounds of the WC games?

Thanks for any information :-)
 
Welcome aboard!

I think the people here are up in arms in whether to deem Secret Ops download as the 2nd in the trilogy or WC:P Secret Ops - like the WC2 add-ons ( I think the majority treat it as the second in the trilogy). As to the future of the WC universe, Prophecy is currently being ported to the Game Boy Advance so maybe if the sales of this game are good, someone might follow with a PC game. Also, PNR (actually its changed a little - but basically a Chris Roberts film company) is planning (or maybe shooting right now) a new WC TV series. The immediate future of the franchise is promising, the following months could be a turning point for WC.

C-ya
 
You can always give the fan-made add-on to Secret Ops, Unknown Enemy a try. http://unknownenemy.solsector.net

About the scores - no one's made scores for the WC music. The best we have are the MIDIs, which TopGun directed you to. Using a music notation program, you can open them and see the notes and instruments, but they're not actual musical scores. However - this may be a good project. Lots of people are asking for scores to the WC music. When I get some free time (which is jsut about never), I may try to turn the MIDIs into nice scores... well... some of them :p
 
or we could ask the nice fatman? and oldizey, after all technically they should both still have the rights to their own music.
 
Well yea, they still have the rights, and technically what I'm proposing would be illegal because of copyrights. But, honestly... who cares? Do you know how many things we've all done that have violated copyrights? Besides, I don't think they'd do it. And I won't be charging money for them. I'll make the score, scan it in, save it as an adobe file, then see if someone from the CIC will put it on there downloads page. My minor contribution to the community.
 
the problem is, that the origin cd mp3's show that some of the scored music didnt even make the game, and anyway, mid's dont allow you to get the entire score, just the GM mapped score (altho wc is too far back for even that!) and if these scores are extracted, youll find that the instruments arent specifically linked to certain lines, due to different cards using different general midi sets
 
When I was doing remixes of the MIDIs for UE, I discovered that each track is labeled with an instrument. Presumably, this is the instrument that was originally intended for use on the track. The GM mapped score, of couse isn't the whole score, but it, along with all the other coding in the midi would be enough to build the score. By checking velocities and things like that, I should be able to find dynamics. Based on how it sounds, I'd be able to write in the slurrs and articulation markings. Tempo is there too. I'd have pretty much everything I need. When you open a MIDI, one instrument corresponds to one track, and the onderful thing about General MIDI is that it's all the same. That's why it's General MIDI. 001 is always Piano. 031 is always Distortion Guitar. 065 is always Soprano Sax. 106 is always Banjo. You get the idea. While they may have slightly different names (Accordian is called Mussete on my keyboard), it still corresponds to the same sound. The only thing different is the ACTUAL sound. But each number corresponds to a certain instrument. So, while the sound for soprano sax may be different on each GM set, 065 will always represent the sound that is supposed to be a soprano sax. It would be fairly easy for me to create a score from a MIDI actually - I'd need to take a few liberities, but all the basics that I'd need are there.
 
hmm, well i agree that its a nice idea, in fact i had considered it in the past myself but felt that approaching the fatman might be easier, eitherway if you can do it, im sure all musical wc fans will love it :)
 
Originally posted by Filler
hehe
nice pun there ;)
Click to expand...

Unintentional. For those of you non-musical people, Minor is a musical mode (minor as opposed to major). Think of it like this:

Major : Minor :: :) : :(


hmm, well i agree that its a nice idea, in fact i had considered it in the past myself but felt that approaching the fatman might be easier, eitherway if you can do it, im sure all musical wc fans will love it
Click to expand...


Your right, it would be easier. But I really have a feeling he wouldn't spend the time to do it. With UE, there really aren't scores - I kinda wrote it for a midi, as a midi. Sure if you saw it you could read it liek a score, but it's not a real score. A WC probably doesn't exist for the same reason. And the Fatman is probably too busy running his business and making more music to create a score for free. Who can blame him? Also, he may be a little wary about putting his copyrighted music up for download in a clear, readable form where it would be easy for someone to copy it (so I'd be going against the Fatman's wishes... well.. I'll give him credit for it, say it's copyrighted, and you remember what I said before about doing illegal copyright stuff, all of us have probably violated origin's copyright on WC one way or another, or benefited from people who have. Also, anyone who's copied a CD, or dl music has also violated copyrights. Parenthetical tanget over). So, that's another reason he probably wouldn't do it. Once I get some time (don't count on it for a while), I'll try to do this.
 
I find myself contemplating the value of orchestral scores of WC music. As Needaham pointed out it's quite likely that the Fatman composed the music concerned only with the way it would sound as a finished midi and gave no consideration to the "physical" music world. In this respect I think it would be damaging to the music to score it for an actual orchestra simply because it wasn't composed with that intention. It would be along the same lines of orchestrating a piano piece or a string quartet for a woodwind quartet. Naturally this stuff is a great exercise and is certainly done in the music world, but not without considerable personal interpretation and it often results in music of dubious value.

I'm not entirely against this idea, but I think if you would like to examine these scores for insight into the Fatman's compositional talents then you'd benefit more from picking apart the midis themselves.
 
Ace's considerations are interesting. Indeed, it would require some work of adaptation, since it's a much more complex thing to actually have an orchestral to perform a music. The idea has great potential.

The music from WC3 and WC4 would be more "orchestra-ready", I suppose.
 
Yes, of course, that is the problem. Interpretation. And you are right, it would be much better for someone interested in the style to pick apart the MIDI itself. However, while I could try to orchestrate WC music for an orchestra, what I was thinking about was more of turning the MIDIs into readable notation for the benefit of people without a music notation program. Also, I'd clean them up a bit - if anyone's opened these MIDIs, it's a counting nightmare. Sure they sound great, but as the song progresses, the beat slowly gets ahead of where it should be, and by the end, throwing it about a measure and a half off from where it should be. It sounds fine, but again, it's not exactly the easiest thing to read. Also - stacattos are 16th notes with a lot of rests, and triplets aren't notated right all the time, some parts are slightly off the beat so they're written as such creating lots of ties and 16th note rythyms - just little things like that to clean up to make it readable. I wasn't talking about completely reorchestrating it, just making it readable without doing any real arranging work.

However, it may be interesting to try to write a full length symphony based on WC music... but I'll leave that for another day. And I want to complete my Zelda Symphony first (still an idea, nothing much yet).
 
Alright, that's not too bad an idea since the midis are hard to read. It'll be a lot of work for you though. I hope there are people out there who will appreciate it.
 
Yea, it is a lot. I hope there's enough out there too. I started seriously looking at a few today, and I figure I could probably do them at the rate of 1 longer midi per 2-3 full days. I won't be able to start right away, I have a lot of other things going on right now, but once I get some free time, I'll start working on a few. Also, I probalby won't do them all, just the more popular ones, as well as the more important ones. For example, the theme is a must. The simulator music from WC1 isn't (unless people really want to see that.. it's pretty simple and short though...)
 
I'm no specialist, but I think that in order to have an actual orchestra to play music from WC1 would require writing a lot of stuff from scratch. The MIDI would be more like a reference.
 
That would be correct. Either I'd need to write some new parts, or I'd need to arrange it so that an orchestra could play it. For example, there's no clarinet part in the WC1 MIDIs (or any WC MIDIs, I believe). So, if I wanted an orchestra to play it, I'd need to either write a clarinet part based on the other parts, write something completely original that works, or take another part and double it exactly in the clarinet. Or, I may even choose to combine the 3 - do it a different way at different points in the piece. And of course, there is the option of having it tacet (rest) throughout the entire piece, or sections. I would make that decision based on what was most appropriate for the situation in my mind. That's what any arranger's job is. An arranger takes something a composer wrote, and rewrites it in a manner of their choice, usually for a different group of instruments that what the original was written for. In order for WC1 to be played by an orchestra, I'd need to do some arranging work. However, to actually make the MIDI into a score of the same instruments used in the MIDI, basically just making it readable - no arranging is involved. It's all just changing it into readable notation.
 
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