The Bard's Tale Developer Diary #4
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My initial thinking was that I would have to create time offset and text offset pairs for every word in the song. I started by defining a timing notation I could insert into the actual lyrics text for each word in the song. But it soon dawned on me that I could take advantage of the fact that songs have regular beats for the most part and the words tend to fall on beats or half-beats. So instead of having to time every word, I made the parser assume that words fall on half-beats. Then I only needed a couple initial time markers to establish the beat, plus some rests beat markers and occasional time corrections. I also needed a way to note exceptions to the word per half-beat rule. I made up notation for breaking a long word into syllables for multiple ball bounces and for merging multiple short words into a single bounce.
