So let me start with the statement that even though I always liked TFTD atmosphere, and music did kind of empower the dread setting of underwater lovercraftian horrors, it did still sound campy, cheesy, idk a better word. Like something straight out of B horror movie.
Then, seeing what X-Piratez became, a huge compilation of various ideas and soundtracks from variety of other games, I saw that TWoTS megamod for TFTD should have the same treatment (eventually) and at least have a nice variety of soundtracks.
Not a lot of tracks would actually fit a mostly aquatic setting, until hovewer I recalled the
Submarine Titans RTS from 2000. It had it's own charm (but went into obscurity because of it's jankiness and "trying to compete with Starcraft") and the soundtrack wasn't very distracting, plus it was actually made for underwater setting.
The game itself is also an interesting project, in my opinion very well deserves any attention it can get, it shouldn't be compared to Starcraft, it played very differently. That's all another story hovewer.
DownloadSo here's the result of my experiment of trying to "port" the music from ST rts to xcom TFTD (specifically to TWoTS). This mod was made as a personal project, but featured on
Quickmind's twitch (mainly plays xcom mods) -
if you want some examples I can post the link to the vods in the topic. It fits TFTD, while maybe the tracks are less creepy, they do have a good atmosphere overall.
Public mod page is up now:
https://openxcom.mod.io/submarine-titans-music-mod-tftdInstallation:Simply overwrite the respective folders for TFTD gamefiles and TWoTS. If you do not use the TWoTS megamod, only replace the TFTD folder. Make sure the game music in options is set to OGG format.
More walls of text (sorry)
The main problem you would face when doing this "porting" is of course the fact that the soundtrack was never released standalone. It had to be either ripped from the game or recorded manually (which is also painful, because music segments would stop eventually even if the game is paused.), then other problem surfaces - ST also used "modular" soundtrack, in a sense that it was split to small segments which would either follow each other or change randomly. So making a coherent soundtrack would also take some effort.
Thankfully, I wasn't the only person with idea of extracting the soundtrack and found the "gamerip" on "illegal" parts of the interwebs (Rip Done by
Rayman_Max)
I do own the game though, on GoG (it also is released on Steam) so I consider this OST "mostly legal". Since this mod (and TWoTS) is non-commercial, I hope this does not become a problem. After all, X-Piratez had a lot of borrowed tracks as well, but I'm not aware of how it was done legally however.
So as a result, I ended up with with a lot of tracks, but unfortunately quite a number of them were also "split" so for few tracks I had to "stitch" them together into something coherent in Audacity.
This is why I still consider this a "unfinished" mod and would like to get some feedback on what I can improve.
Known problems are for now:-No menu music (mainly comes from the fact that ST also didn't have one, just aquatic ambience)
-No win/introduction/loss music.
-General Briefing music was only 23 seconds long, so to solve the tiring repeat (for "play briefing music longer" option = true), I had to use an ugly solution, haven't figured out something better.
-Only 5 geoscape tracks, this is the best I could get without resorting to "repeating" tracks. The point was also to have some uniqueness to each track.
-Possible awkward stitches of some segments, any decent ear would recognize them, but this is something I aim to improve.
Missing tracks I personally resolved partially by reusing Gifty TFTD music mod (a great piece of work, to my knowledge that person actually composed the tracks himself unlike me) and reusing another music mod I made for Quickmind (as it was his idea) - X-Com Apocalypse music port for TWoTS >
This one I can release separately as well, if there's demand for it.So, enjoy the mod and let me know if there's any feedback to it - that's the point of this topic, I do want to "perfect" this if possible as I still need to polish some things.
Credits:-Me for "mixing" the tracks, selecting properly fitting tracks and actually implementing them properly in TFTD/TWoTS
-Rayman_Max, whoever you are, you saved me from a huuuuge headache of recording this manually.
-Andrey Vasilenko for actually composing those tracks for the original game.
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