Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: OKei - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

big smile, on 23 February 2015 - 05:07 AM, said:

HAHAHALKAS:DJGasdfkl

Sorry, but you guys really do have your heads in the clouds if you actually think this would legitimately ever happen. That's what the token PR/"community manager"/etc positions are always for in this sort of business.. they're meant to sit orbiting around the company looking like they're talking to fans and taking any opportunity to spin anything that the company does do to look like it was a real response to any kind of fan demand. You talk to these people and generally it may as well be going in one ear and out the other regardless of what they say or even feel.. Portions of a company like this are already isolated from each other when they do matter, which is why it can be so hard to push something through, and why there's such a disconnect between the talking, doing, and legal parts of the company. Almost anyone who ever talks to you is just for show, so nobody of consequence actually does have to interact in any way with fans

Aside from that, it isn't the American branch we have to worry about so much. It's the Japanese branch; it's always the Japanese branch, and the "restructuring" isn't really affecting it because that's the core company. Anything else is pretty much just glorified localization and PR at this point, and they're lucky to do anything else

I don't want to derail this thing or anything, but you guys have to live in the real world. The meaningful portions of these companies aren't your friends no matter how many resources they dedicate to pretending; it's just business. The only way I see this happening, personally, is with the numbers, because neither talk nor action have gone anywhere. The growing numbers still on the low end of the scale could, as you say, get the press interest we need, and you should certainly leverage them for that, but considering the trouble attached to this particular game, SEGA themselves is most likely going to need to be all but blown away, so the last thing you need to do at this stage is make people think they can be truly comfortable with our progress anytime soon

Maybe I've come across a little harsh in my last few posts, but I do want this to succeed as much as anyone, and that's not going to happen if we're patting ourselves on the back for four figures. It's not just negativity that can actually demotivate- an abundance of positivity creates comfort, and comfort can lead to apathy. It's not easy and it's not going to be easy, but that's certainly no reason not to push forward. We're just getting started

Time to bring this thread back from the dead once again.

I attempted to extract all the sound effects from the AutoDemo. The game keeps it's sound effects in the .MLT files, which you can extract and convert to dsfmini/dsflib files. The MLT files themselves hold multiple banks which seem to correlate to their use, although not every MLT file uses all banks:

Bank 0x0 - General player action sound effects (ring sfx, jump sfx, etc - this is duplicated a lot)
Bank 0x1 - Area specific sound effects (objects mostly)
Bank 0x2 - More general player action sounds (seem to be meant for general objects the player interacts with and other things, like item boxes and brushing up against bushes)
Bank 0x3 - Player action sound effects (the P_* files)
Bank 0x4 - Enemy sfx
Bank 0x5 - Ambient/Environmental sound effects
Bank 0x6 - Cutscene specific sound effects, used by the E_#### files. Also contains player action voices.

I extracted the MLT files using dsfmake (for extracting), dsftime for timing/fade correction, and dsfsndext for figuring out how many banks each MLT had. For some reason, the script doesn't like the AutoDemo's MANATEE.DRV, so I used the final's MANATEE.DRV instead and I was able to get most of the sound effects out. There are still some that can't be played for some reason, but a good chunk of them play at least.

Some interesting things to note:
1.) Even though the AutoDemo uses the ring sound effect when rescuing an animal, the sound effect for collecting one exists but isn't used (it seems different too).
2.) The classic bubble collect sfx is present! But there are no air bubbles at all in SA1...
3.) Likewise, the classic drowning sfx is also present! In the final they just use voice acting. (Does anyone know what happens when a character drowns in the AutoDemo? Can they drown?)
4.) The classic sound effect for losing a shield (the generic hit sound that doesn't involve losing rings) is present but not used.
5.) The Chao voices are all in ALIFE Bank 1. There are some Chao voices for actions the Chao can't seem to do in the AutoDemo. The bank also includes all the animal sound effects plus some other weird mysterious stuff.
6.) Even though most of the level assets aren't present the sound effect files for Sky Deck, and Chaos 0/2/4 still exist. TARGET.MLT is Sky Chase I think?

That's pretty much all I could see from going through everything once. You can download the dsfmini/mp3/mlt files here. Some of the sound effects might not be playing at the right rate, but some of them sound fine. Now we just need to directly compare these with the final version to see how many really are different...

Also, another useful function YouTube has is "Restore Original Audio", so now I can bring back all those tracks I had removed from my uploads. :D