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After reading the article in the tutorials section on looping music, I realized that you could only loop one piece for one player using waits.

Basically, I have 7 players, each with a different piece of music playing in the background constantly. How would I accomplish this?

Help would be appreciated.

Using a deathcount timer or a physical timer.

The physical timer is being used already.

Could you explain how the death count would work?

I'm going to try what I think you mean.

EDIT: While we're at it, could someone tell me how long the normal cooldown time for triggers (w/o hypers) is?

a death counter timer is another way to keep time kind of. with hypertriggers, if you continuously add one counter then itll make 12 in a second. people use this method so that it wont interfere with waits. take a look at this trigger.

Trigger

Conditions:

¤ Always

Actions:

¤ Add one for current player: add one for rhynadon(badlands)

¤ preserve trigger

now you will continuously add a counter. but you may be thinking of a way this could be useful. take a look at this triger which relates to the first one.

Trigger

Conditions:

¤ Current Player has suffered at least 60 deaths of rynadon(badlands)

Actions:

¤ set deaths for rynadon(badlands) to 0

¤ do an event

¤ preserve trigger

this will make it do something once the counter you made reaches 60. if you do the math, 60 deathcounters divided by 12(the amount created in a second)= 5 seconds. youve made a trigger to do something every five seconds and it will loop. now just implement this into your music triggers(it will be more than one trigger)

lol thats funny.

You know you can use more than one right?

I think when he says "physical timer", he's talking about the countdown timer.

Oh, that would make since. I though he was refering to units patroling. Thats what it normally means at least unless i have been mistaken.

When I do music I put a cloaked unit somewhere, put a loction on it called "Music #a" (# being the player) then another one that seems reasonably away called "Music #b" (# being the player). Then I do Play Wav, order to B. when it gets to B move back to A. To get the distance right, just change the space between.

*Put the unit as a comp so the humans can't see*

This has some advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages:

• Dealth can't always be perfect, it takes a few milliseconds with hypertrigger for a +1, and a few seconds without hyper for +1. These just change the distance, or resize it. (SF can place off the grid*)
• Players can start/play the song independant of eachother (If you do one player for them all, only the lowest player hears music)
• Doen't interfere with waits
• Not that complicated

Disadvantages:

• Wastes X units (X is how many players)
• Sometimes difficult to find the right location distances.
• Wastes two locations for each player
• Time consuming

Can't think of much more than that.

I always use death count music timers. Its incredibly easy. (By the way, without hyper triggers it takes 2 second for each trigger to fire, approx.). Lets say the piece of music is 30 seconds long; if you are using hyper triggers that means:
30 seconds x 12 deaths/second (30x12) = 360 deaths. If you aren't using hyper triggers that would mean:
30 seconds x 0.5 deaths/second (30x0.5;30/2) = 15 deaths (because ever trigger fires 2 seconds apart). You need 3 triggers:

Trigger

Description:

Music Start

Players:

¤ Music Player

Conditions:

¤ Always.

Actions:

¤ Play "Music".wav.

¤ Set death of "Unit 1" to 1.

That makes the song start as well as setting the death count timer.

Trigger

Description:

Death Count Music Go

Players:

¤ Music Player

Conditions:

¤ Deaths of "Unit 1" is at least 1. (The "At Least" is very important!)

Actions:

¤ Add 1 death to "Unit 1".

¤ Preserve Trigger.

That makes the death count timer go. It is the "Wait".

Trigger

Description:

Death Count Music Restart

Players:

¤ Music Player

Conditions:

¤ Deaths of "Unit 1" is at least 360 (or 15; depends of weather there is HT's or not).

Actions:

¤ Play "Music".wav.

¤ Set death of "Unit 1" to 1.

¤ Preserve Trigger.

That restarts the death count timer as well as plays the music again.
So there you have it. You can make one of those for each player and calculate the deaths for a different song for each player. Hope that works

If you have hyper triggers and your song is between the little "+1 death = X elapsed time" thing, it will either cut off a second (sometimes that matters), or it has a break (oh noes!)

Sorry if not explained well.

Well everyone thanks for the help.

All this information should clear everything up.

EDIT: Oh, and by the way, I wanted to know about normal triggers because A. my songs are LONG (2467800 deaths) and B. the continuous deaths of the afore-mentioned 2467800 units (multiplied by 7) caused an enormous amount of lag.

It works. Pwnage.

Can someone please remind me why music can't be looped totally within one player with a wait action? Say like this:

Trigger

Players:

¤ player 1

Conditions:

¤ Always.

Actions:

¤ Play "music.wav"

¤ Wait for (#duration of music).

¤ Preserve trigger.

It can, but if the player has any other waits, wait blocks can occur.

I was wondering if you could use other things instead of waits in that trigger. I know that if you add large amounts of minerals to a player, they take a while to count up.

Trigger

Description:

Music clock thing

Players:

¤ a comp or something

¤ players who hear the music

Conditions:

¤ If computer player gets amount of minerals

Actions:

¤ subtract all minerals

¤ play music

¤ add a bunch of mins

Could this work? I don't know what it would improve, but it would take less triggers.

Any counter works. Even the countdown timer I think.

First off it is imposable for a physical timer (ie: a unit walking from one place to the next) to be more accurate than a method that uses pure triggers. The time it actually takes for a unit to move from one location to the next can actually be more accurate but you still have to wait for the triggers to detect the units presence at the location so its accuracy is limited by the trigger's firing rate.

2: The lowest player hearing the music is a result of the first player clearing the conditions before the remaing players check there triggers.




No matter how many minerals you have there still subtracted in the same amount of time and the next action will follow immediately after.

Due to the nature of my map, using minerals, units walking around, countdown timers, and long waits is implausible.

I might as well close this.

EDIT: Eh, how do I close this?

You don't need to close this.


You should shorten up the sounds, lower the quality a little for a smaller size, and use WinMPQ to import them. I find that the Staredit compression doesn't work. WAV files can be compressed a lot in MPQ(scm,scx) files, but you do need to compress it some outside of the MPQ.

Anyway, just use what l)ark_13 posted to loop the sounds.

If I shorten up the sounds, they'll lose all coherency (I already cut out the un-needed rests).

How do you lower the quality? I followed the compression steps in the tutorial that told me to change the format. Is that what you mean?

Yeah, it doesn't sound much worse...I mean, get a much lower filesize than that.

You wouldn't want to use a unit patroling timer for music anyways because the time would vary with game speed.

Physical timers are only really usefull when you want the time to be porportional to the game speed.

Also you don't need alot of space for longer times you could mix it with a counter, and just require that the unit walk that distance X times. If you were so inclined you could use one unit to control all your timming elements for the whole map by making it walk a very short distance and adding to differant counters for differant things. The distance would be your smallest increment of time.

In fact, death counters also change their speed according to the game speed, so they're not 100% reliable either.

I think the only things that do not rely on game speed are wait actions and transmissions (and wav files).

Death counters themselfs have no increment of time.

If you have hyper triggers going then death counters speed do not vary with game speed becaused there based off of waits.

But if you dont' have hyper triggers they do because there based off of the NEO.

And to close it, there should be a selection box, that says "Moderation Options", click "close topic".

Sorry, when I said "death counter" I meant "deaths counting time".
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Hypertriggers do vary with game speed.
With wait time 0, the minimum waiting time is 1/12th of a game second. If you increase the game speed, your triggers will fire faster.