Musical Games

[Connors]

Ever since I did that experiment in TNT Basic with timing the program to music I've wanted to make a music based game. It just sounds too fun not to try it. Unfortunately I don't know that any other game-makers I've used will return the amount of time a song has been playing. If anyone knows a good way to do this without lag messing it up please let me know! I'm gonna also ask Gan if there's Javascript commands that will help me...

[Zoo]

You COULD just find sheet music of the song, and use the rhythms with timers as a sort of silent metrinome, counting the measures, using that to tell you when a note should have been hit.  Use the sheet music as a guide, and have it at such a tempo that it follows with the recording. Still seem easy? I tried making one of these once. it is NOT easy. I suppose you could use a different method, though. Maybe I'm just crazy.

[Connors]

See, what I did before wasn't all that complex. I used a metronome to find the tempo of the song, and then used some simple math to tell the computer how many ticks are in one beat. I had a light flashing in time with the window in which you could hit a note, too. The next step would be, like you said, finding out how to match the notes up.

[Charlo]

If I remember correctly, the ability to use music in Javascript games has only been around for a little while, and it's not very mature yet. 

In most (if not all) rhythm games where you hit "notes" to the beat of a song, the notes are pre-determined.  The game is given a BPM (beats per minute) and the set of notes, and displays them properly.  It's usually a good idea to store the "notes" in an external file so they can be edited easier, since holding them all in code would not be very pretty.

[Connors]

As I said before, I found the BPM of a song and made a program which was the beginning of a musical game, but I lost it because of what happened to TNT Basic... I just have to find a way to program it without TNT. I suppose I should look into the Javascript myself for once.

[Gan]

HTML5 audio should be able to handle a simple musical game.

[Al Staffieri]

Didn't they just update TNT BASIC to run on Intel? You might want to look at that again.

[Gan]

Ithought they only updated they game engine, not sure about the editor.

[Connors]

Yeah they are working on the TNT Basic engine and they tell me you can open old project files and run the program. But you can't edit. And in order to help them test it I would need to compile the new program and I don't even know where to begin.
Looks like I will be researching HTML5 audio and how to insert it into the Game Maker and asking Gan a lot of questions when it fails miserably.... Wait who am I kidding that takes forever.