Hello everyone! After searching the internet far and wide and not finding any way of replacing the Dubstep Gun's music with a custom one that will make the gun fire, I've decided to look into it myself, and have been able to successfully achieve this.
The tools that I used for this are:
Preparing the song:
With the Dubstep Gun, there are 4 tracks that are played.
Save the parts as wave files.
Before we insert the songs into the game, there is one more thing that needs to be done.
Getting the gun to fire:
The way the gun works is straight forward. With the Dubstep Gun, the game plays the sound of the gun first, and then analyzes the song being played for specific markers. If one of the following markers are found, the point of which the marker is found causes the gun to fire.
There are two markers which are directly related to dealing with the weapon's firing.:
To do this (I highly recommend FL Studio for this part, as it is simplistic to do):
Converting it to work in the game:
Now that we have (hopefully) made our files ready for conversion, it's time to actually convert them.
If all went well, you have now successfully converted the files to work in game.
Replacing the song:
Have fun!
The tools that I used for this are:
- Minimaul's "ThomasJepp" Saints Row Tools
- Wwise 2012.1
- A digital audio workstation which supports marker placement (and renders the markers to the file). In my case, I just used FL Studio.
- The song you want, split into 4 parts (I'll explain those parts momentarily).
Preparing the song:
With the Dubstep Gun, there are 4 tracks that are played.
- Introduction - Plays when the gun is started.
- Fire Loop - The part that continuously plays after the introduction. This is the part where the gun fires from.
- Release - Plays when the gun stops firing.
- Inactive - When inside of a building, but the gun isn't being fired.
Save the parts as wave files.
Before we insert the songs into the game, there is one more thing that needs to be done.
Getting the gun to fire:
The way the gun works is straight forward. With the Dubstep Gun, the game plays the sound of the gun first, and then analyzes the song being played for specific markers. If one of the following markers are found, the point of which the marker is found causes the gun to fire.
There are two markers which are directly related to dealing with the weapon's firing.:
- Cannon_Fire - Fires the cannon, or strong wub.
- Rifle_Fire - Fires the rifle, or a weaker wub.
To do this (I highly recommend FL Studio for this part, as it is simplistic to do):
- Load the "Fire Loop" wave file into the FL Studio playlist.
- Start adding the "Cannon_Fire" and "Rifle_Fire" markers. If you need help with this, try doing it to the rhythm of the song. I highly recommend using the "Cannon_Fire" for very intense parts of the song, and "Rifle_Fire" for the less intense parts.
Converting it to work in the game:
Now that we have (hopefully) made our files ready for conversion, it's time to actually convert them.
- Open up Wwise 2012.1, and make a new project.
- Drag the 4 .wav parts over to the "Default Work Unit" item under the "Interactive Music Hierarchy".
- Click import on the box that opens up.
- Expand the first track, and double-click the item inside of it. The track property editor should change.
- In this window, go to the General Settings tab and make sure these options are enabled:
- Stream
- Zero Latency
- Click on "Conversion Settings", and then enable "Override parrent".
- Click ">>".
- On the menu that pops down, choose "Factory Conversion Settings > Vorbis > Vorbis Quality Medium".
- If the song is not already "Stereo" at "44.1kHz" (44100), click Edit, and change the settings for Windows.
- Click the Edit button across from the Windows label and a new window should pop up.
- If it's not already set, change the "Seek table granularity" to 16384.
- Click "OK", then click "Convert" in the previous window.
- Select "Windows", then press "OK".
If all went well, you have now successfully converted the files to work in game.
Replacing the song:
- Make a copy of your "soundboot.vpp_pc" and "sounds_common.vpp_pc".
- Go to the folder containing Minimaul's tools, and run "ThomasJepp.SaintsRow.ExtractPackfileGUI.exe".
- Use this tool to extract both packfiles we have copied.
- Once you have done that, locate the "wep_dubstep_gun_media.bnk_pc" in your extracted "sounds_common.vpp_pc".
- Drag and drop the soundbank onto "extract-soundbank-sr4.bat" to extract it.
- Once it has extracted the soundbank, find the Dubstep Gun's BGM you would like to replace. (I will most likely make a list of all of the files which correspond to each Dubstep Gun, later. For now, you can listen to the converted songs, and determine which goes where.
- Back these up.
- Go to "C:/Users/<Username>/Documents/WwiseProjects/<project name>/.cache/Windows/SFX", and you should find the .wem files which were made by Wwise 2012.1. Rename these to the corresponding files you are planning on replacing.
- Copy and paste these files to the extracted "wep_dubstep_gun_media.bnk_pc" folder.
- Open cmd in the folder containing Minimaul's tools.
- Rebuild the soundbank using this command:
ThomasJepp.SaintsRow.BuildStreamingSoundbank "path/to/extracted_wep_dubstep_gun_media.bnk_pc/wep_dubstep_gun_media.bnk_pc.xml"
(You could also just drag the XML file onto the command prompt after typing the first part.) - Once you have rebuilt the "wep_dubstep_gun_media.bnk_pc", you should see "wep_dubstep_gun_media.bnk_pc" and "wep_dubstep_gun_media.mbnk_pc" in the folder containing Minimaul's tools. Replace the "wep_dubstep_gun_media.bnk_pc" in the extracted "sounds_common.vpp_pc" and the "wep_dubstep_gun_media.mbnk_pc" in the extracted "soundboot.vpp_pc" folders.
- Rebuild the packfiles using "ThomasJepp.SaintsRow.BuildPackfileGUI.exe".
- Replace the "soundboot.vpp_pc" in your Saints Row IV game directory, making a backup of the original.
- Replace the "sounds_common.vpp_pc" in your Saints Row IV game directory, making a backup of the original.
Have fun!
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