plasma pack levels, monolith & gti cutscenes, and alt-fi

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youngku
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plasma pack levels, monolith & gti cutscenes, and alt-fi

Post by youngku » Sun Aug 06, 2006 5:59 pm

I have one whole unit of blood version 1.21.

My first question is, does anyone know how I access the plasma pack levels, since this version supposedly has them?

My second question is, does anyone know how to make the monolith.avi movie and the gtinteractive beating heart movie start when you start the game? I can get the other cutscene movies to work fine.

My third question is, do I have all of the cd audio songs in this version, or is there somewhere to download them from, or do I ultimately simply need the cd to hear them while I play?

My fourth question is, does anyone else have the alt-fire problem? I have set it to be a key on my keyboard and also my middle mouse button, neither of which work. Any ideas?

Willis
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Post by Willis » Mon Aug 07, 2006 1:08 am

1) Plasma Pak levels are the fifth episode (Post Mortem) in OUWB. Cryptic passage requires being launched with a seperate executable (cryptic.exe)

2) Remove -quick from the vlp properties. These movies cause the game to hang on startup for many in WinXP, hence -quick is used to bypass them. Chances are pretty slim they'll work for you.

3) The audio tracks only came on the CD, and can't be replaced by placement on the harddrive like the movies. I have them available for download at http://files.deathmask.net/sounds/mp3s in mp3 format, you can convert and burn them to a CD, just make sure to put in a dummy track for track 1 (copy track 2 or just put in a short wave file).

4) Alt-fire: try using the default key assignment and see if that works? X is the default key for alt-fire. There may be some keys that go unrecognized being it was an older game, and additionally may have problems with certain foreign keys.

youngku
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Post by youngku » Mon Aug 07, 2006 3:05 am

1) Thank you, I did not know Post Mortem was the Plasma Pack addition. Cryptic Passage works fine.

2) I have the -quick removed from the vlp properties. I can see the movie when you start a new game with episode one, but starting the game does not load the monolith.avi, gti.smk, nor logo.smk movies. Any other ideas?

3) Thank you for the CD audio tracks. All I need to do is to convert them to .wav files and burn them to a cd and have that in my cd drive for the cd audio to play, correct?

4) I got alt-fire to work using a different key on my keyboard. No matter what key I assign to my middle mouse button, it does nothing. I seem to remember this being an issue back then, and I thought monolith released either a patch to fix it, a recommendation to change a mouse.ini or mouse.cfg file, or a mouse patch file to enable the middle button for blood since it is a DOS based game. Any other ideas here?

youngku
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Post by youngku » Mon Aug 07, 2006 3:09 am

What sort of a program would I use to convert the MP3 format to WAV format?

Also, the name of the audio track needs to match what the blood.ini file calls for the track name, correct?

youngku
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cd audio tracks

Post by youngku » Mon Aug 07, 2006 3:21 am

Okay, I went through the blood.ini file and I am confused. The tracks that the different levels call up (i.e. eXmY) are different than the cd tracks you have listed for download. For instance, "cbloodX" is listed in the blood.ini file for many of the levels, but the track number listed is the same for different cblood#'s. Is the blood.ini file messed up?

Willis
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Post by Willis » Mon Aug 07, 2006 5:08 am

The blood.ini file has two references. One is Track, which is refering to the CD, and the other is Song which is refering the the midi. If there is no CD, it skips the Track, and goes to the Song.

There are various free mp3 to wav converters, most cd burning programs do it quite well by themselves, just drag the mp3s into a blank audio cd template. And like I said before, make sure to put a dummy track in for track 1 as that is the data track on the original discs, and if there is nothing there, it will offset all the music by 1 track.

As for the mouse button, its hard to say, dos didn't have the greatest support for more than two buttons. Perhaps in the vlp properties there is an option for mouse button emulation? I'm sorry I don't know for sure, I don't have VDMSound installed on this machine as I can't run any dos games without dosbox (x64 platform).

As for the intro movies, thats a good point, my install of OUWB won't play them at all either, and I see no enable option. I'm pretty sure 1.0/1.11 play them fine, but I'll double-check.

Willis
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Post by Willis » Mon Aug 07, 2006 5:16 am

Well, upon re-thinking, I know they didn't work in 1.0, as they didn't work from dos until version 1.11

Why that wouldn't have made it into 1.21 is beyond me though.

youngku
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Post by youngku » Tue Aug 08, 2006 12:59 am

okay, I burned the wav files to a cd with a track one. Then I started the game, trying various levels, still no cd music...what gives?

youngku
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Post by youngku » Tue Aug 08, 2006 1:00 am

Also, are there any audio tracks for cryptic passage or the plasma pack?

Willis
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Post by Willis » Tue Aug 08, 2006 7:24 pm

There are no new audio tracks for Plasma Pak or Cryptic passage.

As for it not working, does the cd play outside of the game (IE, in Media Player or a regular cd player?), also, you mentioned by email that this was on a CD-RW... which gives me the idea that it likely wasn't "finalized" which makes it hard to read as an audio cd. Also, make sure it was in fact burned as an audio cd and not a data cd.

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Post by Ephemeral » Tue Aug 08, 2006 11:01 pm

There seems to be some misunderstanding about Cd Burning.
What sort of a program would I use to convert the MP3 format to WAV format?

Also, the name of the audio track needs to match what the blood.ini file calls for the track name, correct?
You got the wrong idea there, sorry. What you need to do is burn an "Audio CD", just like any music CD. The only difference is that Blood never looks at track 1, because usually the data files would be at that place. So You need a "dummy" track there, you could just duplicate the first song for that(the first song is "Blood - 02 - Pestis Cruento.mp3").

youngku
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Post by youngku » Wed Aug 09, 2006 6:26 pm

I did close out or finalize the CDRW, which really is an oxymoron for a CDRW since you can erase and rewrite to it. Someone mentioned to me that I probably needed the old analog cable connected from my cdrom/dvd burner drive to my soundcard. I'll have to crack my case and check on it, because newer games did this simply through the IDE cable on the CD rom/DVD drive.

Has anyone else noticed that the volume sliders in the blood game don't do anything? It seems that only by adjusting volume in the dos setup.exe file volume is changed.

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Ephemeral
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Post by Ephemeral » Wed Aug 09, 2006 8:46 pm

You may or may not need a cable. There is a thread here, claiming a cable is needed, but I can hear music without it, I just checked.

Further things to check:

1. If you have two CD-Drives, it will only work in the FIRST drive. I don't know the technical details, but that is a common problem with DOS games.
2. The CD-drive must be set to "digital", which I believe is the default setting anyway. Unless you use the cable, then I believe it should be set to analog.
3. The "-nocd" command line in the settings must not be active.
4. does your cd-drive spin up, when you start a new game?
5. the CD must be playable in a music cd player. I'm sorry I'm saying this again, but you didn't reply to my post regarding this.

Edit: I just reread that you use a CDRW. That certainly may not work in a CD Player. But you can try the other way round: Try to get Blood to play any Audio Cd, if that doesn't work, something else is wrong.

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Post by picolo daimao » Sun Sep 09, 2007 6:24 am

ARE THIS MUSICS TO DOWNLOAD THE ORIGINAL MUSICS OF GAME,OR THEY ARE REMIX?
I FIND STRANGE THAT MY BLOOD.ISO WHICH I DOWNLADED HAVE 656mb.HOWEVER WHEN I EXTRACT THE ISO, THE GAME HAVE ONLY 323MB.WHILE I CAN'T PLAY THE CD TRACKS IN THE GAME.I THINK WICH CD TRACKS WERE RIPED.I CAN BE RIGTH?

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Ephemeral
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Post by Ephemeral » Sun Sep 09, 2007 1:57 pm

No, you are wrong, and PLEASE STOP SCREAMING. The iso file is in Mixed-Mode, meaning that the songs are present on the cd as audio, not as files. Try burning it and play it on your cd player... but skip track one, as this contains the data, which may sound really bad...

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