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User:AndrewFM/Pixel Playlist

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Currently Available Configurations

Official Games

Fan Games


(Guide to building configurations for games)

About Pixel Playlist

Pixel Playlist is a music player that monitors the state of the pixels on your screen. It can be configured to look for certain visual cues, and activate a specific playlist when that cue appears on the screen. It's possible, with some clever thinking, to put together configurations that are capable of accurately replicating the behavior of the soundtrack for a game, by using visual cues to figure out where in the game you currently are.

There's some pros and cons of this over a typical BGM replacer that actually modifies the data files of the game:

Pros:

  • Anyone who understands how to use the program can build configurations and add support for games. It's also a fast process by comparison; you could put together a configuration for a game with less than a day's worth of work.
  • You can take liberties with the soundtrack, and add music triggers that didn't originally exist in the game. For example, you could detect that a mid-stage boss is currently being fought, and assign music to that event.
  • Entire playlists of songs can be assigned to a single event, so you could have a soundtrack to a game that is shuffled and randomized each time you play. For example, you could assign like 20 U.N. Owen remixes to Flandre, and have it play a random one each time you fight her.

Cons:

  • Due to the nature of how the program works, each language needs its own separate configuration (in the case that you're using text as a visual cue), and different running resolutions of the program (such as running the game in 960x720 Windowed mode, rather than 640x480 Windowed mode) need their own separate configurations as well.
  • Since it's relying on watching the state of pixels on the screen, it's semi-fragile, and certain things may mess up the playing soundtrack. For example, minimizing the game, moving another window in front of the game's window, or your computer's screensaver activating.
  • Since Pixel Playlist is the one playing the music, and not the game, you need to have Pixel Playlist running in the background while you're playing. This puts extra strain on your CPU, so if you have and older machine that already has problems running games at full FPS, this will only make things lag more.
  • If there's not enough identifiable visual cues available in the game to be able to tell where you are, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to reliably replicate the game's soundtrack. (Most of the Touhou games make it easy, because it brings up a BGM message whenever a song plays, which is a very easy visual cue to latch on to. However, other games, such as Touhou fangames, may be a harder ordeal to get to work)


Troubleshooting

If the window is locked in an awkward position due to your screen resolution, and you want to move it:

  1. Open the Window Lock menu.
  2. The menu displays x, y, width, and height values for the current lock. Jot down the x & y values somewhere.
  3. Press the Remove Lock button.
  4. Move the window to where you want it.
  5. Press the Change Lock button, and re-enter the window caption.
  6. Take note of the new x & y values.
  7. Go to the settings menu, and press the Offset button.
    • The value you should put for the horizontal offset is the new window's x, subtracted by the old x.
    • The value you should put for the vertical offset is the new window's y, subtracted by the old y.
  8. Save your changes.


If it tells you it can't find a window with the required caption:

Make sure the game is running before pressing the play button. If that still doesn't work, go to the Window Lock menu, and press the Rename Lock button. Type in the new caption exactly as it appears in the title bar of the game's window.


If the program fails to run:

The program is super finicky when it comes to unicode. If it's inside of a directory that has any unicode characters (such as a folder whose name contains Japanese text), it won't be able to run. So transfer it somewhere else.