SADX Music Modding?

[Hyp3hat]

So I love me some Sonic Adventure, but there's one thing that has always bugged me about it - the way the game handles the music. The music itself is, of course, amazing, but the fact that there isn't a 'score' as such for it is incredibly frustrating. Songs will play for 2 seconds before just stopping and going into the next song with an ugly hard edit. In case it's not clear what I'm on about, consider the opening for Sonic's story.

 

The Station Square theme plays for about 10 seconds, then cuts out in the middle of the bar to play Sonic’s theme for another 15 seconds, then it cuts for Chaos’ theme for another 15, and then the boss theme.  Everything’s a whacking great edit, like someone’s just pressing the skip button on a CD player (which is probably exactly how the Dreamcast/GC handles it), but it ruins the effect.

 

So… if you could mix something that was a continuous track from the start of the game to the Chaos boss fight (for example), with proper segues between the tracks, could you mod SADX to play that? All the cutscenes are in engine, so would it then be impossible? 

 

 

 

[JezMM]

1 hour ago, Hyp3hat said:

So I love me some Sonic Adventure, but there's one thing that has always bugged me about it - the way the game handles the music. The music itself is, of course, amazing, but the fact that there isn't a 'score' as such for it is incredibly frustrating. Songs will play for 2 seconds before just stopping and going into the next song with an ugly hard edit. In case it's not clear what I'm on about, consider the opening for Sonic's story.

 

The Station Square theme plays for about 10 seconds, then cuts out in the middle of the bar to play Sonic’s theme for another 15 seconds, then it cuts for Chaos’ theme for another 15, and then the boss theme.  Everything’s a whacking great edit, like someone’s just pressing the skip button on a CD player (which is probably exactly how the Dreamcast/GC handles it), but it ruins the effect.

 

So… if you could mix something that was a continuous track from the start of the game to the Chaos boss fight (for example), with proper segues between the tracks, could you mod SADX to play that? All the cutscenes are in engine, so would it then be impossible? 

 

 

 

Unlikely.  While you could replace the files, the game would still be hard coded to play this file at this time and this file at that time etc.  You'd need to really start digging into the code and modifying significant stuff to remove these triggers, let alone replace those triggers with just one that plays a unique sound file that isn't used elsewhere in the game (it's very possible that the game is only coded to recognise the number of sound files that are used in it's natural state).

 

Basically if you want to do this, you'll need to learn programming to physically alter the game itself, this likely wouldn't be a simple task at all (unless someone has already done the legwork into how the game is structured to be able to tell you that it is a simple task).

 

 

If all else fails, the cheaper makeshift option, which is something I've done for multiple games, is to turn off the music (or disable it by removing files, as one has to do with Sonic Adventure 2 on Steam, for example), manually edit your own music ready for use (in my "alternate soundtrack" projects I've sometimes gone as far as to edit together scores for cut-scenes or create looping versions of standalone songs for use in levels longer than those songs, etc), and play it alongside the game as you go.  The less dignified method would be to play windowed and alt-tab over to your music player to switch tracks (with the playlist preferrably setup to allow you to just hit "next track" and alt-tab back in a linear game like this).  If I can be arsed though, I'll sometimes use a secondary music device and an aux cable plugged into the green sound input port on my PC so I can play full screen with both game sound and custom music coming out of the same sound source.  Eventually switching tracks becomes so automatic it no longer takes me out of the atmosphere of the game to do so.  Just a last resort idea.

 

 

 

On a related note, it's a shame that Shadow the Hedgehog was the only game in the franchise that bothered to score it's cut-scenes properly while also keeping the music very "Sonic" and in-keeping with the gameplay music.  All the games since opted for generic filmic orchestra or overuse of the main instrumental theme for the cut-scenes making for some really forgettable stuff.

[Hyp3hat]

45 minutes ago, JezMM said:

Unlikely.  While you could replace the files, the game would still be hard coded to play this file at this time and this file at that time etc.  You'd need to really start digging into the code and modifying significant stuff to remove these triggers, let alone replace those triggers with just one that plays a unique sound file that isn't used elsewhere in the game (it's very possible that the game is only coded to recognise the number of sound files that are used in it's natural state).

 

Basically if you want to do this, you'll need to learn programming to physically alter the game itself, this likely wouldn't be a simple task at all (unless someone has already done the legwork into how the game is structured to be able to tell you that it is a simple task).

That's what I suspected, given the lack of mods for SADX in general. Bah! 

[Speeps]

Yeah, considering for the PC version all the event files are inside the exe it's pretty hard to actually get to the proper files in SADX.

You could get them out of the dreamcast version easily but they're way too compressed for you to do anything with aside from like, swapping them around. This is the most I could ever do with the cutscenes, haha.

[JezMM]

11 hours ago, JmTsHaW said:

This is the most I could ever do with the cutscenes, haha.

I don't see any difference from the regular facial expressions.

[Hyp3hat]

Yeah, that looks fine... 

I was all ready to start remixing the cutscene audio for this thing from the midis... Still might do the first one as an example. Anyone doing a 'Remaking Sonic Adventure in Unreal' type thing?