Music plugins are back!
OK, you can stop cringing now. The incomplete Winamp plugin support in the 2002.04.14 M.U.G.E.N beta was justly infamous for its unreliability. Since the Winamp architecture wasn't designed with a game application in mind, plugins weren't expected to handle demands like rapid seeking or looping. In some cases, it was even difficult to get low-latency notification that a song had completed. The engine could only mash "buttons" like Stop, Rewind, and Play to try to coax the plugins to cooperate, but whether this actually worked depended on factors mostly out of our control.
Music services in the 1.0RC series are being provided by SDL_mixer. Although this is much more stable than the Winamp hack was, there are some features we wanted to have but which aren't provided by the default music players, as well as some bugs we didn't want to have which *are* provided. So we figured we should just do our own BGM system instead. We decided to go with an extensible plugin format. This should allow interested community members to improve M.U.G.E.N's handling of the multifarious game-related music filetypes.
Since this is a significant change to the BGM architecture, with significant potential for significant bugs, we wanted to put out an initial alpha build to get testing and feedback. This is a "testing/unstable/development" branch off the main 1.0RC series. If you'd like to help us out, please try it and let us know what you think!
Changes you'll see, in a nutshell (see README-ALPHA.TXT inside the distribution archive for details):
*) Better MP3 support using libmpg123
*) Extensible architecture (read: "plugins")
*) Loopstart and loopend support, for compatible plugins
*) More intuitive volume settings: Master, wave/sfx, BGM
*) Volume "offsets" replaced by volume scaling factors
*) Various BGM bugfixes
*) Probably some new bugs
Download: M.U.G.E.N RC3 EX + alpha
Please leave feedback in the forums, either by post or by private message. In particular, if you experience "hiccups" in mp3 playback, please let us know how when/how frequently they occur, and what your system specs are. Thanks!
Yay!
The addition of loop points to MP3 is awesome, as well as the FPS boost. But even more awesome is the fact that now there's more hope for ADX! Yay!
Flexibility is good.
This sounds quite beautifull,
This sounds quite beautifull, most people still stick with either ADX or other sound formats, personally I like ADX because you can do looped BGM's with INTROS (you know, parts of the song that are just played once)...
Is said that OGG can do that, maybe if the RC3 with native sound formats support can add this, the plugin engine can be finally removed (and you get most bugs related to this removed at once)...
You can check the forums for that info if you want.
Thanks for this RC3 EX
See ya!!!! :D
Awesome!
Next step, visualization stages! Beat the crap out of everyone while staring at neato flashy colors!