[Woofmute]

I have been hacking REZ for some time now. I've got beta midi's back into the game, and discovered how the game works. But there is some really interesting stuff.

Yesterday I extracted every single texture from REZ and the beta, and found a few cool things.

It seems that at some point REZ was going to have a difficulty display on the area select menu
The artist bit interests me too.
N----World was Underworld, their music was implemented in the beta, but was never allowed into the final.
Richard.D.James (Aphex Twin)'s music could not be used, and was not implemented.
Ken Ishii's music was not implemented yet.
The Chemical Brothers are the same as Aphex Twin.
Adam Freeland is the same in the final.

The game uses a system called MainFlow to control when an enemy is spawned, or when an event such as a BPM change occurs, and can be edited with a Dreamcast keyboard in the beta, you can mess up the level by spawning to many of something, like a password protector, and you can make your own scenarios. The only problem is that you cannot save.

I'll post more as I find out more.

EDIT:Here are the textures, everything you need is inside the .rar
REZ Textures.rar

This post has been edited by Jakeford: 12 December 2009 - 09:34 AM

[Phos]

Interesting...

I wonder if something that would give Rez some sort of Audiosurf like functionality could be created, something that would generate MainFlow files from music tracks.

[Kurosan]

I can't help but think that there's something pretty awesome about hacking a game in which you play as a hacker who enters cyberspace to hack computers.

[Woofmute]

Interesting...

I wonder if something that would give Rez some sort of Audiosurf like functionality could be created, something that would generate MainFlow files from music tracks.

Well, at the moment I'm still working out the .eve format used for MainFlow, but who knows, anything's possible.

I can't help but think that there's something pretty awesome about hacking a game in which you play as a hacker who enters cyberspace to hack computers.

Ever pointed a camera at a screen displaying what is on the camera?


EDIT: REZ handles music like this: Each area has a midi file, Area1 has M01.mid, and each area has two .mpb and .fpb files, one containing samples, the other containing the orders to play the channels in. The midi format is readable by computers, but it is slightly different from an average midi, so a straight up midi replacement is impossible. Probably because it's a Dreamcast midi, but I'm trying to work on it.

This post has been edited by Jakeford: 11 December 2009 - 05:10 PM

[Lobotomy]

And I thought you were just playing with the K-Project Debug menu, awesome stuff! I'd love to see what else you can show us.

This post has been edited by Lobotomy: 11 December 2009 - 10:25 PM

[Woofmute]

And I thought you were just playing with the K-Project Debug menu, awesome stuff! I'd love to see what else you can show us.

Although that can be useful sometimes, but thanks!

There was a texture in Area1 which referred to Project Eden (REZ), Ovum (On the beta after boot, it goes on about Ovum Loader, but why was it important enough to get it's own texture in game?), BoCPU (?), and Music Responce (Spelled like that, maybe referring to how you add to the music)

...You know what, I'll just upload the files for anyone to look at.
EDIT:Download link in first post.

This post has been edited by Jakeford: 12 December 2009 - 09:32 AM

[Wiz]

Wow, what a nice surprise ! I am really happy that someone started to look into REZ and its level content. I hope you will make further research and great discoveries !

[Woofmute]

Wow, what a nice surprise ! I am really happy that someone started to look into REZ and its level content. I hope you will make further research and great discoveries !

Thanks!

The midi type used is form 1, like any common midi. Mpb files contain samples and channel sequencing, so now I have no idea what fpb is used for. Boss files contain at least one Screamtracker2 module, but it maybe a modified version of it as it plays static in Screamtracker2.

[Woofmute]

Ignore this message.

This post has been edited by Jakeford: 22 December 2009 - 11:40 AM

[NiktheGreek]

This is excellent work, well done. Rez is one of my favourite games and it's great to see someone putting the hacking effort in.

As far as the mystery textures go, I think I can shed light on one of them. 'Music Responce' is most likely referring to the song Music: Response by The Chemical Brothers.

[Woofmute]

This is excellent work, well done. Rez is one of my favourite games and it's great to see someone putting the hacking effort in.

As far as the mystery textures go, I think I can shed light on one of them. 'Music Responce' is most likely referring to the song Music: Response by The Chemical Brothers.

Thankyou.

And if it is-You won the internet.

EDIT:Area1 plays normal, until the boss section, you enter the pyramid and the background goes creamy and you end up battling Uranus.

EDIT EDIT:You won the internet! Listen to Chemical Brothers-Music Response 4:20 onwards...doesn't that sound very similar to the beta music on the level select for Area4? If so, then that texture at the top tells us exactly what area the artists would have been/are used in.

This post has been edited by Jakeford: 14 December 2009 - 04:44 PM

[Woofmute]

Why didn't I mention this sooner? Yesterday, I was continuing the binary swaps, and decided to swap the test.bin with STG20.bin (Tutorial level)

Whenever it loads, you go to the Grey screen from the test mode! The only problem is that there is no longer any mouse support and no keyboard support, which I suppose could be sorted, but it may be quite hard (It's all in the 1ST_READ.bin).

EDIT: I get it now! They disabled every controller port other than port 1, so that's why there is no VMU animation on any other port, and the keyboard doesn't work. I'll look into this.

This post has been edited by Jakeford: 17 December 2009 - 04:51 PM

[Woofmute]

I completed the first successful Area swap! (I posted about it before, but it was buggy and not fully working).

Area2 now loads up the Area4 level file, but plays Protocol Rain and now contains Area4 enemies, using Area2's mainflow.

The STGXX.bin files contain the level layout and enemies.

[Woofmute]

Beta texture rant #2-


This texture is found in the TITLE_MODEL.pvm, but I don't recall it ever being used. Perhaps it was the very early stages of the intro video? (Which was not implemented yet) Who knows.






All found in the TEST.pvm file. These textures are never used in game, and I don't remember them being used in the test mode.
The brick one looks similar to in the work in progress videos, and the others could be from an earlier Area5.

EDIT: The videos-
Work in progress #1
Work in progress #2
Work in progress #3
Early footage

This post has been edited by Jakeford: 24 December 2009 - 04:34 PM

[Woofmute]

Right. I finally found the last unknown beta song!

The areas would be:

Area1-Underworld—Rez/Cowgirl/Born Slippy.
Area2-Aphex Twin—Come To Daddy.
Area3-Ken Ishii—Creation The State Of Art (Based on the texture).
Area4-The Chemical Brothers—Music Response.
Area5-Adam Freeland—Fear.

This confirms the interviews where it says they tried to use The Chemical Brothers music and Aphex Twin's, but couldn't come to an agreement. My guess is they where already working on the midi', mpb and fpb files for their songs, but had to scrap them.



An an unrelated note:

From: Jake Kazdal (**************)
Sent: 24 June 2009 00:17:25
To: Jake Ford (***********************)

Hi Jake

There are some videos floating around, we had concepts of the guy being in a big chair with crazy woofer speakers, much more hip hop. Then it went through a very organic phase, undersea microscopic creatures and stuff, which kind of survived the transition into the current form.

I wanted it to be a bit deeper, like 2 or 3 buttons but Mizuguchi-san insisted it stay very minimal so everyone could enjoy it. Thats also why we included the trance mode, where you basically cant die so even people who suck at games can enjoy our game.