So the Xereos project is an attempt to create a FLOSS replacement Bioware's Aurora. This would allow you to play usual suspects like Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic, but potentially also ones like Dragon Age, The Witcher (different developer, same engine) and Jade Empire. However, there's one Bioware RPG that hasn't been overlooked, Sonic Chronicles https://xoreos.org/blog/2015/06/05/the-odd-one-out-sonic-chronicles-1-slash-3/ https://xoreos.org/blog/2015/06/06/the-odd-one-out-sonic-chronicles-2-slash-3/ https://xoreos.org/blog/2015/06/07/the-odd-one-out-sonic-chronicles-3-slash-3/ Here Xereos developer Sven Hesse (DrMcCoy) post about his initial work in getting areas and models from Sonic Chronicles displayed in the Xereos engine, not easy work when it the game is so different from the usual Bioware RPG and obviously uses some DS specific code, but he surprisingly finds some things in common with work he's already done, such as some similar Bioware file format. He seems to be doing a "breadth first" approach to development so right now he's going to focus on getting the same work done in all the other Bioware engines before returning to Sonic Chronicles, but for now it's fascinating to see the work done and the similarities to other Bioware RPGs.
Interesting stuff. A lot of material here that could interest some of our community. Hell, once they figure music out, maybe it'll be possible to make a version that doesn't suck enormous balls =P
What are you talking about? Clearly BioWare's music engineering is too superior for your feeble mind!
And maybe a better frame-rate that doesn't make my eyes hurt after a while. For as interesting as the story looked to me years ago, the presentation was well below Bioware's own standards; wasn't even worth the time to pirate and run, if everybody remembers that it needed to be patched to work on older flash carts of the time. I'll never understand what happened to Chronicles, because Bioware's great at making decent looking games, and they usually do leagues better than steal MIDIs from VGMusic.
They got bought by EA halfway through development. Presumably they stopped giving a shit, finished the game to the bare minimum to not be in breach of contract, and ran.
I always assumed that Sonic games had just become cursed or something. Your explanation makes more sense though. Anyway, it'll interesting to see what progress is made on Chronicles.
IIRC parts of the music played in-game are missing. A while ago someone here was looking at the rips and found that some tracks have instruments that don't play for some reason, like Green Hill is supposed to have a flute as the lead instrument but it's completely absent when you play the game.
If anyone's interested, I still should have a complete rip of the in-game-MIDI-files. That's not even exaggerating, the music files when ripped and converted to MIDI already pretty much align with General MIDI standards where the percussion is concerned. I changed the instrument mappings to make sense and not be all default pianos, too, so, there's that, too. Certainly sounds better than what the in-game-player is providing even without any soundfonts (or being run through mid2smps :P ).
Whoa, seriously? I'm definitely interested! So the game's soundtrack literally wasn't playing it's own sound files properly? That... sheds a bit more light on how two professional game music composer produced a soundtrack like THAT. It's almost like it was rushed at the later ends of porduction, or messed about with somehow. I still wonder what happened there. In any event, should be fun comparing the final and your restored version of the soundtrack.
Alright, well, here's what I managed to salvage; again, with Genral MIDI instruments of my own choosing that I thought fit the overall feel of the respective tracks (as obviously, a video game wouldn't normally adhere to GM mapping in that sense). Only thing not included would be the battle themes as those are already streamed to begin with. Come to think of it, would be interesting to see if a soundfont could be created out of the game's instrument banks that'd factually work for the game. I do suspect that all that went wrong is the instrument mapping itself.
