Custom Music / Hex Editing Request

[MacAoidh]

So as many of you know, there are two ways of bringing in custom music to FT. The first and easiest way is to put custom music in the custom music directory and turn on the option to play this music in the game. This works, but ends up being terrible because you have zero control over which music files play at which times, etc. As far as I can tell (after spending countless hours searching tutorials and threads here on NMA), there is no way to customize any playback options using this method.

The second way is to create a custom sound text file and import it into the level editor for each mission. This is fantastic, except for one problem: the importing process is an overwrite effect, which means all the original ambient sounds for that mission are overwritten. This is soul-crushing for me, as I deeply love the ambient sound design present in the game and do not wish to mess with it.

Here is my question: is there any way, through hex editing the game or otherwise, to add custom music to specific missions without replacing/overwriting the original ambient sounds in that mission?

 

[Melindil]

I think something like this is technically possible, but it's likely to be quite a while before I get enough research done to actually take a shot at it. It will be considerably more than what could be done with solely a hex edit.

How I'd see this working is:

1) I'd need to find where in the code the custom music playback is triggered from, and find a good way to modify the in-game list of music files available to play.

2) With the above, I could add a function to FTSE that would let a script replace this list with a single music file name, then restart the custom music player.

3) Last thing would be to ensure that conditions where the music should change have FTSE hooks so that the new function can be called. Right now, any event that can set a mission or campaign variable could trigger the script. Would probably also want to add hooks for loading a game and loading a new map.

I don't have a timeframe for being able to look at this - UI and sound were much later on my list to research, since I expect them to be more difficult than the game engine elements I'm working on now. But I'll add it to my list for when I get there.

 

[MacAoidh]

Thank you, kind friend. I know that the work is tedious since the developers made the crucial error of not including the original ambient sound text files for each map, which complicates this excessively. However, I also know many modders including myself would love to be able to play custom music set to each mission.