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Is repeating music in hacks really that bad?

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Is not bad to repeat music in more than 4 levels. The problem is that some of us are tired of hearing the same musics over and over and over and over and over...specially when one plays a different hack which happens to have the same song they're tired of. (DKC 2 Castle Theme suffered for this issue in the past)

I suggest to try to seach songs that are underused but fit in the level they need. Rare musics works too.
I guess with SMW hacks, there's a larger expectation to use a more varied soundtrack simply because of the gigantic library of available tracks to use. I mean, you don't see people complaining about music getting repetitive in Yoshi's Island hacks, as additional tracks are not so accessible.

I don't think this just applies to music. I've been hacking SMW for over a decade now so I've seen it evolve greatly over the years. Back when I first started, people didn't really care if your hack didn't have custom resources. As they became available one-by-one (graphics, sprites, music), I guess the mindset just became "if you have these resources easily available to you to help innovate your hack, why don't you use them?"

Alternatively, look at Yoshi's Island hacking. That's actually been around for a long time as well, but there hasn't been as much innovation with it as SMW. Even though YI is my favorite game, when I design levels for it, I sometimes get really bored because it's all been done so many times before and there's not much I can do innovate.
Originally posted by Jacob
I sometimes get really bored because it's all been done so many times before and there's not much I can do innovate.


Quite the opposite for me. One of the things I've found so appealing about Yoshi's Island and the reason I keep getting drawn back to it at times is simply because of how innovative you actually can be with the sprites you're given. I've found so many different puzzle setups through experimentation with random sprites, and I've found so many tricks with the physics of the game that it's unreal. I guess if you've made 2-3 full hacks like you have then it would be a bit harder to come up with stuff, but still.

As for the topic of the thread, I'm fine if music repeats, but not extensively simply due to the reasons above (most notably, there is a huge library of songs available). On that note, what annoys me more than repeating music is people using shitty ports in their levels. It's 2012, and every track submitted/accepted into the music section in the past year or two has been super high quality .. yet for some reason, people still insist on using clicky and awful sounding tracks from 2007-2008 in their hacks. Feh.
I was looking at hacks to download the other day and I read a review and I quote:

Originally posted by Hack Reviewer
I will refuse to play the rest of any rom hack if it doesn't have custom music.




I couldn't believe my eyes. There are many "chocolate" hacks as people would call them that actually use only the SMW soundtrack and they're amazing! Demo World comes to mind...


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Also worth considering is that you have like 300 slots for music. Sure, you could repeat it, but you'd be wasting those slots. Might as well have variety.
You can't fit 300 pieces of custom music in a ROM though. Any .bnk or .brr files use quite a bit of space and depending on how large the .txts file size is, you could be limited to far less.
For gaming news and Wario discussions, check out Gaming Reinvented and Wario Forums respectively.

As for Mario's Nightmare Quest? Well, it's currently on Fusion Gameworks, ROM Hacking.net or the GCN at the moment.
Originally posted by Dragonfly
I was looking at hacks to download the other day and I read a review and I quote:

Originally posted by Hack Reviewer
I will refuse to play the rest of any rom hack if it doesn't have custom music.




I couldn't believe my eyes. There are many "chocolate" hacks as people would call them that actually use only the SMW soundtrack and they're amazing! Demo World comes to mind...

Wow, that seems really biased. Who made that review? And for what hack?
don't click this link...
I personally don't have any sort of problems with repeating songs as long as it's not going to be repeated consecutively for more than 3 levels in a row. If all you want is 10 songs for 64 levels, go ahead and use 10 songs for 64 levels. Small soundtracks can work without becoming tedious to listen to. Even SMW has never become tedious for me to listen to, and that has an even worse ratio of level music:levels than this example.

Variety with consistency is a good thing, but, variety for the sake of variety is not. You may be forcing yourself to use stuff outside your musical taste, or songs that just sound terrible next to each other, or a song may not fit your vision for your level as well as a song you've already used earlier has. These are all things that drag the hack quality down or make it less fun to work on.

The bigger problem IMO, is people using tracks where whether or not it's even music is debatable, kind of like the tracks SNN is referring to.

Just look above you...
If it's something that can be stopped, then just try to stop it!
Originally posted by op
Is repeating music in hacks really that bad?

On the contrary. In a shorter hack it's merely acceptable to have or not have repeating tracks. However, in a longer hack, I find that song reuse, rather than becoming boring due to repetition, really adds to a sense of cohesion within the entire hack. I mean, you wouldn't use a different set of graphics for every single level in a long hack, would you? Each area would look like it had no relation at all to the previous area, and would kill any concept that you are playing a complete, well thought out game, it would just look like jumbling together a whole bunch if different, unrelated ideas. We're in this weird situation where we have essentially unlimited resources for the SNES, where such resources would really be impossible in the time it was created. Because of this, we feel that we are wasting the resources if we don't make as much use of them as possible, and that's just not true. Not every hack needs to use all the resources, we can get our variety by playing different hacks, it's better to make a whole game than trying to have too much variety.
Originally posted by HuFlungDu
I mean, you wouldn't use a different set of graphics for every single level in a long hack, would you? Each area would look like it had no relation at all to the previous area, and would kill any concept that you are playing a complete, well thought out game, it would just look like jumbling together a whole bunch if different, unrelated ideas.

If variety is internally cohesive, not necessarily. Including a custom tileset in each level if they have a consistent graphical style and good area transitions can make each level feel unique while still adding to the larger whole. For example, making a castle in an ice world have a different tileset than one in a grass world can help both stand out in a positive way. The problem is there aren't the resources on SMWC to include both variation and consistency in a full hack.

Where people personally differ is whether a cohesive hack/game with repetition (music, tilesets, etc) or a cohesive hack/game with more variation is the ideal, not necessarily what's possible with resources and restrictions. I personally love seeing different atmospheres that don't reuse content (one of the big reasons I loved Xenoblade Chronicles - you wanted to see and hear what was next) so that's the ideal for me, not necessarily what's typically done in games and hacks.
In other words, IMO variety is something that usually pleases us, hack players, who expect different ideas from the original game, while repetition makes the player pay more attention to the style (especially level design and graphics) and it emphasizes the ambiance between similar levels. Well I think that a good idea to "repetition hackers" is using 2 different custom music for each specific tileset. This would create a balance between "variety" and "repetition". And it wouldn't be hard or effortful to do, as there are things such as search tags to make it easier.

I personally don't care with repetitions, except when just everything is repeating from level to level: same GFX, same music, same palettes, same enemies, same design ideas...
Originally posted by mathelete
Originally posted by Dragonfly
I was looking at hacks to download the other day and I read a review and I quote:

Originally posted by Hack Reviewer
I will refuse to play the rest of any rom hack if it doesn't have custom music.




I couldn't believe my eyes. There are many "chocolate" hacks as people would call them that actually use only the SMW soundtrack and they're amazing! Demo World comes to mind...

Wow, that seems really biased. Who made that review? And for what hack?



Mario's Strange Quest, the reviewer is DaKennyMan.


VTuber, musician, composer, voice actor. Check out my socials!

.





I do not think a bad idea, actually it is good when you want to make one more focused on Super Mario, it's always good to repeat the songs.
If you're talking about multiple uses of music in the same hack: Yes, it's bad.

If you're talking about the same music being used in different hacks from different users: Depends on the context of the music.




Of course, you'll have 10 different hacks, and all 10, for example, will have DKC Aquatic Ambience theme. Out of those 10, 7 levels used it correctly, 2 levels could have had a better water theme, and that 1 level...doh.


Music is good all around. Explore your horizons. If it's a hack work, no more than 1 use per hack. The key here is creativity. Open your horizons.
Originally posted by Dragonfly
Originally posted by mathelete
Originally posted by Dragonfly
I was looking at hacks to download the other day and I read a review and I quote:

Originally posted by Hack Reviewer
I will refuse to play the rest of any rom hack if it doesn't have custom music.




I couldn't believe my eyes. There are many "chocolate" hacks as people would call them that actually use only the SMW soundtrack and they're amazing! Demo World comes to mind...

Wow, that seems really biased. Who made that review? And for what hack?



Mario's Strange Quest, the reviewer is DaKennyMan.

Um, I am not sure if there are any hack reviews that do not have custom music. I am hoping he did not review the ones without custom music (as opposed to reviewing them and giving them a 0/10)
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Being the first-world spoiled brat that I am, I do find it slightly irksome hearing the same few tracks for much of the game. If there's like, 5 pieces of music for a 60-level hack, it does get rather old. For example, The Second Reality Project 2, a hack made before custom music was possible, used SMB3 music throughout. Since SMB3 Music is rather short, and the levels were really long, it got annoying fast, especially since SMB3 music was being used in just under half of all hacks made at the time due to the patch's novelty. I look forward to the remake's entirely custom soundtrack. Since there's spaces for >50 unique tracks in the latest versions of Addmusic, it's kind of inexcusable if someone capable of using the program repeats the same 5 tracks throughout his/her chocolate hack. I'm like Supertails: I try to give each level a unique tileset and music track... as a consequence, though, hack resources like Map16 pages are depleted fairly quickly.
Music takes up a lot of space, so for longer hacks I'm satisfied with ~20 total tracks (including boss themes and whatnot).
Originally posted by Sagittaire
If you're talking about multiple uses of music in the same hack: Yes, it's bad.

If you're talking about the same music being used in different hacks from different users: Depends on the context of the music.




Of course, you'll have 10 different hacks, and all 10, for example, will have DKC Aquatic Ambience theme. Out of those 10, 7 levels used it correctly, 2 levels could have had a better water theme, and that 1 level...doh.


Music is good all around. Explore your horizons. If it's a hack work, no more than 1 use per hack. The key here is creativity. Open your horizons.

So you are saying we should use a different song for each level? That can be very problematic when there are 80+ levels.
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