Kismet music setup

[Chris@EngineAudio]

I have been working on creating a Kismet Music sytem to replace the UTMapMusic setup that is available in the UDK. I am trying to mimic some of the music cues like Intro, Ambient, Action, Suspense, Tension, and Victory. My current setup plays an Intro loop at level start then switches to the Action once the player takes damage. Once the spawn is killed the music returns back to the Ambient loop. If the player is killed, the music stops and a death stinger sound is played.

Some things I am interested in doing:

1. Currently all my music loops change immediately, I would like changes to happen after a loop is finished. I would like to implement a system that uses bpm to trigger loop changes. I have experimented with a math module that calculates millisecond from bpm, then fed that info to a series of delayed gates to trigger changes on the bar. This sort of works, but the timing doesn't seem right. Anybody have any good suggestions on how I might accomplish something like this? Have you been able to maintain sync over time?

2. I have had some good suggestions on using Get Distance to determine the proximity of the player to an enemy. In the pic I have started trying out a few options to make this work, but no luck. I have the player and spawn plugged in to a Get Distance node then I compare this distance to a float value. If the player gets close enough to the enemy it should trigger the action loop. This doesn't seem to work, what am I missing? Best case would allow me to determine the number of enemies in a certain radius around the player, and base music changes on that.

[Sir. Polaris]

Something tells me this your approach should be handled with a "Class MusicMaker". I can already see from the above that expanding your system to handle many states or to more complex actions is going to get messy.

You could form a ini file that links to all your state values (so it's easy to change), then have a class handle looking for state changes and calling the corresponding file from the ini list.

[Chris@EngineAudio]

Although I would like to be able to create some of this functionality in Kismet, I do get the feeling that it might not be able to perform some of the functions without diving into the script.

I have started to dig through UTMusicManager.uc to see how it works. Is this the right place to start? I am not familiar on how to even begin writing my own class to control how the music operates. I figure if I can start understanding the base music system in the game I might be able to make it work for my needs

[A Rabbit]

The distance check needs to be in a continues loop, I'm just about to start a system like this. I was thinking of checking if the bot is aiming/firing at the player to trigger the combat music. This means it can be triggered by an event and doesn't need to be looped continuously.