06. July 2018, 15:20:39

#0

SpeedyQuote

Hi all,

I figure the people here might be interested in this. I'm working on making a custom soundtrack for ReWired and thought it'd be good to post my work on figuring out the custom music format here. I've spent the past few days trying to figure out how the music in the game works - I know it's dynamic, but how exactly everything came together was kind of a mystery to me, but I think I finally figured it out. I put all of the information I've found in this google document here, along with a small guide. It'll probably be always changing until I finish the music for ReWired, but right now I'm happy with it as I've managed to get custom dynamic music finally working in the game.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wHkpt9wkHj7dKVpxoNjmrvoanYoWlQqPw5wIvnx9TuM/edit

Attachments:

🖹 System Shock Music Data.txt🖹 System Shock Music Data.txt 🖹 System Shock Music Data.txt 11.35 kB, 87 downloads

06. July 2018, 16:41:47

#1

nintendoeatsQuote

I don't have time just now to go through your notes (they look really cool, there is quite a bit in there that I am not familiar with). However, I thought you might be interested in what I have been doing:

https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?wap2;topic=10048.0
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1428252618&tscn=1530878076

06. July 2018, 17:22:01

#2

icemannQuote

My assumption is that the music tracks would work similar to how they work in Deus ex (except being midi), where you have a main section that plays in non combat bits and a section which it can jump to dedicated to combat.

06. July 2018, 17:30:35

#3

nintendoeatsQuote

Quote by icemann:

My assumption is that the music tracks would work similar to how they work in Deus ex (except being midi), where you have a main section that plays in non combat bits and a section which it can jump to dedicated to combat.

Kind of, but there are more than 2 sections (Security has 6 variations on the same track!). The ramifications of it being midi allow for some really interesting transitions and such. I don't think that any game audio engine around 1998 would have been able to do the same stuff with LPCM.

06. July 2018, 17:44:05

#4

SpeedyQuote

Quote by icemann:

My assumption is that the music tracks would work similar to how they work in Deus ex (except being midi), where you have a main section that plays in non combat bits and a section which it can jump to dedicated to combat.

Similar, yes. I explain it in the opening of the doc, but the music is separated into two main segments: Normal and Combat. Normal plays during non-combat, and Combat plays during... uh, combat. This only composes 9 of the up-to 49 segments in the music however. There are multiple small tracks that will layer on top of the music dynamically or play during special events, along with a couple of special tracks, like for entering a radiated room or dying.
Every segment is a separate MIDI file, separated as a sub-song in the XMI format.

Deus Ex works different but achieves the same result - the music for that was composed with a tracker, which has parts of music separated into patterns. When the game needs to go into combat, it just calls the appropriate pattern. Deus Ex lacks something that System Shock has though, which is the ability to layer tracks. It can only jump to different segments.