[NightFright]

The soundfont sounds very similar to the Timidity patches, however since Bashe applied some adjustments, the SF2 will sound "drier" with less reverb in general. If you don't mind that, it's a quite accurate adaptation.

[Player Lin]

NightFright, on 20 March 2020 - 07:06 AM, said:

The soundfont sounds very similar to the Timidity patches, however since Bashe applied some adjustments, the SF2 will sound "drier" with less reverb in general. If you don't mind that, it's a quite accurate adaptation.

Understood, I would try that if I have some time, thanks your explanation.

[NightFright]

Bashe actually published a very neat comparison video presenting EAWPats patches vs soundfont side-by-side. Most of the time it's hard to tell the difference:

https://youtu.be/kv4lwVWkYlo

According to Bashe, volume and decay/release times of many instruments have been "optimized". Graf Zahl, who is a determined fan of the patches, considers this a sacrilege which ruins the general character of the package. Anyway, there is a slight chance Bashe will get back to working on the project and considers doing a vanilla version without any personal adjustments.

[Player Lin]

Well, "optimized" always tends be subjective, and I won't blame Graf didn't like Bashe's changes.

Listened the comparison video, the RotT music, soundfont version sounds a little off to me when I prefer patches version, other music...well, I'm not sure if I'm old or something but I found soundfont version was more clear but patches version was...very unique feel.

But, OPL3 still sounds better to me, at least for Duke3D music...(Yeah, I downloaded soundfont and tried that already.)

[NightFright]

Well, EDuke32 luckily gives you many choices right now, with OPL3 always being the fallback solution. The perfect solution for me would be if EDuke32 was able to natively use the Yamaha S-YXG50 VSTi plugin, but it's probably a bit exotic.

[TerminX]

Would you guys mind re-testing .sf2 support? I got in touch with the guy who wrote TinySoundFont and he managed to very quickly fix several problems with the library based on some bug reports I made. All of the .sf2 files linked in this thread sound better to me now.

[NightFright]

I did a fast comparison with r8770 and r8778 using the EAWPats soundfont and listening to grabbag.mid and stalker.mid ingame. There is indeed a noteworthy improvement in sound quality. Instruments appear clearer to my ears and some even seem to be "fleshed out" more. Music also seems to have more volume in general. I dunno about reverb since that soundfont is supposed to sound "dry" by default, but in general this comes a lot closer now to what I know from Fluidsynth in GZDoom.

BTW if you are looking for a small, compact and yet nice-sounding smallfont to ship with EDuke32, Synthoridity over at VOGONs made this nice conversion of a 5MB Turtle Beach soundfont, with some minor tweaks to make it sound better. Maybe not all instruments are top-notch, but for a soundfont of this size it's pretty well balanced and all instruments can be heard clearly. My personal favorite remains 8MBGM Enhanced, however. Was made for Descent and classic LucasArts adventures, but also performs admirably in Doom, Dark Forces and Duke3D.

[Newken]

Grabbag sounds like Devo or something with that 5MB Turtle Beach soundfont and TinySoundFont.

[NightFright]

Well, I never said it would sound overwhelming. You are better off with one of the choices I posted above. It's hard to find a convincing soundfont below a size of 30 MB.

[Newken]

The soundfont is OK when using it with VirtualMIDISynth.

[NightFright]

Well, the character of a soundfont shouldn't change with a different synth. I guess TSF still needs some tuning, then.

[Newken]

r8784 has some improvements.

[NightFright]

OK, EDuke32 is certainly pushing TSF development quite a bit these days.

[NightFright]

Another excellent soundfont to test EDuke32 with is Bill90's Masquerade55 soundfont. It's "SC-55-like" and sounds just great in Descent, ROTT, Doom and Duke3D. And it's just about 17.5 MB in size. If I had to pack a soundfont with EDuke32, it might be this one.

[oasiz]

I think stuff like this should be behind an automatic downloader instead. Similar to how openRA or such handle downloading further assets as required.

[Phredreeke]

Yeah, I don't think EDuke32 should have soundfonts bundled. It doesn't bundle widescreen sprites, skyboxes or voxels.

[NightFright]

Well, you can make a download folder with recommended soundfonts maybe. In the end, we already have an OPL3 synth on board as fallback.

Anyway, I am currently working on a MIDI guide for GZDoom which will also include a download compilation with soundfonts. It can be useful for EDuke32 as well.

[TerminX]

I appreciate the soundfonts you've posted; some of the defects fixed in TinySoundFont were non-obvious until trying some of these random .sf2s.

[NightFright]

Is there some kind of TinySoundfont-specific changelog of what has been adjusted since the last 1-2 weeks? I'm curious in what way EDuke32 contributed to making the synth better in general, and how.

[TerminX]

Yeah, https://github.com/s.../commits/master

[NightFright]

I see. After just one commit last year, already five in 2020. Not bad. Maybe we'll even still see reverb/chorus implementation. Anyway, the solution as it stands now is already quite OK. I can't tell how TSF is doing compared to FluidSynth or BassMIDI, but for ingame purposes where you also have game sounds playing at the same time it should do fine.

[TerminX]

Yeah, that's about how I feel about it. For someone hardcore into MIDI synth who has specific soundfonts they want to sound identical across everything that uses MIDI, the standalone solutions are better. Otherwise, it's pretty nice to have things that Just Work out of the box.

I don't know if chorus and reverb are coming to TinySoundFont any time soon. I've been kind of thinking about how a cheap fake reverb implementation like the sound system itself uses would work in a library like that though. The operation of the ASS reverb is shit simple... instead of mixing into a blank buffer, it decays the bits already present and mixes on top of them. If something like that was done on a per .sf2 "voice" basis, it might work well enough. The actual .sf2 spec doesn't say how the effect is supposed to be implemented.

[NightFright]

With most of the soundfonts I posted, reverb/chorus won't matter that much, actually. Sure, they still make the instruments sound less dry and create a more homogeneous sound pattern, but you won't miss them that much if you have no comparison.

The EAWPats soundfont however needs it more, for two reasons: 1) The Timidity patches use it a lot and it contributes considerably to the characteristics of the instruments. 2) The soundfont was made drier in general which is hard to compensate by any synth, so if it's missing, you really notice it. Hopefully Bashe will create that vanilla-like version at some point still to undo some of the liberties he took with the conversion.

I don't claim to be an expert in this area, by no means. But as someone who has been experimenting with soundfonts in GZDoom and EDuke32 since many years, I gained some insights into what certain tracks should sound like. You don't need soundfonts with hundreds of megs since there are really good ones out there in the range of 8-30 MB which do just fine. The synth itself can also make a difference, but I think that anyone claiming they can hear a difference between e.g. Fluidsynth or BassMidi ingame is exaggerating. For the average user it's definitely negligible.

I appreciate that you guys still try to squeeze more out of TSF in the future. It's already almost everything I wished for. Small detail still: I tried and it seems I can't set up dirs outside of the EDuke32 folder, unless I am making some mistakes with the slashes or something.

[TerminX]

Found this pile of .sf2 files on archive.org: https://archive.org/...nts-sf2-2019-04

[NightFright]

Holy crap, that's the motherload. There are some I don't even know yet. I am mostly interested in the smaller files between 8 and 32 MB. Bigger than that doesn't automatically mean better.

However, I doubt there's anything that beats my personal favorites (8MBGM Enhanced, Masquerade55, EAWPats or the Yamaha S-YXG50 VSTi). With soundfonts it's also a matter of habit. Once you get used to a certain type of sound, anything different from that doesn't seem right to your ears.

[NightFright]

In the I see there's still an open issue with custom modulators which affects the Aureal soundfont. Is that the only one from those I posted here? It appears the author doesn't intend to fix this issue, so there will be soundfonts we cannot recommend for EDuke32 usage. Even though that kinda sucks tbh.

[LeoD]

[Feature request]
Mapster32 should log its command line parameters, like EDuke32 does. Patch attached.

Attached File(s)

•  build-8761-8791.cpp.patch.zip (382bytes)
  Number of downloads: 387

[MusicallyInspired]

Ah RealFont is there. Fond memories of using that one for playback and composing years back when I didn't have anything else to rely on.

[Nuke.YKT]

Have been working on a really cool feature for the build engine: Sloped sprites. This feature works in a similar way to sloped floors/ceilings and makes a lot more complex geometry possible. Here's what oasiz came up with using sloped sprites.

[oasiz]

It just works. Plus collision too!
Just point at a floor aligned sprite and start sloping away.