Pokémon Reborn - Looping Battle Music Mod

[TheTGU 12]

Pokémon Reborn - Looping Battle Music Mod

 

Being the bored guy I am, after having made a looping battle music mod for Pokémon Rejuvenation, I decided to make one for Pokémon Reborn!

 

About

This mod, as the name implies, makes the battle music in Pokémon Reborn loop - and not in the same way it already does, starting from the start of the file, no, it makes it loop based on a set looping point. This essentially means that you should no longer notice the point at which the music reaches its end, however, due to some of the music used in Reborn not having a clear point where it is supposed to loop, transistions might still not be 100% smooth on all battle music but I tried my best to make it as seamless as possible.

Because of there no longer being any need for the music looping within the audio file, the combined file size of these files went down from ~81MB to ~49MB. This reduction could be even higher but I decided to keep additional loops on music files that have slight differences on their second or third loop whenever possible.

And one final note: The metadata of the audio files (title, composer, etc.) is still there and can be viewed via external software such as Audacity, however, Windows Explorer will not display it for .ogg files. Thanks, Windows.

 

Installation

In order to install the mod, you first need to download the mod; you can do so by clicking here. Your browser will likely notify you of this being an unusual download, due to it containing .dll files, if you don't believe me that this doesn't contain any viruses, feel free to run it through VirusTotal before extracting.

After you downloaded the .zip file, you need to extract it into your Pokémon Reborn folder. When prompted whether you would like to overwrite Scripts.rxdata (this is based on the E18.4.1 Scripts.rxdata file by the way!), metadata.dat, and trainertypes.dat, confirm that you want to overwrite those files.

Lastly, you should delete any of the files named "Battle- [].mp3" and "RBY Battle- [].mp3" or move them somewhere else, this is to force the game to load the .ogg files when the battle music is controlled through a map script.

 

Compatibility

This mod should be compatible with any other mods that don't change the Scripts.rxdata, metadata.dat, or trainertypes.dat files, however I can't give any guarantees since I haven't tested it.

This mod is however not compatible with game-z.exe and will cause game-z.exe to no longer work after installation! If you would like to use game-z.exe again, you will need to uninstall the mod by replacing the Scripts.rxdata file with the original one.

 

Credits

This mod wouldn't have been possible without the Essentials script "RGSS FmodEx Extension" by 塗 ゆり. You can learn more about it on the script's Pokécommunity thread. All I changed on the script itself were really minor edits to fix compatibility issues the plugin had with Reborn.

And besides that, well, I set looping points on all the provided music files.

[Kunisada 16]

May I have a question?
What is loop on music?

[andracass 1148]

:oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

i am very interested in this.

how did you make it?

[TheTGU 12]

2 hours ago, Kunisada said:

May I have a question?
What is loop on music?

I assume you mean this as in "What does looping music mean?"? Basically, when the music reaches a specified point, it jumps back to another specified point so that it can keep on running forever without any rough transistions when the end of the audio file would be reached.

1 hour ago, andracass said:

:oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

i am very interested in this.

how did you make it?

Well, I first added the FmodEx extension (which is linked in the original post) to Reborn. The compatibility edits I mentioned were just type-casting the volume and pitch variables on the extension's script to integers (which is about as much as I am able to do with my non-existent Ruby knowledge).

Afterwards, I opened Reborn's music files in Audacity and searched for a point at which the music can loop properly (which is easily the step that took the most amount of time, especially on the music files that don't have a clear looping point), cut unneccessary parts beyond the end of the loop off, added metadata for "LOOPSTART" (sample number at which the loop starts) and "LOOPLENGTH" (amount of samples from the start of the loop to the end of the loop; and I am not sure if these tags actually need to be in all-caps) and exported them as a .ogg files (because while the extension is supposed to work with .mp3 files, it is a known bug that it doesn't really, it will still loop but there are odd hiccups on the looping point).

And the last step was to edit the trainertypes and metadata pbs files to actually use the .ogg files and compile them. The .mp3 files still need to be deleted because whenever music is controlled through an event on the map, it seems to happily accept an audio file of another extension with the same name if it can't find the one with the specified extension (which is both odd and great).

 

TL;DR I added the FmodEx script which looks for metadata "LOOPSTART" and "LOOPLENGTH" on audio files and made sure the game would use these audio files where I set that metadata.

[andracass 1148]

9 minutes ago, TheTGU said:

TL;DR I added the FmodEx script which looks for metadata "LOOPSTART" and "LOOPLENGTH" on audio files and made sure the game would use these audio files where I set that metadata.

ok super

i had actually tried doing this before releasing 18.3 and it hella didn't work.

good to know an extra script was needed

[Kunisada 16]

9 hours ago, TheTGU said:

Basically, when the music reaches a specified point, it jumps back to another specified point so that it can keep on running forever without any rough transistions when the end of the audio file would be reached.

Ah, I see. I'd like to try, then.

I'll fill the vote later after trying.
Thank you so much.