Praetyre
King
Praetyre's Ultimate Musical Experience
Pre(r)amble
I have always had a deep passion for music, one which has shaped my mental and emotional landscape throughout my childhood to the present day.
The two fundamental categories in which I appraise a video game are in terms of its content (factors including but not limited to its gameplay mechanics, storyline, gameplay loop, depth, and so on) and atmosphere (of which music is invariably a very big factor, although not the only big factor in it period).
I have lamented how video games have precipitously declined in both content (see note 1A) and atmosphere (bold and creative franchises like Fallout or Oddworld being reduced to bland shadows of themselves that scarcely even rise to the level of a crude caricature) since the mid 2000s, a decline which hit its apparent nadir in the early 2010s and from which we are still slowly recovering through the rise of the indie circuit (which seems to have succeeded the territory once occupied by the AA or "mid" game), which hopefully (along with the rise of fan remakes/ports and technological innovations in both computing hardware and tools like the much maligned AI) will eventually give birth to a gaming Renaissance (even if that Renaissance, like that of the Carolingians or, indeed, most great advances in human history and thought, may only be enjoyed by a select few and unknown among most).
One of my many lifelong dreams in gaming is to have an ultimate history simulator, a game which allows one to manage a civilization or polity from any point in history and in which each era is like its own game in depth, length, and atmosphere.
Caveman2Cosmos has been built upon literal decades worth of what seems like an attempt to actualize that dream, and it is partly the lull in which it has presently sat regarding its development which has motivated me to step forward and publicize what I have achieved so far with my C2C music modmod.
One of my overarching goals with this modmod is that each of the eras along its timeline should feel unique and resonate with man's aesthetic and historical consciousness, from the tribal drums of the Neolithic to the cyberpunk electronica of the future.
I have poured my very heart and soul into the creation of this modmod, and given its eventual magnitude (I would estimate in the thousands of tracks across 10 eras, at least), I decided to give it a special name; Praetyre's Ultimate Musical Experience, or PUME. It is my primary gift to this community, and I hope anyone who decides to give it a look will both enjoy it and give feedback. I would like, over the longer term, to find at least one collaborator who I can work with to patch up some of the weak spots in this project (lack of appropriate wartime music for certain eras, for example).
So What Is PUME, Anyway, And How Does it Work?
IPUME is my term for the latest iteration of my Caveman2Cosmos music modmodding project. It is designed to offer a vast plethora of background music tracks, organized by era, and further split by whether said tracks will play in peacetime, wartime, or both peacetime and wartime. It draws from countless sources across many mediums, from period music to cinema and television to video games and even YouTube. Its purpose is to provide the musical sauce to what i would eventually like C2C to become, and it is also intimately linked with my plans for a future C2C modmod expressing my personal vision of, among other things, the era system.
Somewhere down the track, I would like to (with outside help) set up a specially crafted system for allowing the game to automatically play tracks in game based upon their status via folder (similar to a system AIAndy set up in the distant past, only that was just for era and didn't account for either/peace/war status nor overlapping tracks, except if you made another copy of the file in a different folder), which would also allow customization so that players could add or remove tracks at their leisure to give them their own custom setup, but for this early stage of the project, I wanted to start with the simplest music modding method, one embedded into vanilla Civ iV itself; the custom background music option. I have heard Civilization IV described in the past as "one of the few games that lets you change the background music, and one of the few games where you don't need to", and the core of my project certainly tries to build upon that lofty statement.
Basically, to set up and use PUME in its most basic iteration, you download the files (which should be already sorted into folders and subfolders), extract them to a place of your choosing, and whenever you want to, you turn on the custom audio option and point it at the folder you extracted the files to, and then you have your soundtrack. This option unfortunately does not offer differentiation between peace/war/either tracks; a stopgap solution would be to copy-paste the contents of the either subfolder into the peace and war folders, and switch between said folders via the options manually whenever you enter war or peacetime.
Please note that PUME is intended as a total replacement for the existing C2C and vanilla Civ IV soundtracks, even if it ends up using many of the tracks used in those. The intent is to build a vast, monumental and intricately crafted musical experience from scratch, rather than simply to expand upon what already exists.
The Short Chronology And The Musical Timeline
The fundamental structure of PUME, the heart and soul of its existence, is my own particular take on periodizing human history. I have written much of this subject in the past, and many more influential thinkers in the field of both history and gaming have added their own views, but for the sake of brevity I shall try and stick to the bare essentials. As mentioned earlier, I have always wanted to play a Civ or Civ-esque game where each era is effectively its own game, with its own mechanics, atmosphere (including of course soundtrack), goals and so forth. This, naturallly, leads to the question not only of what time period in our (or the hypothetical fantasy worlds which most Civ games are set in, diverging to one extent or another from our history) history each era corresponds to, but what difference there is on the "ludo" part of the ludonarrative between them.
It is in part for this reason that i have tended towards a somewhat generalized, but still (in my opinion) functional and atmospherically oriented, timeline, one which I tend to refer to in internal documentation as the Short Chronology. I plan to release PUME in pieces, not only because it is an unfinished project, but because I would like to get feedback from the community and refine the vast raw material I have "excavated" from various sources into a more coherent whole. Before I get into that, though, I have a caveat to add; I am in favour of "unstacking" the tech tree concept and structure; this has many facets, but one of them is that for the purposes of PUME, a "technological" era (which is what my modmods take on the eras will be primarily about) is not necessarily coterminous with that of the "musical "era.
To give one such example, I have found that music from the Renaissance proper (meaning roughly the 16th century, or 1500-1600 AD) is similar enough to what music survives from the medieval era, as well as the music associated with that era in popular culture. This means that while the Medieval Era ends around 1500 in the "technological" timeline, it ends around 1600 in the musical timeline, with the dawn of the Common Practice Period and the Baroque.
Some downloads will contain tracks in seperate folders marked as "Tentative"; consider these a "Director's Cut" of tracks that you can choose to add to their respective main folder (they are already sorted as far as peace/war/either goes) if you want. Some of them will be reevaluated and merged into the main folder over time.
I have included a .ods spreadsheet with each download, listing the author and source (when known) of each of these tracks. Please read these sheets and send some views and thanks to the many sources I have used to create this vast corpus.
One last very important note: this modmod is a work in progress, and will be updated over time as more tracks are added and more eras are more firmly set. I want to start by releasing a relatively small sample of tracks to judge player interest and obtain feedback, as well as offer a taste of the nature and scope of this project.
Without further ado, let's get to the downloads!
The Paleolithic Era
Suggested Usage: Play these tracks from the beginning of the game (as of writing, Caveman2Cosmos is designed to be played starting in the Prehistoric era) until your civilization discovers Sedentary Lifestyle.
This era's selection of tracks is small enough that I feel comfortable packaging it all in a single download: DOWNLOAD PALEOLITHIC ERA HERE.
The Neolithic Era
Suggested Usage: Play these tracks from when you discover Sedentary Lifestyle to when you discover Writing and/or Bronze Working.
While this era has more than twice as many tracks as the preceding Paleolithic, I still feel it would work best as a single download: DOWNLOAD NEOLITHIC ERA HERE
The Ancient Era
Either:
Peacetime:
Wartime:
The Medieval Era
Either:
Peacetime:
Wartime:
The Early Modern Era
Either:
Peacetime:
Wartime:
The Industrial Era
Either:
Peacetime:
Wartime:
The WWI Era
Either:
Peacetime:
Wartime:
The WWII Era
Either:
Peacetime:
Wartime:
The Atomic [Cold War] Era
Either:
Peacetime:
Wartime:
The Information Era
Either:
Peacetime:
Wartime:
The Future
Either:
Peacetime:
Wartime:
Explanatory Footnotes
1A: (Aside from the near-ubiquitous dumbing-down of depth and mechanics, one example would be the decline from expansion packs that offer you 50% of a full game for half or less the price, so well illustrated by this meme., to DLCs that offer you a sliver of content that often barely interacts with the core of the game, if not outright sticking out like a sore thumb and contradicting it)
