Do the fans and the explosive farts ever interact in Exoddus?

[FrustratedAssassin]

I was messing around with Paul's open-source ALIVE implementation and I noticed the fan sprite is called fartfan.ban. also evilfart.ban heh



Do the fans ever interact with the farts in the game? Were they supposed to do something, like blow the farts away if you flew in front of them?

[Varrok]

I never heard about it.

[FrustratedAssassin]

OK so I just tested it in-game. The two sprites do appear in the same screen sometimes, but they don't interact in any way.



So either this is scrapped functionality and I'll go down in history for discovering this or it's just called fartfan because it appears in the explosive farting tutorial.

[Paul]

Could be, check the AO PSX demo with it, there are lots of unused things in there

[Varrok]

Probably the latter

[FrustratedAssassin]

Could be, check the AO PSX demo with it, there are lots of unused things in there

I umm, I don't know how to extract the data from that.

Right now I'm listening to the Oddysee music with resampling off. I had no idea the game's music is made from so many short tracks and also that I can turn industrial ambiental into '90s techno at the press of a button. r1.lvl!RFSNDFX!R1SEQ.BSQ!34 is especially catchy.

I love your engine thingy.

[Paul]

you just need to point the resource_paths.json at the .bin file of the demo disk image. I just realized the UI is hard coded to only look in BA.LVL though :P

r1.lvl!RFSNDFX!R1SEQ.BSQ!34 is slig action music.

[FrustratedAssassin]

Oh, I know what it is, all I was saying was that it's really catchy with resampling turned off.

I'll try opening up the demos tommorow because it's literally midnight though.

[Jordan]

Perhaps they were originally intended to be used as objects that blew the farts up and you had to time moving past them to avoid it?

[FrustratedAssassin]

OK I wanted to open the demo .bin file but now it's a .bin.ecm file and I have no idea how that happened. Maybe the emulator did something to it? Maybe I downloaded it like that? Maybe it's Maybelline?

[SgabbitGabbiar]

You need Gemc, it converts from .ecm to .bin

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gemc/

[Paul]

There was some "unecm" command line tool as well. ecm is some pointless worthless compression.

[FrustratedAssassin]

I converted it but the UI just shows all the data from all the supported games with no way to sort through it. Is there any way to make it only display the demo data?

[Paul]

Not at the moment, unless you edit the code and rebuild it.

[FrustratedAssassin]

The most coding I can do is hello world in Python, so I'll pass. But do the demo files follow a unique naming scheme or something so I can at least try to find them?

[Paul]

Erm its the same stuff as the full game, just gotta change the code because its hard coded to load BA.LVL

[Nepsotic]

I umm, I don't know how to extract the data from that.

Right now I'm listening to the Oddysee music with resampling off. I had no idea the game's music is made from so many short tracks and also that I can turn industrial ambiental into '90s techno at the press of a button. r1.lvl!RFSNDFX!R1SEQ.BSQ!34 is especially catchy.

I love your engine thingy.

Does this mean you can render out the full tracks?

[FrustratedAssassin]

If you extract them and you combine them, sure. Right now you can only listen to the small snippets though.

[Nepsotic]

Why don't you extract them and send them to me to piece them together? Then we can finally have the full AO soundtrack.

Edit: Thinking about it, we don't really need to now that the remake OST is out.

[Paul]

The engine will eventually be able to mix the tracks itself, else it won't be able to replicate the games music properly

[Nepsotic]

My biggest problem with AO's music was its shityy programming. A lot of it is off-beat, especially with the chase music, which sucks because those are the best tracks.

[Paul]

Off-beat how? Even in PSX version?

[Phylum]

I don't know if you can call it shitty programming.

One one hand they probably had a limited synth timer resolution. As for the chase music, it just does whatever the game is doing. You can't criticize something that doesn't even try to have a beat for not having a beat.

[Paul]

The music is basically midi with a soundfont, I'm not musically minded but to be off beat sounds like its an error in the synth or maybe just bad in the PC version due to crappy emulation?

[Phylum]

It could be an emulation thing. There's some cool syncopation though, and generally weird rhythmic patterns which is why I said about the "resolution" they can play sounds at. Are they limited to 1/60th of a second? 1/100th? 1/1000th?

But some of the time it seems pretty obvious that they just don't give a fuck about any beat, especially in the chase music and (lack of) musical transitions.

[Nepsotic]

Yeah it's probably just crappy emulation, I haven't played the PS1 version in a while but thinking about it, I don't remember it having the same issues.

Phylum, what are you talking about when you say "resolution"? Resolution in audio is the sample rate which is not what this is about.
Also, I would say that the chase music does have a clear beat when you listen to it properly, it's just that it gets interrupted everytime another Paramite or Scrab drops down, effectively ruining it. That's my issue.

[Phylum]

Well there has to be a limit to how often it can play a note - a "resolution" that every note played would be limited by. When I say resolution I don't mean of the audio, but the synthesizer. If you want quaver triplets offset by a semiquaver (or a demisemiquaver) at 130bpm then you're going to need a higher resolution synth timer than to just play crotchets.

And the chase music is intended to react to what happens. It's not musically pleasing, and it treats it as more of an effect than anything else. You can't call a creative decision shitty programming though.

[FrustratedAssassin]

quaver

You're British?

[Phylum]

I was about to tell you that my location is set to Australia, but that hasn't been true for about 2 years now.

Either way it basically just means not-American in my experience. At the very least it's common enough that there's never any confusion about what anyone means.

[FrustratedAssassin]

I actually had to google it because I'm not a musician and I don't really know non-American English. In most languages, including Romanian, they're called 8ths and 16ths and stuff like that.

But I'm so far off-topic I should stop now.