Midi support?

Is it possible to play a midi in the game? I ask because I've heard of patches that give maps midi support... And I think I saw a few in the game MPQ. Anyway, if it's possible - does anyone know the quality of the playback? Like, would it sound different on everyone's computer like normal midi? (Depends on sound card, midi tables or whatever.) Would be a good way to have some custom music without adding massive filesize to a map...

I don't thank that Warcraft 3 has MIDI support. Besides, I don't like MIDI files because they don't sound right. I can't explain it but I think that many would agree with me.

The only way I'm aware of adding midi-support to maps is using one of the Advanced functions of WE Unlimited, which requires an extra patch installed in addition to the WEU program files.

You can download WEU and the patch for midi-support from here. There's also a helpful thread with additional information here.

I'm not entirely sure about the playback differences in many computers or sound cards, but my personal experience was with two different computers and sound cards (though both Creative Sound Blaster compatible), the midi files sounded arguably identical to each other.

If you have a map you've worked on quite a bit via the regular WE, you can import it into WEU fairly easily (it's really just a matter of creating a new map in WEU that has all the features you will want to use), then writing down all the files that were imported to create that map, and import them into your original map with the custom file paths (I originally had a heck of a time with this step, only to realize it wasn't importing from the correct directories.)

If you have any trouble or need some extra assistance, feel free to PM or e-mail me and I'll try to help anyway I can.

-GabeStah-
-[email protected]-

Theres a much simpler way. Awhile ago blackdick released a midi patcher program, with explanation how to use it.

But you would have to run the patcher and have everyone run your patcher to play your map.

How it works is that BD program finds where your gm.DLS is found, this is your windows Dynamic library of sounds. Which is basically a defination file for the sounds a midi can make. And inserts it directly into your mpq, and edits your mididata.slk to add entry data for it under Roland (The creator of this massive DLS)

To use it you would set the ambient to "Roland" then you set what music you want to play (you'd have to import the midi file...duh).

War3 does use midis, but it was cheatingly added. rathering then using the instruments already avaliable and working around them they created much smaller ranges of instrument peices and limited thier range so that the composers could use the same Midis for ambient themes without fear of a instrument playing at the wrong time. (clever, but lazy on thier part). The fact they simply don't include Native Midi support is really disgusting.

As far as the quality of your midis they were largely the fault of your soundcard; but now windows (2000&XP anyway) does have software support which should standardize the quality by using extraclocks from your CPU (Unless you have an audigy or a highend soundblaster you probably going to want to leave this untounched) which is set by default.

If you want to do it the hard way, go here and try to follow my attempt to write a tutorial. It allows any player with ambience turned on to listen to midi-files (I haven't explored the effects of having ambience turned on, and wether it works on Macs or not (it should)). Check out the midi.w3m map in my signature for an example.

If your midis use alot of instruments the DLS will get quite big and will increase the size of your map quite extensively. The midi-file in my test map only uses one instrument (piano) and thus the DLS is small.

Pepar your ways abit clumsy.
Requiring two external programs. This method is probably just as poor as it requires you to fiddle with your main mpqs but its probably less obtrusive and should be perfect for SP.
The packager
http://www.wc3campaigns.com/forums/s...threadid=11334

This is the original thread. http://www.wc3campaigns.com/forums/s...&threadid=5336

This tutorial was written for RoC, and since then a file importer has been added. Additionally, the filtering process is optional.

There are some things that can be done better, like disabling the day/night ambient triggers which seems to interfere with your midis unless you play them immediately at game start, where they seem to jump a bit. I will investigate this further

EDIT: I redid the example map to use the file importer as well as altering the sound initialization trigger to play the music a short time after map init.

Cool, thanks for the responses guys. It sounds like a messy process no matter how it's done... I likely won't bother with it, especially if it requires external programs. I'll check out that map in your sigh tho Peppar.

And 35263526, the reason midi doesn't sound too good to you and many others is that midi generally isn't what you'd call high quality sound. I have a HUGE midi collection, personally, most of it doesn't sound anything close to real music (quality, instrument sounding), but there also many that sound really really good. I've also found that piano generally sounds the same on most different cards. So if it were possible to impliment it in a map, an entire track of new music could be added at the expense of a small handful of kilobytes.

Anyway, next idea. ;)