DF-21 Forums

[ACE]

Hey,Ace here. Im back in editing and going along good with my new small level too. (but Im not going to upload it) But i have one question how do you add custom mp3s such as tracks from other games or movies etc. into levels i have made or still making?

[Pumpkinetics]

Mp3s are a little difficult. If you have access to new MIDIs you can stick them in the game with the name Stalk1.gmid, if you convert it with the tool in WDFUSE. (You won't get battle transitions, that requires further work) Mp3s have to be converted to VOCs (and wavs inbetween), with some complicated steps found here.

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[ACE]

OK

[Nottheking]

Most older games were not made to use more modern "waveform" audio like MP3s or even uncompressed WAV files; at the time, they were simply too big in file size.

So instead, Dark Forces uses a "GMID" format, which is little different from a scripted MIDI-2 format; instead of saving what the sound's wave looks like, it instead records various instrument information, akin to sheet music.

The downside is that it's technically impossible to directly convert something like an MP3 to a GMID file for Dark Forces. There ARE methods of still playing them in-game if you conver them to the right format, but they will be played as "sounds," and hence not controllable with the "music volume" slider. Nor will it be possible to have different stalk/battle musics that work normally.

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[The MAZZTer]

There is a workaround to use sampled music, but they will end up being very low quality, and will not have the iMuse features which allows the music to switch to different tracks based on whether you're exploring or fighting. However you can change tracks (abruptly) using INF. There are other drawbacks as well.

Fish's level "Fortress of Quadrigon" features sampled music as the soundtrack. First he converted it into the VOC file format (the only sampled music format Dark Forces can understand) and lowered the quality to the Dark Forces supported settings (which is OK for sound effects... the purpose of Dark Forces' support of VOCs, but won't sound terribly good). Once he had this, he simply played it in his level as an ambient sound effect and timed it so it looped properly.

The downside is that you lose a sound effect slot, not a biggie. A bigger problem is when sound effect slots fill up, old ones are stopped if a new sound effect needs to play. This means your music may abruptly stop in the middle of your level and not start again until it "loops" using the timed INF. Level design has to take this into consideration so there aren't too many enemies or ambient sound effects around. However, Fish used this to his advantage, as if you play many "silent" VOC files at once, you can FORCE the music to end... and then play a DIFFERENT music track. One caveat that is apparent in his level is that when this happens the entire game will be silent for a moment (no SFX at all).

If you use MIDI music you lose the ability to play sampled music and are left with predefined instrumental music, but it can still be pretty good especially if you use iMuse triggers to make "stalk" and "fight" music. And you don't have to worry about basing level design around your music. Of course you pretty much have to make your music again from scratch, in a completely different format...

I would suggest sampling your music down into the VOC format with the quality settings needed for a Dark Forces sound effect and deciding if it's still acceptable for music, since this isn't too hard to do. Depending on that you can decide what you want to do from there.

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[Fish]

Exactly. However there is a minor update regarding this method. (Though it should not discourage you...)

Namely, there are relatively few modern PC's that handle DF sounds well. Some will manage to run it directly from XP/Vista, but it will rarely work well. Therefore, as there is already mentioned in a dedicated article here, one will prefer using VDMS, or even DOSBox on a fast machine. I've experimented with both so far, and it seems that they occasionally introduce some minor sample rate changes (probably rounding to the sound-card-friendly frequencies). Anyway, it can somewhat ruin the finely-tuned looping time of the samples, what then sounds seriously awful. So if you are about to use some VOC-based music, I'd recommend to do a "faded-start", that is, a music that begins and ends with an effect or something that is not rhythmically critical. (Quadrigon suffers from this mistake.)

Of course, the best solution would be to have a DF-dedicated abandonware computer running DOS and equipped with an old-school sound card, but I guess most of us have enough headache even with the computers we have already.

[Darth Oosha]

Has a bug report been filed at http://sourceforge.net/projects/dosbox?