Reinstate the Intro Music

[bunnybot]

Mirrored from Codeberg
Created on Tue Mar 05 18:44:58 CET 2024 by Benedikt Straub (Nordfriese)

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Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Discussed by PM: The old Widelands intro music (https://codeberg.org/wl/widelands/src/branch/master/data/music/intro.ogg) is currently unused¹, but it has a high recognition value and is part of the traditional Widelands design. It should be used in the splashscreen again.

Describe the solution you'd like
This needs discussion. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in the past (0.21 and earlier) the intro (which is a full 52 seconds long!) played as long as the splashscreen was open (which was forever until the user clicked). Clicking the splashscreen away cancelled the intro music and switched to the main menu music.

Now that the splashscreen fades out much earlier even without user intervention, this design choice would no longer work.

One possibility would be to always play the intro for the first 52 seconds and then switch to the main menu music, regardless of how long the splashscreen is visible.
Another possibility could be to do this only if the user does not click away the splashscreen, and switch to main menu music immediately upon the user clicking the splashscreen away.

Please discuss. I don't really have a preference here.

Footnotes

1. I simply overlooked it during the 1.0 main menu redesign, and until now nobody cared ;) ↩

[bunnybot]

Mirrored from Codeberg
On Tue Mar 05 18:53:42 CET 2024, Benedikt Straub (Nordfriese) wrote:

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To also throw in a slightly more exotic suggestion: I remember one or two older games that had a built-in screensaver (from the times when showing a static image on the screen for too long risked hardware damage), where leaving the game's main menu in idleness for a minute or so switched to a screensaver movie showing select in-game scenes with their own music.
Such a "screensaver" for Widelands (with its own separate deck of slideshow images) would be a nice easter egg, and an ideal place to use the intro music if it no longer fits that well to the regular main menu.

[bunnybot]

Mirrored from Codeberg
On Tue Mar 05 21:15:32 CET 2024, Tóth András (tothxa) wrote:

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First of all, we should change the startup code to start the music and load the splash image much earlier.

[bunnybot]

Mirrored from Codeberg
On Wed Mar 06 22:18:02 CET 2024, Benedikt Straub (Nordfriese) wrote:

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Nice! This is a very promising approach, though it should show a message "Loading …" (in the intro font…) or such until the splashscreen can be skipped. Maybe we could adapt the UI::ProgressWindow code.
Somehow the fadeout doesn't work for me with this patch though (testing with a debug build and lots of add-ons installed, which makes for 30-50 seconds of startup time; master with release build works fine).

[simply-peachy]

I don't mind too much about the choices as to when it should play, but would like to express my support for reinstating the intro music. I fondly remember it from 20 years ago and would dearly like to hear it again when I start the game.

[bunnybot]

Assigned to tothxa

[bunnybot]

Mirrored from Codeberg
On Tue Mar 12 18:15:38 CET 2024, matthiakl wrote:

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I think the old music should start with the splash and continue after fading to the main menu. Then it could either play to the end before changing or fade to the current main menu music once the first window is opened, i.e. the player starts interacting with the game.

[bunnybot]

Mirrored from Codeberg
On Tue Mar 12 18:22:17 CET 2024, Tóth András (tothxa) wrote:

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I'm working on a splashscreen that scrolls the authors list while the intro music lasts, then fades to the main menu. (Of course it can be skipped with a keypress like before.) I already have a working rough version. I hope I'll be able to clean it up and open a PR soon.

[bunnybot]

Mirrored from Codeberg
On Wed Mar 13 10:20:21 CET 2024, frankystone wrote:

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a splashscreen that scrolls the authors list

-1 from me. I can't think of any other FOSS games that do that, and it's something I strongly associate with proprietary games.

-1 also from my side.

Having a "Loading… Please wait" message, if feasible with a progressbar, is sufficient, imho.

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Not related, but i would like to see a split of the option "Play Music" into "Play Intro Music" and "Play Music in Game/Editor".

[bunnybot]

Mirrored from Codeberg
On Wed Mar 13 11:30:02 CET 2024, Tóth András (tothxa) wrote:

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So for the original issue my primary vote is to drop the intro music ("until now nobody cared"), my secondary vote is to only reinstate if we find a use for it (I came up with the credits, but only because that's already available, so I'm not attached to it if someone has a better idea). But I vote against any middle ground where we just play it without any real purpose, or mix it down before it has a chance to actually start.

To put it Debian-style: ;)

[9] drop it
[0] play it only during starting up then mix it down
[1] start it with splash screen and let it play through once
[5] play it through in splash screen with some dynamic content
[4] none of the above

edit: oops, that's probably wrong, the Debian way is to think in terms of ranking not preference strength... should it be this for Debian? :

[1] drop it
[9] play it only during starting up then mix it down
[8] start it with splash screen and let it play through once
[4] play it through in splash screen with some dynamic content
[5] none of the above

[tothxa]

The previous one is actually reverse Debian style. Corrected on CB, but that won't get mirrored... :(

[bunnybot]

Mirrored from Codeberg
On Thu Mar 14 17:57:24 CET 2024, Benedikt Straub (Nordfriese) wrote:

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In your vote you left our my idea from above :) Is it worth that I should make a branch for that so it can be tested and evaluated?

[bunnybot]

Mirrored from Codeberg
On Thu Mar 14 18:56:53 CET 2024, Tóth András (tothxa) wrote:

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In your vote you left our my idea from above :) Is it worth that I should make a branch for that so it can be tested and evaluated?

Well, I considered the screensaver idea somewhat unrelated, so I forgot about it. Since we already have a slow slideshow of in-game scenes as the main menu background, I don't think that would give much value. (Though we could disable the buttons after some inactivity and speed up the image swapping, but I'm not interested in implementing that.)

As for using the intro music with such a slide show: That's an option for a dynamic load screen, but I wouldn't use it for a screen saver, because it's not really fit for playing over and over IMO.