Which ambient outdoors theme did not play in vanilla DOS Daggerfall?

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MrFlibble
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Which ambient outdoors theme did not play in vanilla DOS Daggerfall?

Post by MrFlibble »

I'm sorry if this is not the "right" place to ask this question, but it has been bugging me for a while and I thought that maybe an answer was found through the DOS binary analysis for DFU, so here goes.

I distinctly remember that when playing DOS Daggerfall (in DOSBox, with MPU-401 MIDI music; but it might have happened with OPL3 FM synth too), under certain circumstances ambient music would not play while outdoors, and if you happened to (enter and) exit a building at such a time, the ambient music from that building would continue playing instead, unless you loaded and saved the game which would revert to silence.

IIRC this would occur in late evening or at night, possibly in foggy conditions - it is my understanding that the choice of ambient tune is affected by these two factors: time of day and weather. Since Daggerfall retains some unused MIDI tracks in the data (like the sneaking theme from Arena), I have no clue which music it failed to play - or was it missing from the data files altogether? Does anyone know?

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numidium3rd
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Re: Which ambient outdoors theme did not play in vanilla DOS Daggerfall?

Post by numidium3rd »

I've experienced this myself in classic and I'm pretty sure it happens specifically when it's foggy. I know there are a couple sets of unused MIDIs such as the sneaking music and some dungeon music. Real shame about the dungeon songs because they're very atmospheric but I digress. I think we can chalk this up to a bug in classic because, according to the code in DFU's SongManager, if it's foggy outside then the overcast playlist should be used.

You mentioned that this might have been happening when it's foggy and night time. If that's the case then there could have been an issue with prioritizing because the night time music should override the weather playlists.

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MrFlibble
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Re: Which ambient outdoors theme did not play in vanilla DOS Daggerfall?

Post by MrFlibble »

numidium3rd wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 10:21 pm I've experienced this myself in classic and I'm pretty sure it happens specifically when it's foggy.
Nice to know that I did not misremember the weather conditions. Back in 2016 (IIRC) I did a bug-hunting playthrough for the DaggerXL project and posted the various bugs and glitches that I came across in the XLEngine forums (which are now down I guess). I remember it being nighttime and fog when I found this issue.
numidium3rd wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 10:21 pm I think we can chalk this up to a bug in classic because, according to the code in DFU's SongManager, if it's foggy outside then the overcast playlist should be used.
Thanks! I do remember hearing the overcast theme in vanilla so I guess it was not only during fog that this tune plays.
numidium3rd wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 10:21 pm You mentioned that this might have been happening when it's foggy and night time. If that's the case then there could have been an issue with prioritizing because the night time music should override the weather playlists.
Oh, I did not know that! In fact, it is exactly the reason why I assumed that both time of day and weather play a role in which tune is selected because I thought that only evening or night-time fog had no theme playing. But IIRC I did not specifically test this to verify if fog at daytime would result in a similar lack of ambient music.

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