Intro Audio

[Danial]

Does anyone know where the audio for the intro video is stored? You can open the Intro.FLI in any video program, but this is simply an animation, there is no audio attached...

[Kriptor]

Sound/gmintro1.mid

Sound/gmintro2.mid

Sound/gmintro3.mid

[NKF]

The intro sound effects are stored as your typical raw audio .cat files in the sounds directory. However, they've mysteriously been removed from the CE, so you'll only find them with the dos versions.

 

- NKF

 

P. S: Just to clarify, I'm referring to the sound effects. i.e. the sounds of the guns firing, the Mutons moaning and the civilians screaming. The music on the other hand is, as mentioned, stored as midi files - only in the CE. The dos versions had all the midi music tracks stored in the midi-variant of the .cat files specific to certain soundcards (Adlib.cat, roland.cat, etc).

[Quantifier]

They're still there, only in different file, as sound engine was rewritten in version 1.4. The file in named SAMPLE3.CAT and stores not only audio data, but .wav headers too. If you want to rip them there'll be no problem, any ripper will do that. If you want to make game use modified sounds you will have to remember to rebuild TOC of the file as well. If you want to have working animation with sound outside of the game, then I can't help, I think synchronisation between audio and video is stored somewhere else.

[Danial]

Well that's certainly an interesting way to do it - music in 3 files and overlayed sound FX in another...

 

Wonder why they didn't just make one file?

[NKF]

Originally it was 2 files. The first was raw wave audio with sound samples to be played at certain points during the animation. The other was synthesiser audio - i.e. midi information, with all the music sequences used in the game lumped together into a single file and to be played on demand. This saves a bit of space, whereas if the intro and sound effects were to be mixed and stored together in one file, the audio file will most definitely have had to be in a wave audio format. We didn't have very good audio compression back then, so the resulting size would've been quiet huge.

 

The intro uses three sequences that are meant to be played at 3 points during the animation. My guess is that, like the sound effects, it may have been done this way so that the right music would start immediately if the animation plays too quickly but the music hasn't caught up. The CE port of the introduction player appears to have dropped the ability to load the intro sound effect file for some very odd reason.

 

- NKF