Anyone else think it’s lazy that the alt stages don’t have themes of their own? I don’t think the theme of the New Zealand stage fits with the night variant.
Random note: Determining if the character battle themes (demo included) should have a title change expressing which characters are used for the song, or to use the description information to tell what specific battle this BGM plays in. Also, the songs you don’t hear in the Ch.1 playlist are likely in the General BGM section mentioned above.
That’s what I prefer as well… but I would figure most common people would prefer the title being the battle between characters. The game OSTs that goes through these type of situation I can’t recall, but for example, most people would be searching for Karin’s theme for Alpha 3 by searching “alpha 3 Karin theme”… rather than “simple rating.”
The track title though isn’t too exact to the original files… but to avoid any title comprehensive titles, it had to be changed. Normal file prefix goes by “gen_ch02_sc001_005_00000000” as an example.
Can you give some pointers on how to convert the game files into something playable on their own? I can un-pak everything myself, but I dunno what to do with the uasset files afterward.
VGMToolbox is a good start. Hex editor is a good touch to have as well (needed to know what files are in it)… which shows that .hca is the format used. You will have 6 splitted .hca files since the game supports 5.1 surround sound… so you would have to know the order that the channels are assigned to match with the order of 5.1 .wavs… and then convert it to stereo afterwards. It’s worth noting that .hca channels use their own style of assigning channels as does .wav and .ogg (bringing up .ogg because it’s the format I intend to use for loop pointers, specifically .logg which can play properly with in_vgmstream).
The hardest part would be time management and dealing with channel adjustments/modifications. First you would have to convert .hca files into .wav files, and then turn those 6 .wav files into a proper 5.1 sound file manually, which would then have to be converted to stereo if you intend on making it a normal type of song format that everyone knows (.mp3 or .wav for example). That’s pretty much the process for story mode bgm. In story mode’s case, the process is a little less time consuming than the other things in the game because you don’t have to do calculations to get the loop point information.
Luckily because there are no loop pointers… you don’t have to worry about making calculations to get specific loops. It’s a problem because there are uploads from youtube out there that gets very incorrect loop lengths like a lot of the Claw theme uploads since they make adjustments by ear rather than looking through the file (along with making one calculation in the case of .hca format) and getting the correct values.
With this said, I’ll work on Chapter 2 and 3 tonight. Chapter 2 doesn’t look long. Chapter 3 might take a while.
That’s why I love the PC version. You can just mod in your own song for the Alt stages and the game will play it without messing up the original stage’s song. You won’t desynch online either even if the other person doesn’t have it installed.