The Soundtrack

[Castruccio]

I know Chris mentioned in another thread that soundtracks are incredibly expensive to create.  The good news is that AI War 1's soundtrack is AWESOME.  If the soundtrack budget for AIW2 is limited to only 1 or 2 new tracks (like Starward Rogue's was), is there any chance that you could include the AI War 1 complete soundtrack (expansions and all) as the soundtrack for the AI War 2 base game? 

[x4000]

The arrangement that I have with Pablo is such that I can't include these in another product without his consent.  Which I imagine he would give, but I wrote the contract that way explicitly on purpose because I didn't want situations like this to arise where I might be able to take advantage of him.

He earns a royalty on every copy of AI War sold for all the work he put into that.  However, after Starward Rogue happened we have redefined our professional relationship.  He still earns royalties on past work (of course), but on new titles I am now commissioning those at a fixed rate and then have unlimited usage rights on them with no royalties. 

This works out better for him (he actually requested it) because then he's not feeling like he's on the clock all the time as happened in some past cases.  It allows for him to broaden his work some and not have quite all his eggs in the Arcen basket, which I really support.  I want to keep working with him long-term, and the feeling seems to be quite mutual, but I also want to see him grow his own business as well (as Erik is doing).

What this means is that if I wanted to use the music from Release Raptor here, I could certainly do so.   But that's the only game that has been done under this arrangement so far.

I feel terrible about the situation with Stars Beyond Reach partly because he did over a year of fulltime work for NO PAY since the game has not come out.  He's made quite a lot of money off of other projects, so it bridged that gap in such a way that I wasn't scamming him or something, but we were both becoming very conscious of how much his financials hinged on situations completely beyond his control.  It's not his fault SBR hasn't come out yet.  This same situation with SBR also cost me $420k+ out of my own back pocket as well, so we suffer together and that's the nature of royalties-based work.  There weren't and aren't any ill feelings there that I'm aware of it.  However, as a model going forward, it wasn't making a lot of sense, and I was glad he brought up doing it differently since I'd already been thinking along the same lines.

Anyway, so the long story short of this is that I'm overly sensitive about asking him for any sort of favors that would financially benefit me and not him.  We are talking about a few different options, but I'm not sure what will come out of it just yet.

[x4000]

Here is a teaser for the new version of the main theme that he's working on, though: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,19065.msg206581.html

It's not going to be a piano piece, but it's a nice little warmup video anyhow.

[Castruccio]

This all makes good business sense.  I see why you are doing it this way. 

One last question:  will those of us who own the original AIW and all the expansions be able to copy the music files to the AIW 2 directory and have those files play in the game?  I copied the AVWW and AIW soundracks to my Starward Rogue directory a few weeks ago, and you'd be surprised how well most of those songs fit with that game.

[x4000]

Based on the way the modding for sound is set up in AI War II, I don't think it will be able to play back from a folder like that... although, heck, maybe I'll just keep that as a side option.  That's a non-ideal way to do it for performance reasons, so for the main music we aren't doing that, but for the stuff you copy over, why not.

[Tridus]

That's all entirely reasonable and sensible. That said, it's also important to have a good soundtrack for AIW 2, because music is important to a game that lasts as long as this one. So if you can't afford to get a good track mix in initially, I hope you can pull in some of the old songs under some kind of arrangement. A successful release likely means expansions, and that means more tracks for Pablo to make anyway.

[chemical_art]

Based on the way the modding for sound is set up in AI War II, I don't think it will be able to play back from a folder like that... although, heck, maybe I'll just keep that as a side option.  That's a non-ideal way to do it for performance reasons, so for the main music we aren't doing that, but for the stuff you copy over, why not.

In AIW1 it was very easy to add new custom music if so desired (easy compared to trying to mod the rest of it at least). So I will be curious to see how it works out for AIW2.

[PokerChen]

While you are here, please bug Pablo about selling the manuscript for, say, the piano collections. I would buy one, it gives me another reason to buy a elec piano for my current flat.

[Jannik2099]

While you are here, please bug Pablo about selling the manuscript for, say, the piano collections. I would buy one, it gives me another reason to buy a elec piano for my current flat.

Yes please, I would literally kill to get the sheet music

[x4000]

I have mentioned it to him.