Re: Octal / Dynamic BGM / Indrema

[David O'Toole]

> IIRC) I remember someone mentioning dynamic modules for games (i.e. they
> change depending on events) and I thought this would be really neat if the
> core player engine was ported to the Indrema, which uses Linux as the core
> OS.

I don't know too much about the Indrema, although it seems like it could 
be a cult hit if people realize they can make their own games and such. 
Sort of an
amiga-rebirth I guess?

The "L" in OCTAL stands for "library". One eventual goal is to operate 
as a sound / music library for games that wish to avoid the uneven 
quality of MIDI implementations and who wish to code their own effects 
if neccessary. So this idea, while currently not the main focus, is 
certainly within the scope of this project and this is something I'd be 
interested in looking into. Perhaps you can ask a few developers there 
what their opinion is? Octal is designed to be lightweight and fast so I 
think they might like it, especially since most of the other projects in 
this area are trying to create whole Audio Operating Systems of some 
kind :-)

> (those that know what they're talking about, anyhow <G>) that a mod format
> of some sort would be ideal for BGM. I'm liking this idea a lot, and I
> think Octal could become a common element to Indrema games if it doesn't
> suck up too much (of a 600MHz) CPU.

A mod format that also supports pro-quality sound effects and software 
synthesis would indeed be pretty cool. Depending on the requirements of 
the song I have no doubt that a 600MHZ wouldn't be much of a problem. 
Unless you're doing a lot of reverb or filtering in the 
not-that-efficient Buzz on Windows, it still uses only a small part of 
the old 333MHZ I used to run it on. So this could be cool.

>         The big question I have is, would the licensing work? Is there a
> way to include (and provide the source for!) the Octal engine in a
> commercial game, yet keeping the rest of the source closed ('cause big
> game companies aren't going to release the source to their game

At the present time, Octal is GPL'ed. With reference to the library 
issue, sometime late 1999 I discussed GPL vs LGPL with Richard Stallman, 
and his opinion there was that he didn't see how making Octal LGPL would 
help free software. I can see that using the GPL would only be a problem 
for closed-source projects. Now, as I understand this, use of the GPL 
restricts direct linking between GPL and closed-source code. If Octal 
were a separate server program running as a daemon on the Indrema, and 
if changes to Octal were never made without full disclosure of those 
changes, this might not be a problem. For instance, those closed-source 
games can run on Linux even though the Linux kernel is GPL'ed (because 
of the exception for libraries provided as part of the OS.)

Plugins/machines are a different story. These link directly with Octal 
and run in-line with it (that is, in the same thread) so I'm not sure 
where this stands. In addition, there is no provision for cross-version 
bin-compat with respect to the plugins in OX_API. Again, I'm not sure 
why a game would be using a far-out patented audio algorithm, so I doubt 
this will be a real problem.

To sum up, I don't know :-). Has there been any discussion of licensing 
topics on the indrema lists? What's the opinion there ?