Composing Music for Unreal

Alexander Brandon
abrandon@uswest.net
Straylight Productions

UPDATE

Many apologies for the lack of updates to this page. They've been long overdue, and there is much to report regarding Unreal's music. Expect to see regular updates from now on. Also stop by the Straylight site for updates concerning interactive music using the Unreal Engine as well!

Last Updated: 07/09/1999

There are many choices now for composing music using the Unreal Engine. Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and the Unreal Mission Pack all used MOD files, which were chosen because of small file size and excellent quality compared to MIDI based files. New developments, however, have led to new ways of music reproduction in the engine.

• TRACKERS: Tracker programs, used to write MOD files, can be found at "Maz' Sound Tools" page (listed below), along with information about how they are used and samples to use with them. The two trackers that are most widely used are "Impulse Tracker" and "Fast Tracker 2". Both have excellent features. Try them and see which one you prefer! Note that Tracker programs are usually either shareware or freeware. They are the least expensive way to get into making music for Unreal based games.

• DIRECTMUSIC: DirectMusic Producer, included free with DirectX 6.0, is another easy way to get into music production. DirectMusic uses a MIDI based approach to composition, letting you create your own samples much the same way as you would use tracking programs. DirectMusic, however, has numerous ways of letting you manipulate your music and change it interactively with game events. For more information contact Chanel Summers.

• REDBOOK / STREAMED AUDIO: CD audio and other forms of streamed audio are becoming much more popular now that they don't use as much in terms of processing time. However, they take up a LOT of space, and the more channels you use and the higher quality you use, the more space is needed. A 44khz 16 bit stereo piece 4 minutes in length takes about 45 megabytes of space, and if you wish to use more channels for surround sound (such as Dolby Digital AC-3), the size doubles or even triples in size from there. However, there are many forms of compression such as ADPCM that allow you to compress a 16 bit file to 4 or 8 bit with minimal signal degradation. Compression routines can be used in programs like Sonic Foundry's "Sound Forge" .. more info can be found at www.sonic-foundry.com. Unreal's "Galaxy" sound engine can play back many different audio file formats from Redbook CD audio to streamed WAV files.

• MP3s: For commercial games, there is a tricky situation going on. The folks who supposedly created the MP3 compression program (Fraunhofer), have put a patent on it, which says that they get part of anything sold that uses this compression. Quite a pain, but there are proceedings being held all over the world against this patent, so it will either stand or be dropped, we'll have to wait and see. For non commercial use, however, such as freeware TC and MOD distribution, MP3s can be used just fine, and "Galaxy" will play them back in Unreal.

Try going into UnrealED, go to the texture browser, select "Music", and load the song you want (.UMX file).. then press the Export button. You will be able to export the file selected as an Impulse Tracker (.IT) file. The .IT file can be then played in WinAMP or other Windows MOD players (available at Maz' Sound Tools).

The Galaxy audio engine within Unreal does not support certain extended features of Impulse Tracker, such as New Note Actions (when you use 'instruments' instead of 'samples' in IT, for instance). However, it DOES support ping pong looping, 16 bit files, up to 32 channels (64, if you don't want sound fx playing ), and panning envelopes. No volume envelopes, though.

Yes. Galaxy can play up to 64 WAV files at once. Be warned however, that using more than 2 or three WAV files over 2 megs in size will slow down the system.

Yep! Andrew Sega contributed a song to Unreal. His nick is "necros" and he is currently working at Digital Anvil. Another contributor was Dan Gardopee, my partner and the co-founder of Straylight Productions.

• "Maz's Sound Tools" is a great one-stop site for getting tracking programs, samples, info on soundcards, converters, and generally everything else under the sun. http://www.maz-sound.com/

• DirectMusic Overview