Heroes of Might and Magic II

[saimon69]

Thanks again,will test something tonight if wifey allows me to

At the end, if comes out too heavy in K for in-game we can keep it for Amiga credits maybe

The stretching and syncing idea was based on this seminar from Revision, wher they explain a similar technique: (video link)
[ Show youtube player ]

[edit]Whoops, thought that was the singing of HOMM2 but i know what you mean: it should be simpler for that song since has only like ten verses[/edit]

Some update: worked yesterday on the City of the Knights, the freedom theme (good campaign start) and the snowy plains. Stubbed other songs, realized am missing desert, volcano and jungle from my reference movies so need to download it.

@adrdesign

Last month i found a SF2 to WAV converter for win also available as source if someone want to port it on Amiga; it helped me to get a good deal of samples.
Source and win binaries are here:
http://sanfransys.com/main_downloads.htm

[saimon69]

Ok, i made a test using my own voice: results are here: it sound a bit funny and artificial but i think that with speed increase and more control points at the end - also with complicity of background music - might come out almost decent:


All this assumed the clean song tracks are available...

[WARNING]THE SONG IS VERY ROUGHLY SKETCHED !!![/WARNING]

[meynaf]

Sorry for popping with bad news, but why spending time on this ? The melody should be there, not the lyrics. Those wanting the lyrics can just get the CD tracks.
The music i want is to replace the midi, not replace the CD audio tracks.

[saimon69]

@meynaf

I honestly Thought the Cities tracks were MIDI; don't know the game enough...

ok then, forget about the sung part, especially because this means there are no clean (no orchestra in background) song samples
And my voice is not phonogenic, being mostly form nose - have no adequate mic for it, else i sung as Basso in a choir for a while

[saimon69]

so going on on drafting songs:
almost finished drafting for snowy plains, city of the knight
continued drafting for heroes theme (good campaign start) and city of necromancer

BTW why is taking so long?

First of all we are talking about around 30 songs here, each one with its own personality and orchestral sound full of chords, made indeed for more than four voices, so when drafting i need to see what can need to be put in first, then what can be crammed in the midst, and this in drafting phase, with instruments that might not sound as good and an idea of all the melodies;
then need to refine, try to redo passages as similar can be to the original;
third is finding right instruments and finetune sounds
fourth is once done to remove all the unnecessary cruft (unused instruments) to save memory.

Add at this that i can only work on it a couple of hours in the evening and not all days, but we are slowly getting somewhere.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by saimon69

I honestly Thought the Cities tracks were MIDI; don't know the game enough...

The game offers you three choices : CD with opera, CD without opera, and MIDI.

[saimon69]

little time to work on it this week however drafting of freedom theme gone on and also took hands again in sea theme after a bad start: now decided to put really efforts on drafting and leave refining for later, considered the big amount of songs to do...

[Don_Adan]

Originally Posted by saimon69

so going on on drafting songs:
almost finished drafting for snowy plains, city of the knight
continued drafting for heroes theme (good campaign start) and city of necromancer

BTW why is taking so long?

First of all we are talking about around 30 songs here, each one with its own personality and orchestral sound full of chords, made indeed for more than four voices, so when drafting i need to see what can need to be put in first, then what can be crammed in the midst, and this in drafting phase, with instruments that might not sound as good and an idea of all the melodies;
then need to refine, try to redo passages as similar can be to the original;
third is finding right instruments and finetune sounds
fourth is once done to remove all the unnecessary cruft (unused instruments) to save memory.

Add at this that i can only work on it a couple of hours in the evening and not all days, but we are slowly getting somewhere.

HOMM2 Succession Wars has only 15 different MIDI songs, not 30 songs.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by Don_Adan

HOMM2 Succession Wars has only 15 different MIDI songs, not 30 songs.

Price of Loyalty has to be done too. That said, of course, Succession Wars is more important to have early.
There are also more songs on CD than with MIDI.

[saimon69]

Today had to go off work earlier so i did work a bit more on sea theme, very far from being finished drafting,though; in its apparent simplicity is very textured...

[Thorham]

If it's possible to reduce the amount of disk access during the game, then the CD tracks are still an option.

[saimon69]

Actually i don't ask to relieve me of this, am pretty proud of what am doing: is a good challenge for me

[meynaf]

One doesn't preclude the other. The game has settings : CD audio, or midi. The mods would then be used on the "midi" setting, and else we can have CD audio.

Reducing the disk access is possible but not to the point it is really sensitive. The game is designed to work with ~14 megs of mem (i want to keep it this way) and has a main data file which is ~43 megs.

[saimon69]

(will try to condense music updates here)

9/16: today had some more time to work so the sea theme is mostly drafted on the basics now: time to look for some good harps

9/17: worked more a bit on combat theme 1; made stub for missing main themes

9/18: worked today on snow theme: reached end of song, time to start to refine it

9/19: started drafting of sand theme

[week-end used for home chores so no further progress so far]

9/23: analyzed some other tunes ready to start the port

9/24 first touch at wasteland theme: found utils to convert .sfpack and .sfark to .sf2 and therefore lot of new instruments!

9/24 night: continued a bit wasteland and improved a port of enemies lurking

9/29: got a BIG scare when my laptop showed me a "unbootable volume" blue screen, i had to go weith chkdsk but now seems i revovered the partition, however it is time to back up stuff here...

10/2: found there is another batch of songs including the knights town... more work

10/8: trying to continue city of necromancer, tested new strings for beginning: wow

[Don_Adan]

Originally Posted by meynaf

Price of Loyalty has to be done too. That said, of course, Succession Wars is more important to have early.
There are also more songs on CD than with MIDI.

More 6 XMI songs to convert is necessary, total is 15+6=21 XMI/MID files.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by saimon69

9/29: got a BIG scare when my laptop showed me a "unbootable volume" blue screen, i had to go weith chkdsk but now seems i revovered the partition, however it is time to back up stuff here...

Do not give important data to a PC. You may well lose it

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by meynaf

Do not give important data to a PC. You may well lose it

Quests of Nargoth docet :/

[saimon69]

damn! family issues prevent me to work properly in the soundtrack, but am going on sporadically...

[Doranwen]

I haven't the faintest clue about all the details you're hashing out (my knowledge of the Amiga was as a kid growing up and playing the games, and I still haven't learned much more about it), but I think this concept is awesome--played a lot of HOMM2 as a kid (still have the original disks and stuff somewhere, with the Price of Loyalty and all), and it'd be fun to play it this way. Will have to keep an eye on it--I now have FS-UAE (I run Linux) so if it's something I can test on there, let me know!

[meynaf]

The actual version is perfectly playable. I finished both Roland and Archibald campaigns with it. It's just that you will get no music - and it's Succession Wars, not Price of Loyalty.

If you have the original CD then you can copy the data from there, to your Amiga HD.

The URL to get the Amiga version is at the start of this thread.