[Reality] Sound/music in client

[James Knight]

Okay, I want to have a way to do sound and music in the Java client...for
MacOS and Windows, I am implementing it in Quicktime for Java (which is a
very very nice interface). Obviously for Unix systems, it will need to be
implemented some other way, since Quicktime is not available.

Anyways, the featureset that I am thinking is necessary is as follows:
- Ability to play at least the following formats: MIDI, MP3, WAV
- Ability to specify the volume (e.g. as you approach a waterfall, it
should get louder (now there's an interesting challenge for the game
engine...how would we pull off a background/continuous sound in one room
being audible in neighboring ones at decreased volume without specifying it
directly))
- Multiple channels of sound.
- At least one channel of background sound/music which will loop endlessly
until explicitly set to something else.
- MAYBE the ability to stream sound/music off the web. Pre-downloading it
and storing it locally is probably a better solution though.

What would make it REALLY COOL would be to have the following:
- Ability to specify breakpoints in the music every 10 seconds or so where
it would make sense musically to start playing a short transition piece
which will lead into a new music track. That way its more like a continuous
background music that changes depending on what's happening/where you are,
which is much much cooler than having abrupt cutoffs when you move.


Anyways, what does everyone think...once we get a featureset down, the
server->client interface can be defined that supports all the features, and
the platform specific implementations can be started.
-James

PS: More thoughts re: the downloading stuff...it should probably have
something like AOL (used to?), where you autodl the necessary files when
you need them and then it stores them on your hard drive forever, unless
the files change at which point it redownloads them. That would probably
make sense for sound, themes, and (images if we ever have them).

--
You are in a maze of testy little Java VMs, all subtly different.