RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2022-02-06, 17:45:
As I said above, X-Wing and TIE have already been ported to XWA, with remastered orchestral music built from the original MIDI files, using today's HQ DAW samplers to give the experience of a real orchestra soundtrack.
And I'm the one who did the music remastering. With TFTC coming out, though, it kind of gave an ultimate one-up to the whole Re-Orchestration Project, though. At some point, I'd love to go back and redo the music; I screwed up the looping at the end of most of the tracks in the last iteration, and never realized it until the whole thing was out on the 'net, and by that time, I was trying to work on the X-Wing ReOrchestrated project, but I was so burned out from TIE Fighter, that I gave up music for something like five years entirely.
swaaye wrote on 2022-02-06, 23:10:
Hey. I saw the post but I figured it was just another non-interactive soundtrack. But, after some searching it does sound like it is dynamic to a degree. I suppose recreating what the IMUSE MIDI engine did would be rather involved. I remember it would fade instruments in and out as events occurred.
But I will have to check out the mods!
It wasn't dynamic at all - the Special Edition that we used was built on the Xwing vs. TIE Fighter engine, so we were locked into streaming Redbook audio, and even that was kinda stupid at times. The Intro cutscene music, for example, caused the video to run at double speed unless we cut the quality in half to 22050Hz, unlike literally every other track in the game. For the mission audio, I recall there being maybe three music cues - battle, victory, and failure - and that was all. I do know that we eventually created a loop of a bunch of the battle music that would roll around on itself for the majority of the battle, but there wasn't anything dynamic about it. We all bitterly lamented the excision of iMuse, because otherwise, I would have been okay with creating a sound font from my virtual orchestra and having General MIDI triggers, but that was completely stripped out of the code. The fact that we got our programmer to do some ASM hackery to add the music back into the concourse (and, if I recall, the registration desk) was more or less a miracle - I seem to remember him complaining about how fucky things were in the '98 edition, and he had to do some serious refactoring in order to insert JMPs to unused memory locations just so he could side-load the new audio; looking back, and knowing more about coding, I get the impression that the original code actually specified memory addresses, so things were locked down pretty narrowly - adding a single line of code meant any references pointed to the same address, even though the code in that location had changed.
