Say hello to the future of music in Faith & Prayer Version!
If you’ve played Touhoumon Faith & Prayer Version, you’re probably more than well aware of the glaring issues with music and sound files - specifically, how they just don’t loop properly! Or you haven’t noticed because you play with sound off, in which case, that’s cool too! But if you have noticed, well have I got some good news for you. As of August 7th, 2015, Touhoumon Faith & Prayer Version now has the ability to properly loop specific audio files!
You see, RPG Maker XP is a rather old program, and while it does support looping audio files, it only supported it for very few types (.wav, .mp3, .midi). It also didn’t have native .ogg support until someone managed to make a script which allowed it. Faith & Prayer Version uses .ogg files primarily because of how small the file sizes are in comparison to .wav and .mp3, but unfortunately this meant that audio files couldn’t be looped - at all. It wasn’t until very recently that the sands have shifted.
Several months ago, a person by the name of Nuru Yuri on the Pokecommunity Forums developed and released a script which refurbishes the old fmod script plugin, which was 100% incompatible with Pokemon Essentials, to make it work with Pokemon Essentials and all fangames built in it. This script makes it so you have much more control over your audio files, but for the purposes of right now, it also made it so you can loop .ogg files.
Initially I was going to include his in Demo 6, but I couldn’t get it working before release. That’s what one of the leftover bugs was on Demo 6 initial release, an attempt at getting this to work. I decided to scrap it and try and make it a Demo 7 feature, giving myself much more time to work on it and get the audio files fixed up.
Now, the audio file you hear here is Dichromatic Lotus Butterfly ~ Ancients off of the Touhou Puppet Dance Performance OST. Specifically, this is the in-game version, as it was already in .ogg format. Being part of the translation team also allowed me to find that out, as well as the loop points required to make it loop properly in a game. The track itself is 4 minutes and 40 seconds long, so you can observe the looping in action at around that point in the video. The video also continues for another 4 minutes or so, to show off the song going double its length if you don’t believe it (The reason why I was battling so poorly was to show off the loop’s first cycle). I would like to state though, this track will not be in Faith & Prayer proper, it was just a filler track to test the looping function.
With this script applied to the game, be sure to expect more looped music files, from map overworld themes to battle music, to miscellaneous other tracks that may be included across the game. I’ll also try and touch up on the tracks audio quality since I have to manually go over every single audio file, potentially re-recording them all. Demo 7 might bring about a massive audio update. Stay tuned for more news. Derxwna, out!
