Port Monke's Radio and Tapes to /tg/

[bingusdingus]

I like the idea a lot and it adds job content to Curator. I think people would be less likely to play Assistant if some of the other low pressure jobs had more things to do, and I think having a radio fits great with the broadcasting items Curator was already given. Basically how it works (for those that are unaware) The curator has a radio station in their study that they can load tapes and broadcast music to the entire station like the way admins do. The Curator also gets the ability to speak on the radio channel so they can do non music things like do interviews, ads, or interstitials. The tapes on Monke are player submitted and have to be reviewed and require their "monkecoin" currency to submit. I think if I could change things, it would be to take away the player submitted part in favor of a handful of tapes with thematic music or songs from the same source. Think things like game OSTs, old royalty free stuff like jazz and classical, and songs that are already associated with SS13 like Robocop, Space Asshole, etc. That way we could take away the potential of people overplaying meme or flavor of the month songs and encourage them to play songs that fit the vibe of the round or just how they feel. I always thought it would be fun to have the sound only come from the intercoms as well to make the music diegetic rather than just playing from some heavenly speaker.

I think if I could choose this would be my #1 thing I want ported from another server. I just think if done right it could add a lot to tg. Any thoughts?

[mrmelbert]

I prefer Goon's Radio Show job over giving it to the curator.

Also I considered the logistics of making music play from intercoms and I don't know if it's super feasible without psychic assaulting everyone. There's like three hundred intercoms on the station or something.

[mrmelbert]

Oh and for music pool, we would probably limit to to the jukebox pool. Though if we did, it'd be insanely laggy.

The other option (what Goon does) is just to have all the tracks in the code. Which is viable, so long as we're fine with spending 30mb of our precious RSC on radio songs.

[bingusdingus]

I wish I could code so I could more meaningfully contribute. I appreciate you looking into it. It's too bad about the intercoms but I can get how it wouldn't be designed for that in mind. I just liked the idea of being able to have a way to turn it off in game and I could see fun IC interactions about keeping the radio on. How does Monke pull it off? I feel like it didnt contribute to lag at all and they had a pretty neat system where you could put youtube urls into tapes and it somehow did it the same way admin music worked.

[Scriptis]

what if we ffmpeged the bitrate to 12kbps

[mrmelbert]

How does Monke pull it off? I feel like it didnt contribute to lag at all and they had a pretty neat system where you could put youtube urls into tapes and it somehow did it the same way admin music worked.

AS FAR AS I CAN TELL from a quick glance they literally just use the same system as admin music.
They just go the extra mile to host the files themselves so their links never die and youtube doesn't get mad at them


So for context, there's like, three ways we can play music to people via code.

The first way is to have the file in the codebase. We can just play the sound directly to players to make it global, we can make it come from a physical object like the jukebox to make it positional, etc.
The players already have the file downloaded, cause it's in the code. Meaning there's 0 lag.

The second way is something like the jukebox config. The music in the jukebox isn't in the code, but instead it gets "imported" from config files. Just like the first way, we can make it global or we can make it positional or whatever.
The problem with this way is that the songs are not in the code, and players don't pre-download it. So when someone clicks "play" on it, every player that hears it has to download the song.
This causes lag because byond. The server has to wait for everyone to finish downloading it before the next tick or something, I don't remember the details.

The third way is the admin music way. This way "cheats", instead of "downloading" the music through byond, we actually send it to your chat panel and your chat panel downloads it.
The music when played comes out of "your chat", not out of "the game". This means it's not possible to make it positional, it's always global*. But it's lag free.
*People have tried in the past to make a positional audio system using this same method but nothing's come to fruition yet.


All that to say: We could totally have scriptis host a buncha songs for a system like this, buuuut we couldn't make it fully diegetic.
For now.
And probably for ever, unless you, I dunno... made a "speaker" object instead of using intercoms.

HOWEVER it can be like, 50% diagetic? We can definitely make it so if the "source radio" is destroyed the music stops for everyone.

[bingusdingus]

If it gets added at all in a way that's similar to the way they have it I would be happy. I just enjoyed using the system. I'm pretty sure there is some kind of central radio that acts as the machine that makes it all happen. I recall people breaking in to the curator's study to break his shit so he would stop playing shitty meme songs.