[directmusic] Re: directmusic Digest V1 #47
- From: "Jason Booth" <jason@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <directmusic@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2002 14:37:26 -0400
I don't think a degree is necissary, but a really good
understanding of exactly how things function in Direct Music is.
Sometimes simple things can trip you up; For instance, at one point in
the project I had a segment with a band in it set to looping, and this
segment was being called from another segment. This essentially made the
looping segment get called every other bar, thus you'd have an
increasing number of these segments playing the longer the music played.
While everything sounded fine with short listenings, after 30 seconds or
so Direct Music would start to hitch. I had no idea where this hitching
was coming from, and luckely someone on this list looked at my project
and figured out what was going on. That experience made me spend a lot
more time understanding what was going on under the hood - because it's
very easy for the composer to cause all kinds of problems if they're not
careful with their data structures, and it might not always be obvious
to the programer whats wrong.
Both sides really need to work for a common understanding of
what they are doing, and how the structure of the music is designed.=20
Also, make sure you have adiquate programing resources alocated,
and that you're using people who aren't distracted by other tasks, or
aren't clean coders. The first person assigned to my project was also
assigned to localization, which is a big task into itself. That,
combined with not really understanding a lot of what they were doing,
caused months of re-work for myself and my sound designer, and made the
code extremely unreliable, slow, and buggy. Eventually, we moved one of
our graphics guys onto the system, who's quite versed in everything, and
re-wrote the entire thing from the ground up in the last four weeks of
the project. This was not optimal, and greatly reduced are time to
polish the mix of the system (we actually got the last major bug
squashed the day the client went gold, so we weren't allowed to finish
the mix).=20
I really feel that if the management of my company was willing
to allocate the proper resources to the project from the beginning,
instead of trying to half ass it, the entire game would have benifited
as we would have had a lot more time to work on other aspects. Make sure
your company allocates the proper resources to the project up front.
-----Original Message-----
From: John Glynn [mailto:johnglynn@xxxxxxxxxxx]=20
Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2002 8:50 AM
To: directmusic@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [directmusic] Re: directmusic Digest V1 #47
Hey Devin,
I appreciate you asking all of those questions. Even though I am
already sold on DMP and am using it for a current project I would like
to those answers as well.
And thank you Jason for taking the time to answer a bunch of them. BTW
Jason, you mentioned the roll of the composer. How much in your opinion
should the composer be aware of technically? I realize this is a highly
subjective question but I am working with one of our programmers and we
are trying to solve a problem. As the composer I understand all of the
musical aspects and he understands all of the techy aspects. But its
like there is a ravine of ignorance between us preventing us from
communicating succsessfully so the problem is not getting solved as
quickly as if either of us understood both music and programming. This
is a tough question to answer but how much crossover is reasonable and
has anyone else encountered this problem? How much should the
programmer be expected to know about music? Does it make more sense for
the composer to just get a degree (or
equivelant) in programming?
John Glynn
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