2015 Xonotic Soundtrack Competition

Thank you for your participation and support. Now that every time zone in the world has passed the submission deadline, submission is now officially closed. Please vote to choose the winner!.

2015 Xonotic Soundtrack Competition

Submission Deadline

August 31, 2015

Rules

Contestants, Judges, Winners

• Collaboration is encouraged.
  
• There is no limit on the number of submissions.
  
• The winning tracks are picked by the community through rounds of polls.
  
• Contestants are encouraged to defend their own pieces in the forum, before and during the polls, to win the community votes.
  

Prize

The winning track(s) will be included in the game!


Submission

• Submissions cannot be published before.
  
• To be included in the game, the piece should comply with Xonotic's GPL practice. Specifically, one must provide reasonable sources (project files, scores, etc.) so others can build upon the work.
  
• To submit a piece, reply to this thread with a link to a new thread in the Music and Sound Development forum, and title it with "[soundcon] The Name Of The Soundtrack". The first post should always have the link to the latest version of the piece, as well as a description explaining why the piece is suitable for Xonotic.
  
• The contestants are encouraged, but not required, to discussion work in progress with the community before the deadline. The discussion should happen in the same thread of the submission.
  
• Check out some technical details on this Wiki page.
  

Winning Criteria

• The community will determine whether a track is suitable for Xonotic.
  
• It may be helpful to read through some of the early discussion on what people expect. However, you are encouraged to think outside of the box!
  
• The soundtrack can be for specific maps, for general gameplay, for menus, or for titles.
  
• There's no restriction on styles. Be creative!
  
• Common etiquette applies.
  

Revision

The goal is for the community to join the creative movement for our beloved game, Xonotic. Depending on the submission, discussion, or various other practical considerations, rules may change.

I'd like to get in on this and submit stuff.

Also, I have a little more free time for a month or so and would be willing to help out with some organization.

Thank you so much, @Totally_Cool. The sound/music forum has been quiet for a while and I was worried that no one is even interested any more.

If we go with the popular vote to decide soundtracks for maps, as opposed to having a small committee, then everyone, including the organizers, can submit their works.

The map contest is May 1 to Aug 1, so I imagine the winner will be out in August. Does that align with your free time window? Or are you making generic soundtracks, as opposed to score to specific maps?

Thank you so much, @Totally_Cool. The sound/music forum has been quiet for a while and I was worried that no one is even interested any more.

If we go with the popular vote to decide soundtracks for maps, as opposed to having a small committee, then everyone, including the organizers, can submit their works.

The map contest is May 1 to Aug 1, so I imagine the winner will be out in August. Does that align with your free time window? Or are you making generic soundtracks, as opposed to score to specific maps?

Yeah, that would work fine. I've been trying to take on a few music projects this summer so i'll already be working on stuff.

I would like to fit something to a map. The music is meant to enhance the setting you're in, so I think its important to have something that closely matches in stead of just music in general. That can be more distracting which I feel would make people just want to turn it off while playing.

Honestly, I'm a bit concerned about the participation and the support from the community and the core team on this one. I think I'll start a poll to test the water and see whether we should go ahead with this.

Below is the original post here as a backup. Please refer to the first post for the most updated version.

The poll result supports the idea, so I think we should go ahead and make this happen, @Totally_Cool.

These are some rough ideas, up for discussion:

Participants and Judges

• It's more fun to have more candidates, so I think we should allow multiple submissions from the same participants.
  
• The forum community will pick the winners by voting.
  
• The winners' tracks will be given to the core team for the next step (release, ask for technical modification, etc.).
  

Submission

• Submissions cannot be published before.
  
• Submissions should comply with Xonotic's GPL practice. However, while it's an ideal way to fulfill the GPL spirit, I'm prone to relaxing it a little bit. For example, if @Halogene wants to improvise, we'll accept just the recording, instead of requiring a transcription.
  
• Each soundtrack should have its own thread, with the prefix [soundcon], for community discussion.
  
• The participants can choose whether or not to discussion work in progress with the community, before the deadline.
  
• Since this contest is to go with the winning maps, please specify which map the piece is written for. (However, considering the number of the maps we are likely to get, perhaps we should relax this rule and allow a generic submission.)
  

Styles

• There are some guidelines/suggestions somewhere in the forum (can somebody help dig them out), but I think we should just be very open and allow out-of-box thinkers to surprise us.
  

Prizes

• Shall we ask for donations?
  
• Perhaps a pair of high-end headphones?
  
• SoundCloud or some music membership sponsorship?
  
• A frame to put the CD in to hang on the wall?
  

===============================
The following is the original post, as a record:

I was suggesting that we run a soundtrack competition along with the map one. The idea is to score for the winning map(s), and more importantly, the winner track will get released officially. There have been a lot of submissions in the past, but there was no process to make anything official so the momentum kind of died out.

There are several issues that I'm too new to know how it's been done, such as:

• Do mappers, or devs, or the community, usually have the final say about which soundtrack to pick?
  
• Should this competition judged by popular vote, or a smaller table of judges?
  
• Is it guaranteed that the winning track will be included?
  
• etc.
  

Can unfa or somebody more experienced here help get this competition going?

Moderator, could we pin this thread into the Important Threads? Thanks.

Can we get some support from the core team on the music competition? Specifically, could the core team at least help make it official?

I understand that for high-skilled players, music is usually turned off. However, for casual players, it enhances the experience tremendously. The music forum used to have a lot of interest, but it became quiet. I believe a contest will really help revive it. I really can't do it alone.

I'm not part of the core team, but I'd like to state that I approve of this competition. Seeing that you get so little feedback on this is very disappointing, however I can't really help much besides saying "yes, please do it". I can neither make suitable music for Xonotic myself, nor does the general music taste of Xonotic players have much in common with my own, so I feel my opinion on specific tracks is of little use. And lastly, I myself turn music generally off when playing, or I listen to some of my own music instead.

@Halogene, I'll have a small orchestra at my disposal this summer and if I send you a piano part, could you record for me? I like your articulation from your recording.

I really want to make it a community contest so together we can produce many tracks -- I don't want to do it alone. If we don't get enough support, I'll re-allocate the orchestra time for other projects.

Thank you for the compliment! I'd sure love to contribute with piano recordings. However, I have currently packaged and stored away my stage piano (hence there are no new recordings on my soundcloud). I still play the (real) piano though - actually even more than before - just can't do any recordings easily at the moment. But I will probably find a way to do that. How would you go on about getting my recording to blend in with the orchestra? Would I play to recordings of the orchestra or vice versa? Personally, I think it would be better if the orchestra part was already done so I could orientate myself on the flow of the orchestra, as I myself don't have a very steady rhythm. What kind of piano part would that be? Who is writing the music? Would I be free to improvise a bit? Might be hard for me to restrain myself not to do so ;o)

I don't know how the core team is able to make it "official" or how would it help?
Could you elaborate what you expect from them?

@Halogene, I brought the technical discussion to another post.

I don't know how the core team is able to make it "official" or how would it help?
Cpuld you elaborate what you expect from them?

@Mirio, thanks for responding. The response itself helps a lot actually.

The community and I have a lot of respect and appreciation for the core team; therefore, I think the core team can help with the following:

1. I'm relatively new here so I think some voices from the core team to ensure that this competition is supported by the core team will encourage people to participate. For example, can at least one core member join the discussion? Even just a few words will help make it not look like a random guy's solo show on the street.

By the way, is it possible to move this thread from Music and Sound Development to the Important Threads under Community Contest, AND have presence in both areas? (Is it necessary?)


2. Can the core team say that the winning pieces will be part of the next release? In the past there had been a lot of music made here but few ended up in the official release. The activities dropped a great deal, partly because people realized they were just exchanging music, rather than making music for Xonotic. They can exchange music anywhere, but to contribute their creativity and passion into the official release of their beloved game, is a totally different level of engagement.

What do you think?

Ok I posted here Point 1 solved.
Anyway, we like to see contests, tournaments, etc. for a good cause and those have full support per se.

I moved the thread. You should finalise the rule set from Post #6 and edit them into the opening post. (might as well copy+paste rules from the mapping contest as they are similar)
Actually once you have done that, I could make a post at Xonotic Facebooks page about it.

I guess it would make sense to merge this thread into the competition thread, so there are not X threads about it floating around?

2. I will bring it up in the team, but it has to go through a poll system first, which takes some days. So at this very moment I can't confirm it yet but I expect it to succeed though.
There are various reasons that not many tracks got accepted, for example there was/is just a huge thread and it's a pain to go through and find all the files (sometimes you don't know if it's supposed to be for Xonotic etc.). I did that once, never again. And another reasons is probably that we did not have enough maps! Right know the game has 20 soundtracks and 25 maps since 0.8, so it would be good to have new ones I guess.

Hope this helped so far.

I think some voices from the core team to ensure that this competition is supported by the core team will encourage people to participate.

Ok I posted here Point 1 solved.
Anyway, we like to see contests, tournaments, etc. for a good cause and those have full support per se.

Your words have weight. This helps a lot! Thank you so much!

I guess it would make sense to merge this thread into the competition thread, so there are not X threads about it floating around?

Makes perfect sense to me. There are three threads about the organization of this contest:

• Sound track competition for the map competition
  
• this current looking-for-support one
  
• the poll
  

Please do whatever you see fit. I edited the first post as you advised.

I moved the thread. You should finalise the rule set from Post #6 and edit them into the opening post. (might as well copy+paste rules from the mapping contest as they are similar)
Actually once you have done that, I could make a post at Xonotic Facebooks page about it.

I was hoping to have some discussion with the community about the rules, but that didn't happen. To speed things up, I'll edit the first post in the merged thread, and wait a few days for feedback, and then start the contest.

By the way, I'm still unclear about several things -- shall the music contest start after the map contest concludes so the music can be written for the winning maps? Or shall we encourage mappers and musicians to work from the beginning? Or shall we change the nature of the contest and just ask everyone to write generic music for Xonotic game play?

Some rules may need to be different from the mapping contest though. For example, I'd like to encourage collaboration, and perhaps relax the requirement a little bit to allow more submissions.

I'm inexperienced here and I have a feeling that I'm making it more complicated than it needs to be. Can somebody help me out here?

it's a pain to go through and find all the files (sometimes you don't know if it's supposed to be for Xonotic etc.). I did that once, never again.

It's unfair for you to have to do that! I'm hoping the community can help out. Please continue the discussion here.

Okay, so I merged the two threads.


Oh, I meant it as looking at the rules from the mapping contest just to get an idea or "concept".

I believe the tracks should fit into Xonotic and not a single map, so we can use them for different maps in the future! Also (likely) not all maps form the mapping contest will make it into the game, which means that some tracks probably could not make it either.

hf!

I revised the first post. Now let the contest begin!

I'm in! :-)

Cool, I'll try to make something soon

I was just informed by the core team that the winning track(s) WILL be included in the game! Yay! Let's make some music!

Cool, I'll try to make something soon

HELL YEAH! Can't wait!

Would love to see Unfa participating as well. I just want you guys to know that I love to see this kind of competition. New music sounds awesome... The idea of postponing the deadline so it ends after mapping competition is smart as new music might match the new maps! I am so happy about it, mabye even my map will have soundtrack designed just for it... (sigh) I go mapping immediately!

So far we have the following folks expressing interests (I believe there are more who just want to surprise us later):

• aa
  
• Totally_Cool
  
• Cobra_Fast
  
• Archer
  
• BuddyFriendGuy + Halogene
  

We would like to see more. Even letting us know that you are interested in submitting is great!



@Justin, and other mappers, in the beginning I did start with the idea of making the music for the winning map, but @Mirio pointed out that tying music to one map might be too limited; besides, not all maps will be included in the game so we don't want the winning of the music to depend on map winning. Therefore, we ended up letting the music submitters decide what they want to do.

If you feel that your unique style of map calls for a unique style of music, chances are somebody is willing to make some music for your style.

Technical change of rules:

Following the practice of the map contest, submissions should reply to this thread to indicate participation, with a link to a new thread in Music and Sound Development forum. I think it's better to put music works there so people who follow that forum can give feedback.

Update about source requirement:

To lower the participation threshold, the source-providing requirement applies to the winning piece(s) that will be included into the game, to comply with the game's GPL practice, as opposed to the submissions, as discussed in this post. Winners who cannot provide sources within a reasonable period of time will lose their position.

This allows those whose sources are not ready yet to join the competition.

Here's my submission:

Cry Link by BuddyFriendGuy

@Halogene and I have been talking about potential collaboration but his schedule and mine did not work out this time. The piano part of this piece was written with him in mind though. We'll give it another try some time in the future.

I did find Clockwork very inspiring and planned to write a piece for it, but since it still needs optimizing to play on most machines, I'll wait until later.

Can you clarify "Submissions cannot be published before", because I just shared a WIP of my track on IRC. xD