Game Arts

[shadow drifter]

So I desided to make an rpg, and realized how important good music and realistic backgrounds are.

Of course, as many people would agree, The Way has a lot of good music, and obviously great backgrounds.

Anyway, I was wondering how it is possible to make those cool backgrounds.

So if anyone has a suggestion, please.

Oh, and what kind of music editors do you use?

[Teenr0cker]

I believe Lun uses Cakewalk, according to Jeramyu. I actually prefer Fruity Loops myself. You can seach for my topic for some names too. I don't know how people make those backgrounds, but I know I just went around the net and downloaded some.

[EmperorJeramyu]

The backgrounds are made with Bryce 4. The music is done in cakewalk.

[Impossible]

Lun's music in Cakewalk sounds about a billion times better than anything I've made in Cakewalk...

[shadow drifter]

I searched cakewalk and found a variety of products.

Is there a specific one? Could you put in a link?

Also, I couldn't find a download site for Bryce 4 that actually worked, do you know of any that do?

[EmperorJeramyu]

Well, as for Bryce 4, it a pretty high-profile program that costs hundreds of dollars to buy, so you might not be able to just download it off of any old website. Not to mention Bryce 5 is out as well. I got mine from KaZaa, and even then, I'm lucky it works 100%.

[shadow drifter]

Ok, what about cakewalk?
Which product are you talking about?

[Vaylos]

Well, cakewalk has a number of products indeed. Personally, I'm using home studio 9. works well with midi, and only costs about 50 or 60 dollars on academic liscense (i think i'll have to verify that)

Fruityloops is also good. I use 3.4 myself (i know, i'm too lazy to buy the latest, and i'm a cheap ass) but I use fruity mostly for dreaming up occasional electrnoica, and converting my midis over into mp3 format using various sound samples i've gathered over the years.

The nice thing about cakewalk home studio (or pro audio if you feel like spending more) is there's a staff entry window so you can enter the notes by hand if you don't have a midi keyboard.

And as long as i'm mentioning musical notation, well, a lot of times I'll use Finale to write the score by hand (which usually takes me awhile if it's particularly long, or complex) , save as midi, open it in cakewalk, and
tinker with volumes/dynamics, and then boom, pretty decent sounding stuff.

But yeah...er...I don't condone warez in any way shape or form. If you're in college, you can purchase an academic liscense as a student for about half the retail value. If you still don't like the cost, get a job you damn hippy.

[shadow drifter]

I actually already have downloaded a few demos of midi editors, looking for which one to actually buy.

I don't know about Finale, but I think the two most easiest programs to write by hand are either Anvil Studio or NoteWorthy Composer. You can actually download the full versions of both for free (although they make you "promise" that you are only evaluating the program).

Although, I actually had to use them together sometimes, because Anvil is incredably time consuming to have a volume change within a track, and NoteWorthy requires you to manually put in all the rests so you can line up chords with a different track.

Anyway, I've downloaded a trial of FL, but I'm going to need to learn how to use it. I will try and download a trial of Cakewalk.

There isn't any downloadable trail of any Bryce products are there?

Well, thanks everybody for answering my questions.

[Ryan]

Bryce is extremely hard to use, and if you don't have atleast 2 months to learn it I wouldn't even bother. I download many many pirated things on the net to where I guess you could consider me a pro at it heh. Kazaa just doesn't cut it sometimes ;). But yeah, don't use bryce even if you do have the time to learn it... Lun got lucky with his backgrounds coming out meshing with tiles like that, it's not easy.

[shadow drifter]

I doubt I'll ever even get it anyway (Kazaa doen't work on my 'puter for some reason...). So I suppose there arn't any other landscape editors with that quality. Meh, that's ok.

[Iteroth]

LOL

I leared Bryce back in Bryce 3

I am such a bryce pimp. Making backgrounds like lun's aren't fundamentally hard really, they just take a knowledge of the program.

Bryce is a nice program and all, but even with the slick results I always get the feeling that it's more of a toy than a real modelling program.

I like 3d modelling with Blender 3d and milkshape, but I just don't think in 3 dimensions so it's hard

[EmperorJeramyu]

Yeah, Bryce isn't hard at all. I made some really neat stuff the first time I used it, and making it into a panorama for rm2k was easy.

[Iteroth]

The only hard part is rm2k's bitchy color depth and pallette

it totally messes up 3d images unless you fix them in photoshop first

[Ryan]

Jeramyu, really neat stuff doesn't work with rm2k :) That requires 32 bit depth hehe :D