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2016

WildMIDI 0.4 is here with support for other formats!

WildMIDI

WildMIDI 0.4 is released!

It has been two years in development and we’ve pushed WildMIDI 0.4 beyond just MIDI support, we’ve branched out into MIDI like files as well. We’ve worked together with other projects like GStreamer, OpenTESArena, XLEngine (DaggerXL), Thirdeye, ZDoom and more to ask what we can do to make their lives easier, as a result we now support rendering, streaming and playback of many older MIDI-like formats!

What’s new in this release

We’ve added support for KAR (MIDI with Karaoke) files, MIDI Type 2 and many MIDI-like formats such as HMI, HMP, MUS (Id) and XMI! We’ve also expanded our API in libwildmidi to support getting text/karaoke out of files, seeking songs in multi song MIDI Type 2, get errors instead of having a noisy library, setting conversion options, converting MIDI-like files into MIDI files and library now returns a buffer in the Endian format of the host.

You’ll want to re-experience old game soundtracks:

You probably still remember the soundtracks of your favorite games in their original OPL2, OPL3 or even MT32 glory, but now you’ll get to experience via a softsynth. Real guitars thrashing away on Doom’s opening anthem from e1m1 hangar or relax to the ambient Daggerfall soundtrack rendered by an orchestra. Here is a non-complete list of games that WildMIDI can use their native file formats to play back:

  • 1992-03-?? XMI Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss
  • 1992-04-16 XMI Ultima VII: The Black Gate
  • 1992-05-?? XMI The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One
  • 1992-12-?? XMI Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty
  • 1992-??-?? XMI Eye of the Beholder III: Assault on Myth Drannor
  • 1992-??-?? XMI Battle Chess 4000
  • 1992-??-?? XMI The Dark Queen of Krynn
  • 1992-??-?? XMI Tetris Classic
  • 1993-12-10 MUS Doom
  • 1993-12-?? XMI Isle of the Dead
  • 1993-??-?? XMI Dungeon Hack
  • 1993-??-?? XMI The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Two – Hand of Fate
  • 1993-??-?? XMI The Seven Cities of Gold
  • 1993-??-?? XMI SimCity 2000
  • 1993-??-?? XMI SimFarm
  • 1993-??-?? XMI Wayne’s World
  • 1994-04-01 MUS Raptor: Call of the Shadows
  • 1994-05-06 HMP Magic Carpet
  • 1994-09-23 XMI System Shock
  • 1994-10-10 MUS Doom II: Hell On Earth
  • 1994-11-19 XMI U.S. Navy Fighters
  • 1994-12-23 MUS Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders
  • 1994-12-?? HMP Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger
  • 1994-??-?? XMI The Settlers
  • 1994-??-?? HMP Sensible Golf
  • 1995-03-17 HMP Descent
  • 1995-08-?? HMP Abuse
  • 1995-09-30 MUS Hexen: Beyond Heretic
  • 1995-10-30 HMP Whiplash (a.k.a. Fatal Racing)
  • 1995-??-?? XMI Hi Octane
  • 1995-??-?? HMI The Terminator: Future Shock
  • 1996-03-13 HMP Descent II
  • 1996-03-31 XMI ATF: Advanced Tactical Fighters
  • 1996-05-15 MUS Strife
  • 1996-08-31 HMI Daggerfall
  • 1996-08-31 XMI The Settlers II
  • 1996-11-30 XMI Rex Blade: The Battle Begins
  • 1996-??-?? HMP Astérix & Obélix
  • 1996-??-?? HMI The Terminator: SkyNET
  • 1997-06-30 HMI Carmageddon
  • 1997-07-15 HMI X-COM Apocalypse

Head on over to Videogame Music Preservation Foundation track down your nostalgia!

What others have been up to:
It seems that WildMIDI has been webified, over at Wild Web Midi you can give them your MIDI file and they will stream or give you the resulting rendered file! You can look at their source code here: wild-web-midi github account.

Great job guys!

What to look forward to…:

We would like to of course support more formats! So far on our list are: MMF, RMI, RDL, CMF, DRO, IMF and RDos.

Additional features also include SF2 and DLS support to help expand WildMIDI’s softsynth ability. There is also OPL3 emulation also known as a backup soundfont generator.

Support for AmigaOS and OpenBSD are also coming.

As was mentioned already, we’ve reached out to a few project to ask if there was anything we could help them with and now we want to extend that invitation to everyone. So if there is something you think WildMIDI should be supporting, let us know!

That’s it for this release, it was a huge and long one in coming. Now that the heavy lifting has finished, we can get back to smaller updates and shorter release cycle.

WildMIDI Resources:
Release: WildMIDI 0.4
Issues: WildMIDI Issue Tracker

New releases of WorldEngine, OpenMW and TESAnnwyn

Rivers

WorldEngine 0.19 has been released! In case you’re wondering, WorldEngine is the combination of two projects: Lands and WorldSynth. The biggest gain in the merge is that we’re now two developers on the same wavelength and we’ve added plate tectonic simulations! As things have become more serious and complicated, we’ve had to write tests suites to cover our bases. We’re currently about 86% code coverage and the tests guarantee reproducibility which aids us in finding regressions. We’ve got many contributions, so having these in place are crucial for project stability.

What’s new in WorldEngine 0.19:

  • Speed of generation increased by almost a factor of 3 (due to update to Platec and making heavy use of numpy).
  • World-generation is now deterministic, i.e. generation is 100% reproducible.
  • Added support for exporting heightmaps using libgdal (see http://www.gdal.org/formats_list.html for possible formats).
  • Added the ability to modify temperature and humidity ranges as well as the temperature/precipitation curve.
  • Added the ability to generate scatter plots showing temperature and humidity of all terrestrial cells.
  • Added small variations to the temperature-map based on basic orbital parameters.
  • Added a satellite-like view of the world.
  • Added support to save/load worlds in/from HDF5-format.

Exposure!

In addition to a new release, Smashing Magazine published an article that I co-authored with Federico titled “Diving Into Procedural Content Generation” which goes into detail about our motivations in creating WorldEngine (originally WorldSynth and Lands) and how by simulating real world phenomenon we can “create” realistic worlds, the results of which have been used by others for their own projects.

Speaking of own projects…

I’ve been a member of OpenMW for a while now and with the recent advances in the OpenMW-CS (construction set), it has made it possible to create your own “game” and not have to rely on Morrowind or any other Bethesda IP. In this particular case, I’ve been working on the OpenMW-Template and OpenMW-Example-Suite. The Template is fully CC-BY 3.0 and can be used by anyone wanting to have something akin to a starter kit or SDK when using OpenMW and its CS. The Example-Suite is OpenMW’s own game using the Template as a basis but going further in demonstrating what the engine can do.

One of the things I’ve been working on is getting height data (DEM) into OpenMW, such as ones created by WorldEngine. Introducing TESAnnwyn, originally open-sourced by Lightwave, I’ve been working to turn it into a library with a CLI and improving it even further by adding features and fixing bugs. The result is that you can use GDAL to convert whatever DEM you might have, into a 32-bit signed raw (ENVI) file that can be read by TESAnnwyn and converted to an ESP full of terrain data! My hope is that one day it will have Python bindings so it can be used directly by OpenMW-CS.

Here is an example of the result of a DEM that was reduced by 50% in terms of resolution and size running in OpenMW with all the setting cranked to max, including view distance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LmzpdhNHds

As you can see, we’ve come a long way and many of the projects I’ve been working on are cross pollinating. There is so much left to do! If you’re interested in any of the projects, please feel free to leave a comment and/or help!