Music
UnrealED2 Tutorials by EZkeel

E-mail:Ezkeel@nikodemus.co.uk

Contents

1) Adding your music
2) Triggering music within a level
3) Importing Music

Introduction

Although UT doesn't really support SP games you can make them, and as such I'll base this tutorial around that. By covering SP level building you can cover any music needs required by any game type.

Adding your music

To assign music to your level just do the following:

1) Select the "Music Browser" from the top icon toolbar (it looks like a musical note).

2) From the new window that appears choose "File" and "open". A browser will appear from which you can choose any music file you like. Once chosen, it will appear in the window. Click on it once so that its highlighted (double click it to actually hear it).

3) Back in the main editor screen right click in one of the grids and select "Level Properties"

4) A properties menu will appear. Click on the section called "Audio"

5) A further set of menu options will appear. Click in the area called "Song".

6) Now click the "use" button in that field and you should see your music selection appear there.

7) There's also a field there called "SongSection". This is set to 0 by default. Most of the music for the original Unreal is split into 3 sections. Section 0 is the main tune. Section 1 and 2 are suspense and action sequences. This is useful to know if you're fed up of hearing "Warlord" all the time for fight scenes!

8) Save your level and try it. It will play the music straight away.

Triggering music within a level.

Typically there are two reasons why you would want to trigger music in a level. Firstly, the player might enter an area, which is somehow different, and you want to change the atmosphere. Secondly (most commonly) a battle is about to start and you want some aggressive music to start the adrenaline pumping. Most of the time you wouldn't use this in a Deathmatch, Domination or Capture the Flag map, but you may want to use it in an Assault map and you wourl certainly want to use this in a single player map.

Just follow these steps
(assuming you have a level prepared which you want to add it to):

1) Open the "ActorClassBrowser".

2) Select "Triggers" from the menu.

3) Select "MusicEvent" from the extended menu.

4) Right click on your map (in the 3d picture) anywhere you like. Its probably best to keep it fairly close to the area where the music will happen so its easy to find it if you want to change it. You should see a grey animal head appear in your map

5) Now open the Music browser.

6) Click on "File" and "open" and from the browser choose the music file you want. Then highlight it once it appears in the toolbar.

7) Click on the music event which you added to your map and press F4 to bring up its properties on the screen.

8) In that properties menu click on the field that says "MusicEvent"

9) Choose the field that says "song" and click "use" and your chosen music will appear there.

10) There will also be a field with a drop down menu called "Transition". From here you can choose if you want the music to slowly fade in or chop in instantly. For fast fighting music, use "instant" and for moody areas use "slow fade" You'll need to experiment with this, otherwise the transition can sometimes go "choppy" when it changes in the game.

11) The "song section" field enables you to pick a part of the music file to use. A lot of the music files are split into 3 sections.

0 = ambient or mood music
1 = suspense
2 = action

12) Now you'll need to "label" your music event so that UT knows where to look when it has to change the music.
Still in the properties menu, click on "Events". And in the "Tag" field call it "Vibes" (or whatever you like).

13) Now you need something to trigger your music off when you play. This could be any number of things. It could be a simple trigger (taken from the classes menu, under triggers). It could be a mover of some kind. Pushing a button may cause a set of events to happen, and one of those events could be your music. Another common way to start music (usually the fighting stuff) is to have a monster start it off.

Here's the general principal to trigger your music.

Let’s say you have a Titan, and when he sees you, you want the fast music to start. All you need to do is select the Titan and bring up his property menu. Under the menu option labelled "AI", you'll find a field called:
"FirstHatePlayerEvent". Type in "Vibes" (or whatever you called your music), in that field, and as soon as the Titan sees you, it will trigger off the music.

You can also have another music event, with the Song selection set to "None" and the transition set to "fade".
Give it the tag name of "dead" and in the Titan's event field type "dead". When the Titan dies, the music will then fade back out again.

For movers, it’s simpler. In the "event" field type in "vibes" (or whatever you called your music tag) and the mover will start the music when it reaches its final keyframe.

For straightforward triggers, just put "vibes" in its event field.

To get rid of music all together use triggers in the same way, but set the property "bSilence" in the "MusicEvent" property to true.

And that should be all you need to know to have music in your levels.

Importing Music.

Importing music is tricky business and you will need a useful tool to
convert files into a format that Unreal understands.

Unreal Tournament will not import WAV files as music, so you will need to convert these if you have them. A useful tool for doing this is Modplug: http://www.modplug.com/
Once you've loaded your WAV file in there, all you need to do is "Save as" and use one of the compatible formats it lists! Then you're ready to import!

Essentially, all you need to do to import music files is to open the Music browser click on "File" and "import" and use the browser to find your piece of music. When you open it, the music will appear in your music browser window, and then you can save it as a UMX file.

EZkeel
(Simon West-Bulford)