SRIV How the Dubstep Gun Handles Music?

[Ange1ofD4rkness]

I'll sit down with one of the dudes that set these up and get more details, but here's what I know:
1. The music track is selected by the audio designer, approved by the weapon designer, etc.
2. The music track is manually given markers for beats, wubs, and miscellaneous slams. This is the time-consuming part.
3. These markers trigger the projectiles, VFX, and dancing.
4. The audio track is broken up into equip loop, attack (ramp-up sample), loop (the part that actually fires), and release (cool down after firing). The markers only exist on the loop.

Without these markers, the weapon wouldn't even fire. In fact, for a time during development, the weapon wouldn't fire at all if the player had either music or SFX disabled through the options menu. This weapon is unique in this way - All other weapons have audio triggered by the weapon firing, projectile, or VFX.

I'll figure out if these markers are transferrable or hard-coded, and if the former, whether or not they can be modded. I'd love to see some of the possibilities the community can come up with.

Thanks for taking the time to explain this to us, I can imagine the process could be time consuming, and an interesting gun

(does remind me a little of how they did Guitar Hero)

 

[Wynot]

The entire concept for the dubstep gun is awesome. Whoever came up with it, great job!

1. The music track is selected by the audio designer, approved by the weapon designer, etc.
2. The music track is manually given markers for beats, wubs, and miscellaneous slams. This is the time-consuming part.

Awesome, so it will take a little work but it's doable.

 

[Hacksaw123]

The entire concept for the dubstep gun is awesome. Whoever came up with it, great job!
Awesome, so it will take a little work but it's doable.

As long as it's not rigidly hard-coded, but what we know sounds promising so far. Manually adding markers sounds interesting, though.

 

[Ange1ofD4rkness]

As long as it's not rigidly hard-coded, but what we know sounds promising so far. Manually adding markers sounds interesting, though.

From how they explain it, is pretty much all hard coded. Like I said before, reminds me of those Guitar Hero mods I downloaded that added new songs (with a text file of some sort that had a ton of queues)

 

[Gondar]

Yes, but the point is, those markers in said text file are added with. What's meant by "rigidly hard-coded" means "baked into the EXE" like a lot of stuff is. They do that for memory after all, the game has to fit in itty bitty console spaces.
So, if we can add it as we go, it doesn't matter what the markers are named or what effects they have, the important thing is we can add cues (for wubs, pulses, beats, etc) to our own songs using them by name, and do it for any song we throw on. That's what we need for a new dubstep firing mode.

 

[[V] Ellix]

I had a chat with the audio lead, it's actually just metadata in the sound file. If you open the WAV files in Reaper (or any DAW more advanced than Audacity, really) you can see the markers. I'm having a follow-up with him this week about whether or not this data can be applied or modified to tracks, but he said it should be totally possible without touching the code or using any proprietary tools.

 

[Gondar]

YES! That's even better.. the only thing to go with it is if we can get a list of markers for what effects so we can do it.

Also, is there a running limit to the file it can play? If we're just replacing the files have certain lengths.. does the game internally assume that's held, or perhaps something on that scope is held? Or does it not care if you feed it a 4 minute loop with all the cues thrown on, and happily loops as needed if you can reach that (infinite ammo ftw)?

 

[Kushology]

Hell yes. It's nice to see that Volition is getting feedback from the community. I have always loved the Row series.

I'll be glad to use this song.

Parts of it are just NASTY and would be awesome to wreck havoc using it.

 

[Ange1ofD4rkness]

I had a chat with the audio lead, it's actually just metadata in the sound file. If you open the WAV files in Reaper (or any DAW more advanced than Audacity, really) you can see the markers. I'm having a follow-up with him this week about whether or not this data can be applied or modified to tracks, but he said it should be totally possible without touching the code or using any proprietary tools.

Thanks for getting back to us on this (I think I speak for everyone when I say we are extremely grateful for this). This seems a lot easier (and a much better way of doing it), mapping it straight to the audio. Sounds like we'll be making our own Dubstep gun tracks soon (or we can hope).

Looking forward to hear back, and again, thanks

 

[Voltarox]

I purchaced the Dubstep gun remix DLC via my Steam account mainly for the Metal music feature.
When I started SRIV with steam it showed the screen confirming that the remix DLC is installed.

When firing the dubstep gun, it just plays the same track.

How do you switch it to play the metal music or cycle through the tracks ?

What is the name of the animation that the NPCs do while firing the dubstep gun and in which archive or file can it be found in ?

Is it possible to use the NPC dubstep reaction animation ( just a guess as to it's name ) as an animation state or action for extended player taunts/compliments in the customizable_action.xtbl file or an animation_state for NPCs in the action_node_npcs.xtbl ?

Thank you.