OzzieMonkey

In the words of Fink, "oh no, not this story again!" 😂

We're definitely close to more concrete news about the release: The Game Awards' Twitter account responded with a little train emoji...I'm going to take that as tacit confirmation that they'll be showing the game off at Summer Games Fest...probably with a release date.

I really like how there's an air of meloncholy to this version, to me this tells the story of Guybrush going back to a critical part of his life, but things are different, he's a different person and been through so much, he's been avoiding it for too long, but now it's time for one last adventure...it's time to Return to Monkey Island. To me, this is perfect! I hope the actual theme is as good, (though I'm sure it will, we're dealing with the MI2 musical trio here :D)

Yeah, I think people will get themselves twisted into knots trying to reconcile everything Ron's said in the past. I think the tossing of Murray into water mid-sentence in the trailer was a very pointed statement about more than just what he said about owning the rights, it was everything he's said up until this point. It was Ron's way of saying "yes, I know what I said, I've said a lot of things, forget about it." That's what it communicated to me, at least. Gahhh, I just want more content, gimme!

I totally understand where you're coming from though, don't get me wrong, I definitely don't want to break any rules, I love this place I also couldn't do all this work and not share with everyone else, that's MI fan rules 101. I guess if forum Mods decide it's not a good idea to share it publicly, I'll settle for PM'ing people who are interested in trying it out.

So the loop markers had to be manually added in by me in sound editing software AFTER the music was extracted and converted into a format that XACT could recognise. It appears that merely the act of re-encoding the files removes the loop markers entirely, as there is a little N under the Loop heading in my wavebank, and a Y when I add the markers back in. Anyone who wanted to do what I did would have to spend hours editing the loops back in, and yeah, I did it cause I'm a masochist with too much time on my hands but I can't expect everyone to do that so a completed Wavebank is much more preferable. I guess I'm just wondering what the major difference would be in sharing that from, say, the Cursed soundtrack that also supplied a repacked Wavebank. You still need to purchase the game to get it to work. If there's a script that can do all my editing automatically, that would be good, but I would have no idea where to begin with that.

See my updated starting post for a status update.

Considering that statement was in the context of being asked whether or not he would reveal the Secret, I imagine that is primarily where he is predicting division among fans. People have spent 30 years, 3 DECADES imagining what that secret could be, of course it's going to ruffle some feathers when/if it's ultimately revealed. I don't really have any expectations myself as to what it actually is (mainly because I've doubted for a while that there even is one), I just hope to be surprised and that whatever it is, it actually means something. I think Ron has said something to that effect before anyhow, that the Secret on its own is meaningless without tying it into the narrative and saying something thematically, which is why he's never given in and just written a blog post revealing it (or, like I said, there IS no secret).

It's interesting to hear people's take on what Ron said about endings, because I came to a different conclusion. My interpretation is not so much that you have to make something polarizing, but that if you have an idea that is wildly different, the potential for fracture in audience response shouldn't sway your decision to commit to that idea. I think what Ron said sends a message of honouring your own voice above trying to please everyone by making something generic and safe, not that you should go out of your way to make something terrible or controversial for the sake of it.

Essentially it works the same way as how people use the Cursed! MI1 soundtrack in the first Special Edition The only thing that's needed for it to work is the MusicOriginal.xwb file that is produced when I build it in XACT. Once you replace the file in the game's audio folder, you're good to go!

I edited loop points into a few tracks using Wavosaur, then put them into XACT with the rest of the tracks, built the Wavebank, and BOOM! It works! We are cooking with Rapp Scallion's gas burners now people! Still gotta edited the files which will take some time but at least now it'll ensure infinite looping

Idk if anyone follows Aaron Giles on Twitter, but he's recently been tweeting about his progress creating a native intepeter for the Lucasarts games called DREAMM (I believe this was mentioned in Mojo's interview). It seems to be going well, and he recently posted that he got CMI to work, which was the one game he thought wasn't possible to het running!

So with Woodtick, let's say you walk into the Woodsmith's. The whole track plays and then after a few seconds of the song playing over again, the song loops and repeats those few seconds and the rest of the song. The structure of the songs looks like this: Whole song + First few seconds of song OR Intro + whole mid section + First few seconds of mid section. With the first example (and what happens in all of woodtick), the tacked on first few seconds makes it loop straight after that and instead of playing the rest of the song, it plays from the beginning. The second example occurs somewhere like the Rapp Scallion scene, where the intro is the bit that playd when he's resurrected, then his theme during dialog. At the end of that song, it once again plays the first few seconds that happen after the intro, then abruptly cuts to the intro again. What should be happening is this: Whole Song looped Intro played once, middle looped

I gave it another crack and made it a little lighter and closer to the original. Not perfect, but pretty close

Yeah I struggled a little with the gradient overlay settings in Photoshop. A lot of my experience with the software is self-taught and just trying things to see what works. I wasn't quite able to get it lighter than this, though I'm sure there's a way for more savvy users to work it out. I'm glad you liked it otherwise!

Appropos of Return using the old logo instead of what the SEs and Tales went for, I decided to make matching ones for those games.

I think that's a pretty safe bet, it's not far off from Thriftweed, after all. On the topic of spoilers, it's gonna be an absolute minefield navigating that stuff when this comes out, not as bad as when a new Marvel or Star Wars thing comes out though (this is still a niche series after all). I would hate to find out what the true Secret of Monkey Island™ is through a wall of text on a forum post, for example.

Yeah I messed with it some more, no dice. I've looked into it a bit further, and apparently my hunch was correct. Although developers CAN create loops in the Soundback using XACT, some don't and instead rely on .wav files encoded with loop points using Wavosaur. Those appear to get lost as soon as they are re-encoded from the ADPCM format I initially extracted them from using your Extractor (great program btw, couldn't get this far without it). Basically, I still need to do that stupid amount of editing to put the loops back in, but at least now I only have to create one loop point instead of just artbitrarily looping different songs at varying lengths depending on guesswork around how long people genereally spend in each environment. If this all goes to plan, you could theoretically stay in the same location for hours, days, weeks, ETERNITY and never hear the faulty loop, which is what the original does. Thanks a lot for your help! I'll continue to test things until this works. I think it's worth it.

By the time we get more info the conversation will have derailed so much that it really will be a Return to Monkey Island 😂

That makes way more sense! I had Friendly names on and sync in-game data off. Do you happen to know what the original samples ber block was? Or is that gonna be a trail and error thing? Another question I have: What does the MI2SE Rebuild.xgs file do?

In an ideal world, that would be the case, yes 😂 Sadly I can't even put the original extracted file as they are into a new wavebank because XACT requires uncompressed wav files. I've also noticed that depending on the conversion software, the files end up longer than they were before, looping from a speficic timecode and then continuing on. It's all a bit of a headache, and I wish I knew what the missing step was, but for now I'm just gonna fish up these edits and give it a test.

This is pretty cool.

Hoo boy, this is becoming a lot more of an undertaking that I originally thought. It seems as though the way the original files were encoded, they retained the ability to play an intro section of the music, then the main bit, followed by looping to a specific timestamp instead of the beginning, That functionality is lost as soon as the files are converted to a format XACT is compatible with. For example, in-game you'd get the Rapp Scallion resurrection cue, followed by his theme, but when the track is over it loops back to the resurrection cue instead of just endlessly looping like it should, which is not ideal. Thankfully, I'm pretty good at editing, so I'm in the process of editing all the tracks in Audacity so they loop for longer, basically enough time that most people playing the game will never reach the part where the incorrect loop happens. This is all dependant on the location of the music, so for example Dread's map screen or any of the island maps don't loop as long as, say, the Voodoo Lady's or the various Woodtick rooms. I also have a working theory on why the little transition that plays between the swamp and the Voodoo Lady's doesn't play, which I believe lies in the MI2_MUSIC IMPLEMENTATION.csv file. I'll see if I'm right and report back with my findings. Of course, if anyobdy knows of a way to convert an APCM encoded .wav file to a PCM .wav file without losing the loop triggers in the process, I'd love to know about it cause it'd save me a lot of hassle

Monkey Kombat wouldn't have been as reviled if the puzzle wasn't randomized. If all you had to do was fill out a sheet once, it would only have taken a single person to put out a walkthrough with a filled in chart that people could just copy. Alternatively, it should've just been an in-game chart that filled in as you progressed, with better clarity than the one they put into the PS2 version.

Just an update on the looping situation, I did some further testing and it seems as though every looping track loops to the wrong position (so all of woodtick is a bit of a mess). Fortunately, I believe I've detected the issue. Basically the tracks extracted using the MI Explorer have to then be converted into a format that XACT recognises, and during the conversion the tracks got extended and now don't match the timestamp of the original MT32 files. So now, I'm going in and putting each individual file into Sony Vegas and rendering them as a .wav to be 100% sure I'm getting the same files at the same length, then I'll rebuild the wavebank and report back. Also, during all this messing, I found that by editing some tracks I can get back previously lost transitions, such as the buildup and crescendo that hits when Largo says "Look out world! The most fearsome pirate of all time will soon sail the seas again!", smoothly transitioning into the Voodoo Lady's theme, rather than cutting to the Voodoo theme when largo says his line and missing out on that build which really added to the presentation of the scene in the original game. I have no idea how to bring back the little tune that plays when the coffin gets lifted up in the swamp though, it's part of a set of layered transitions that are meant to be event triggered, but without access to scripting or any real understanding of the MI2_MUSIC IMPLEMENTATION Excel file, I'm at a loss. UPDATE: Ok, so I did all that and it still doesn't loop correctly. I'm honestly not sure what the issue is. The tracks line up exactly, but it seems as though the game just doesn't want to obey any looping instructions when they're replaced with SE music. Idk, maybe I've done something wrong in XACT?