Designer Genes is Revived!

Hey! It’s been a little under a year since the last time I talked Creatures, hasn’t it?

In case you don’t know what I mean, I used to run a blog by the name of Designer Genes that was focused primarily on the Creatures Series. You can learn more about the games at Creatures.wiki.

Anyway, I’m writing this post to break the ice. I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing anymore with this whole blogging thing and just want to get my feet wet. Let’s get started!

By the way, I won’t be announcing a regular blogging schedule since I don’t know yet how my schedule will work out. I’ll keep you all posted.

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How odd that I’ve chosen to talk about the Death Music in Creatures Exodus for the blog’s revival! Still, it’s something that I’ve spent a lot of time with recently and I’d like to share what I’ve learned about the game with you. Specifically, I’m talking about that awful death and near death music. I won’t be getting to my solution til the end because I also wanted to talk about other ways to get around or change the problem so you could find something that works for you!

Special thanks to Jessica of Discover Albia and KittyTikara of Moblua Ray for ideas, files and information!

The first and perhaps most popular solution to address the Near Death music (the most depressing of the tracks in my opinion) is to simply change it to another one of the existing tracks. This worked for me for a little while but after changing the track to the Aquarium theme, I found myself hearing that theme an awful lot in one of my bigger wolfling runs.

The next option was to remove it from the MNG file or edit the MNG file to play a different song. I couldn’t get the latter version to work and was instead treated to silence in a room with a dying creature. Again, this was preferable to hearing the Death Music for me, but because I’m a bit picky, I looked for a way to tell the music not to play the near death track at all and just play the metaroom’s music instead.

Poking around in the “DS life event factory – PHOTOGRAPHS THE DEAD.cos” file lead me to find this section here:

* music
doif va00 = 3
strk 30 “ds_music.mng\\Bleep”
elif va00 = 7
strk 20 “ds_music.mng\\MetallicChords”
endi

All I had to do then was comment out the lines that would play the music. So I changed the above to this:

* music
doif va00 = 3
*strk 30 “ds_music.mng\\Bleep” DO NOT PLAY BIRTH MUSIC
elif va00 = 7
*strk 20 “ds_music.mng\\MetallicChords” DO NOT PLAY DEATH MUSIC
endi

And now the game doesn’t play the DS Death music anymore. This was great! I also removed the Birth music since I didn’t like that (a bonus for me, really), but I still had the problem of dealing with the near death music.

After exploring the above options to remove or change the Near Death music, it finally hit me that I could try to comment out the near death music from whatever script would call it. Unfortunately, I never found that line in the scripts. I was stumped.

After changing the near death music several times I finally got the idea to try not assigning it a variable in the first place!

At the top of “!DS_game variables.cos” there are the music variables. I commented out the line that chooses the near death music like so:

* track for near death
* sets game “engine_near_death_track_name” “ds_music.mng\\MetallicChords”

Since, I haven’t heard the near death music at all! The current metaroom’s music plays uninterrupted, and the death and birth music don’t play at all! Hooray! Just what I wanted for my game. 😀

I hope you’ve liked this first post in a while! Hopefully I’ll be coming up with more game tweaks, gameplay posts and more in the weeks to come. It’s good to be back, everyone!