Switching ambient music between factions?

[jez9999]

I ask this question more in hope than in expectation, but...

Does anyone know whether you can switch one faction's ambient music to another's? I quite like the Gaians' ambient music but I hate the Morganites' ambient music with a passion. However, overwriting fx/mset1.amb with fx/gset1.amb doesn't seem to have worked in giving me the Gaian ambient music when playing as the Morganites. I just get the odd drumbeat sound. I fear that it's gonna be basically impossible to do this, which is depressing because it means I'll have to play as the Gaians just to get ambient music that doesn't make me wanna kill myself..... but does anyone know how I might be able to do this? Even if it means hacking the SMAC .exe or something.

UPDATE: Looks like the need to hack the executable terran.exe to do this. I managed to. Check this post for the solution: http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...07#post5747867

[dgh64]

I usually just turn the game's music off and listen to iTunes. If you can get the sound file to play separately from the game, you could do that...

[GooglyBoogly]

A pretty dirty hack, But:
why not just change the Gaians faction file to have all the Morgan bonuses?

[dgh64]

Heh. Good idea. Why didn't I think of that?

[jez9999]

A pretty dirty hack, But:
why not just change the Gaians faction file to have all the Morgan bonuses?

Yeah, but it's just not the same though. I mean their bases would still looks like the Gaian's ones. Damnit, why couldn't they just make the ambient music in this game easier to change?

[Verrucosus]

Hello jez, if I may say so, your Meier/Reynolds contact post was an ill-mannered attention getter , but in my case it worked.

Here's a thought. The fx subfolder contains seven *.amb files. One could speculate that they contain the notes for the ambient music of the seven factions. Most of them start with a faction initial, but there are two files that start with "u" and none that starts with "h", so maybe I'm just way off. However, being desperate, you might want to try to move the mset1.amb file somewhere save, replace it with a renamed copy of the gset1.amb file and see what happens.

If it doesn't work and you end up writing to Mssrs Meier and Reynolds, you might want to mention that, should they ever decide to do something about SMAC2, they better avoid any Civ4Col type of nonsense if they don't want the drones with flameguns showing up on their doorstep.

[jez9999]

Tried it already, Verrucosus. Apparently the game actually uses the different ambient music files in different ways for the different factions, so just overwriting say the Morganites' ambient file with the Gaians' doesn't work. You just hear the off drumbeat when playing as the Morganites. It's fiendishly hard to do. :-\

I'm thinking more along the lines of whether there's somewhere the game is told 'this is the ambient music style for this faction', which includes which ambient music file to use as well as the way it's going to be used. That may well be hardcoded in the .exe, which would suck bigtime (seeing as jsut about everything else is customizable).

[Verrucosus]

Too bad. How about following GooglyBoogly's advice and swapping all the Gaian and Morgan pcx files in the main folder?

[dgh64]

OK here's what you do: plug your computer into a tape recorder. Start a game as the Gaians, and leave it running for a while until the tape is full. Then start a game as the Morganites or whatever, but turn the computer's sound off and listen to the tape instead. When you come to a movie or something you want to listen to, pause the tape and turn the computer's sound on.

[jez9999]

Oh. har har. You should get a job in stand-up.

[dgh64]

Seriously, I don't see the appeal of the in-game music. I'd much rather listen to Nickelback, or Evanescence, or Jimmi Hendrix...

[jez9999]

OK, well for anyone who's interested, I was so irritated with the ambient music thing that I've hacked SMAC always to play the Gaians' ambient music, no matter who you're playing as. Just overwrite terran.exe with this version, and it'll always play the Gaians' ambient music (the only music I consider non-terrible). It has to be overwriting v4.0 of terran.exe. It changes nothing else. The hacked version can be found here:
http://www.game-point.net/misc/terran.exe