System Shock 1 custom High Quality Soundfont

[666be50d761d5Deu sex]

Hi everyone, it's been quite a while now that I'm using System Shock Portable, and I must say I love it !

But they are two things that really annoys me about it :

- the fact that I can't play it in 1280x1080 / the fact that 1024x768 lags hard
- the quality of the sound, which is very poor

if I unfortunately can't do anything about the first thing, I can for the second !
I've been using WeedsGM3 and its cool but I don't feel that satisfied with it, It is great for DOOM for example, but for system shock some sounds still feels very weak.

So I decided to create a custom soundfont dedicated to System Shock !

I'm not a sound engineer so I don't have the necessary skills to actually create sounds, but with the help of some softwares, it is possible to create a custom soundfont based on multiple ones, to just pick the sounds you like from a specific soundfont or an other, and create a single big soundfont that way.

I didn't started seriously yet, but I just merged the hard way WeedsGM3 and GiantSoundfont and it has a quite good quality ! So I'm convinced that doing a proper work on selecting precisely sounds from different common soundfonts can give us a good sound quality for all instruments used in System Shock

And what about you ? Did someone tried something yet ? What do you think of this idea ?

[666be50d7646bKolya]

This thread might interest you: System Shock 1, using BASSMIDI for higher quality music with soundfonts (.sf2)

[666be50d765bcDeu sex]

Yes I love this thread ty that's what got me into thoose soundfonts stuff ! I think I'm going to download all of them and see what I can do with them already.

[666be50d7675bDeu sex]

It's been quite a while (more than a year) and I was too busy with other things, but I have finally started the selected merging I was talking about in the original post.

I am using "Polyphone" to do the job, I have absolutely 0 skills in MIDI editing or else, so I'm learning everything from scratch ! So it takes time... but after dozens of hours of work I have a pretty descent and concrete result.

I am working with GiantSoundfont v6 beta as the "base", and I edit sounds in it, replace some sounds with others, and import and replace sounds when I found other soundfonts doing a better job for a specific sound.

My internet is unfortunately very slow, but I should be able to upload the 'wip' soundfont in the upcoming days (in worst case scenario) so people will be able to listen the sounds and judge is they are descent enouth or not

[666be50d7692fDeu sex]

Some news ! It's been a while, I now have optical fiber, and I'm getting way deeper into MIDI music, for games, but also for music in general !

So I've been able to upload the custom soundfont for SS, It's still very beta and I need to set volumes properly, and some instruments are still out of place,
but you can get the general idea, in some places, it sounds very good !

For a reminder I didn't make the sounds from scratch, I modified them, so this is a modification of the Giant Soundfont specially made for System Shock, it can work for other games but might sound a little dizzy, also since it's not cleaned yet it's very heavy (500+ Mb)

Enjoy ! https://mega.nz/#!rsZmCRLZ!7CE4VwcHUVxp3o_K6lgJjXZ_m-WxjWG9HSNhSVwkhNo

[666be50d76a8bHikari]

Way to keep us in the loop man.

[666be50d76b60Deu sex]

Try it ! let me know what you think !

[666be50d76cc3Scorpion]

Might be worth mentioning also that there were some custom instruments made for System Shock. They were meant to be used with the Gravis Ultrasound. The Classic edition has those instruments saved in a folder named GRAVIS which can be found in the SOUND folder.

[666be50d76db5Deu sex]

That is very good to know thank you !

[666be50d76ebdlerenwe]

The drums and guitar on the reactor level sounds neat. Not fan of the vibraphone in the Medical Level, though.
It sounds promising, I hope you'll keep working on it often, I've always been desperate to have a good soundFont just for SysShock =)

[666be50d7709cDeu sex]

Extremely late reply sorry for that, I've been back to SS1 since the new beta release of Nightdive a few weeks ago (which is a BLAST to play by the way !), since I'll have a lot of time now, I've decided to redo this project from scratch, I've already created saves to a lot of different places in the game so I should have pretty much all music samples and dynamic alterations to work with, since I also do music production as a semi-pro hobby on Cubase now, my knowledge of MIDI has improved a lot, so it shouldn't take months to get there, expect news pretty soon !

[666be50d77215nintendoeats]

Hey there! I have been working on something laterally related: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1428252618

My project right now is a version using a whole bunch of soundfonts to do really cool stuff, so I'm going to add the version you uploaded. I think it has a lot of potential. Executive sounds damn cool with it.

I do note some voice volume inconsistencies between sections (Security C for example).

[666be50d77402Deu sex]

That's really cool stuff you've got there !

I'm merging and carefully selecting sounds from 9 different huge free to use soundfonts, it's very long and the software I'm using (Viena) is crashing a lot unfortunately ! I only started seriously 3 days ago and I'm at instrument 15 / 127, once I've completed the 127 instruments there will be drumkits and effects, and after that, specific stuff related to System Shock in particular to adjust volume / reverb / pan / etc... to have a neat soundfont !

The only thing I'm kind of afraid of is the size of the soundfont, I'm trying my best to get the smallest great sounding samples but the soundfont is already +- 100 Mb with only the 15 instruments I've imported yet.. with cleaning !! I hope this is because it's the most complicated ones, I wanted to not go beyond 1 Gb but that will be complicated I fear.. I'll do my best to avoid that !

Otherwise I'll just delete instruments not used by System Shock in particular but that will require very careful analysis of all instruments being used by SS during all samples alterations ! Can be done though.

[666be50d775fdDeu sex]

I just finished the 128 (I was counting the 0) instruments, some of them doesn't sound great with system shock though, but I intend to stay as close as possible to the composer's vision so I won't alterate instruments in the first iteration of the SystemShockSoundfont, I'll try to find same instruments but make them sound better for the ones that really don't fit.

For those who want a sneak peak of the current state of the project it's here : https://mega.nz/#!i8pBEADR!UpwV5bSuXt78uROFrmmanm1dEwbY5uqiE23oqpLcD7M
Link removed replaced by lattest alpha hotfix version :
https://mega.nz/#!O1gATIYD!YoxR_cHbMrHyoRWt-AG8_FjYYTygfBbtKJwF4cFhnQA

[666be50d77723nintendoeats]

Research Labs now sounds like it was done by The Police a la Walking On The Moon, which is kinda neat. May I ask what soundfont or hardware you are using as a reference point for the "composer's vision"?

[666be50d778fcDeu sex]

Sure, I'm using Viena to edit soundfonts and instruments on a crappy Dell Inspiron laptop ! Viena is a great tool but the software is crashing a lot unfortunately, you have to close it and reopens it at each soundfont edit/save to minimize the crashing !

The soundfonts I'm working with are :

-ChoriumRevA
-Crisis General Midi v3.01
-FluidR3_GM
-Giant Soundfont V6.0
-GMRBasico1.1
-MuseScore
-SGM-V2.01
-Timbres Of Heaven GM_GS_XG_SFX V 3.4 Final
-WeedsGM3

Which are all supposed to be free to use soundfonts if I believe Virtual MIDI Synth's website.

The process consist in testing instruments from each soundfont and deciding which is best, first without testing with the game, and then testing with the game to replace the few ones that doesn't match the system shock feel if I can say so.

As for the composer's vision, it only means that I'm restricting myself to use the intended instruments first, for example where there is a bagpipe (why ? lol) I shall STILL use a bagpipe (even if it sounds terrible and I hardly understand that choice) maybe bagpipe on mac had a great sound effect to it ?

Anyways, the first complete iteration will remain faithful to the originally used instruments, after I finished that there will be an arranged version where I'm going to take a lot more freedom.

[666be50d779danintendoeats]

Ahhh, I get it. That sounds like a really cool process.

[666be50d77bf7Deu sex]

We're moving from pre-alpha to alpha, were all instruments choices are final, except drumkit which is still WIP.
Beta stage will be tuning the drumkit, and ajusting volumes and effects in all instruments further to what I've already done (which should be faster than alpha, alpha was a lot of work, I worked every day on this since last release !)

Even if it is "only" alpha, I'm still really satisfied of how it sounds, I'd say it's entierely playable from start to finish without weird sounds or problems

https://mega.nz/#!S8xFgIbT!Ru60at2lAwmw4vhK6P0eM3O82YxBM_0ylirXhJ7LUNg

Somehow I managed to fuckup "gun shot" and "acoustic bass" before the upload, they sounded way too loud in the elevators and in the grooves, this is now fixed and the new link is here :

https://mega.nz/#!rxxhWYrL!oJWmemIMly7HL9-tQoJzZHbiK4QEC_o2n3O2NGn3XiU

Link removed replaced by lattest alpha hotfix version :
https://mega.nz/#!O1gATIYD!YoxR_cHbMrHyoRWt-AG8_FjYYTygfBbtKJwF4cFhnQA

[666be50d77d9fnintendoeats]

Security in particular sounds much improved! I also think the quiet bits of Groves have an even more ominous feel. Executive continues to be my favourite. It sounds like it's coming along really nicely.

A couple notes (which are, of course, entirely subjective):

--

To me a lot of it sounds very arpeggiated. That's cool in Research Labs where it is part of a "delay" effect, not so much in Medbay or layered on top of Security.

Anything with a distorted guitar sounds really weird to me, especially the SecurityBot and ServBot add-ons. Most of the insturments feel like they are intended to be synthetic to begin with, but the distorted guitar is like somebody wanted a live performance and had to make due with MIDI.

The mixing can be really strange, and often it feels like the most prominent part of the music is not at the fore. Medbay C1 and C2 for example (using the nomenclature of the MIDIs I uploaded elsewhere). Executive D is another one, it actually feels less aggressive than the other sections which is definitely not the original intent.

--

Great work!

[666be50d77f36Deu sex]

Yes, pretty much everything you stated is part of Alpha -> Beta work, as for the distortion and overdrive guitars unfortunately, it is very hard to obtain a better result, I tried a lot of things, some sounds feels less live performance and much more electronic, but also a LOT cheaper unfortunately, like it's coming from a $15 keyboard you bought for your 3 years old kid to discover music (you know, the kind of ones that only have 3 or 4 instruments lol).

I'll try to get the most of them, maybe with frequency and attack adjustments... not sure about how to go from there, seems like we are (hopefully in a sense) going to enter the personal taste territory ! It's not a problem to me, once I've finished this project (or even before) I'd be very happy to see other people improving upon my stuff, what I do is really amateur stuff (in the MIDI engineering world ofc), so a real sound engineer could do miles better than me maybe !

What's executive D ? the section just before Edward Diego ? Near the master jettison switch ?

[666be50d7807enintendoeats]

Executive D as defined by the nomenclature used in the MIDIs I posted at the bottom of this thread:

https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=10048.msg121044#msg121044

Basically, it is the compositional sequence which brings all the different parts together.

[666be50d781aeDeu sex]

Wow but this is amazing ! You decompiled the whole midi soundtrack files ? this will provide indeed a very useful ressource to me, sorry if I didn't pay more attention to it sooner.

This also leads to some opportunities... if there is a way to inject those files back to the game that means it is possible to arrange the composition itself... I'll stay focus on what I'm doing, but arranging the composition directly has always been a dream to me !

[666be50d782c4nintendoeats]

I'm glad it can be of use! If you are interested in putting in new music, Speedy has been working on just such a thing: https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=10162

[666be50d783fdDeu sex]

Amazing ! Looks like some pretty cool stuff can be done indeed ! I still have to play that custom story by the way ! After that why not creating a little group being midi music oriented 
Wow, also, I'm listening to all samples and... there definitely are some great sounding ones that the game never uses, that's a shame.

EDIT : I just found executive D 1 2 3, I totally see what you mean, mmm, this will be tricky since I really like the "saw lead" I'm using, I'll find a way for the beta