@Saladin Yes, that is wise. Check my guides, you will find info on how to make both MMS and Wwise Mms packs. There are also people in the XCOM 2 modding discord who can help you.

I'll take a look, but I think to start with I should focus on making the music pack. Then go from there.

@Saladin I think RoboJumper is at least a little bit active in modding still, but I don't think he has any interest in touching MMS.

IIRC Wwise Mms has some knobs and dials that you can tweak to increase or decrease the frequency (but it's been a long time, so don't hold me to that).

Your best bet is to make either an MMS or Wwise Mms pack. A Wwise Mms pack would be more work but better quality. It MIGHT be possible to use the built-in events to trigger the music without creating a separate pack, but the only way to know if that will work is to try (since it depends on how their project was set up).

If you want to contribute to Wwise Mms itself, the code is here https://codeberg.org/nintendoeats/WwiseMms . I'd be pretty happy to hand the whole thing off to somebody else at this point.

@nintendoeats Thanks for your answer. If that's the case, I'd be interested in trying to do it myself. I'd also really like a version of MMS with a list of songs that you can set the frequency of in MCM.

Do you think I should contact the original MMS creator to discuss it, or should I just rip the vanilla songs and follow along with the regular MMS guide? I was curious how difficult a project like that might be. I have a background in programming but no XCOM 2 SDK or Unreal experience.

@Saladin While MMS does come with a non-Wwise-Mms version of the OG XCOM2 soundtrack (which works with Wwise Mms), anything beyond that would require creating a new music pack with the required tracks. There has been some discussion about how we could potentially enable the tracks within the game, but it may not work and I'm no longer active in XCOM modding so it's not something I will be investigating further.

Hello, I have a quick question about this mod or MMS.

Is there an easy way to play the game's original soundtrack alongside the new soundtracks? In particular I miss hearing the tactical legacy and Shen tracks as offered by the Greater Music Variety mod. And every now and then I'd like to hear a Chosen track.

I'm having the same issue as TheWizardEverywhereSystem, without LWOTC, where loading a tactical save causes the music to vanish until you return back to the Avenger. This happens consistently, in every case that situation has come up; is there any fix for this? Otherwise, the mod works wonderfully ^^

If there is an MMS mod, it will load in Wwise Mms no problem but will not have any of the benefits of Wwise Mms (aside from a few behaviour fixes for WotC). In order to make a true Wwise Mms mod you need to create soundbank files using the Wwise authoring tools.

is it possible to add a music mod to this through only configs? The mods already have the music files and stuff ready...

Hmm, yeah that's a bit of a tricky one then. For what it's worth I had a bit of a mess around with WWise last night and was able, using your (excellent) guide to get a random track of my choosing playing properly & looping on the shell screen which I suppose is a good start. I think I could probably expand on that to create a more-or-less functional music pack if I wanted to, which is great :) I think creating a WWise pack containing all of the base game music would be a bit of a headache...and a slightly weird thing to do - Surely there must be a way to reference the existing base-game files, rather than having to re-ship all the assets in a new base-game soundbank. As a side-point, I guess creating a mod which uses MCM to toggle the specific tracks on and off would be pretty handy but I think we'd need more of an ecosystem around WWise MMS with a bunch of packs being created to justify the effort of making MCM work. Still, thanks for all your help :)

Soundtrack toggling:
The recommended way to do this is to enable and disable music packs outside the game using AML. If you want to disable a specific track, you need to comment it out in the mod's config files.

It would be possible to create a menu in-game for enabling and disabling specific tracks (with some pack-specific caveats), but not for enabling and disabling whole packs. If somebody else wanted to do that I would provide support, but for me this project is now in maintenance mode.

Including the OG music:
As I recall, including the OG soundtrack in the mix is a feature provided through base MMS and can be toggled if you have the Mod Config Menu installed. However, the way the OG music is included is via an internal MMS pack, which doesn't include WotC music and has the same disadvantages as a normal MMS pack. The whole arrangement is rather unfortunate, and is basically a legacy situation.

The best solution if you wanted the OG music would actually be to create a Wwise Mms pack with that music. I remember discussing the idea of actually supporting the built-in music files, and I concluded that it might be possible but would require a lot of experimentation and some luck.

By default, in the scenario described, the track you get at the menu will be randomly selected from any of the MMS or Wwise Mms packs that are installed and enabled (and optionally the OG soundtrack).

@BlackDog Hi, I'm glad you are enjoying the mod! Some of what I'm about to say is from rather old memories, so take it with a grain of salt.

Hi There, I have a few questions with the behaviour of the mod. Firstly, I'm fine with the install/setup of the music packs & the ones that have been created sound great. My question is whether the WWise packs replace the base-game music altogether, or if the track selections are mixed together (e.g. if I install 3 wwise packs, will the menu music just be the latest installed wwise pack, a mixture of all 3 installed wwise packs or a mixture of all 3 wwise packs + base game soundtracks). I was also wondering whether it'd be possible in some way to allow a particular soundtrack to be selected from the audio menu in the game, so you can limit the tracks selected to a single wwise pack that you have installed. Maybe that would have to be implemented in the music mods themselves, I was just curious :)

@nintendoeats Don't worry, I'm using the normal music mod thing. Thank you.

@Grel Shoutmon First question, have you also installed the Wwise Audio banks for the music pack you are trying to use?

Also the combat music is not playing. I am still hearing explorer music...in combat.

I'm hearing vanilla music in the "skyranger loading screen" when I shouldn't be at all. I should be hearing the music mod pack I downloaded, right?

Not sure if this is a LWOTC related issue, but when reloading a save during a combat encounter it causes all music tracks to stop playing until you load back into the avenger/geoscape.

Oh, now I see it actually said that in your guide. Thanks very much!

@Djackdau If you install the launcher, you have the option to install previous versions. I just confirmed, they still provide the option to install 2016.1.6

The only Wwise versions I can find at Audiokinetic are from 2014, 2015, and the latest which is 2021

@nintendoeats, so that means that I can now use this to create the soundtrack mod I dreamed of when you first released it? Time to delve deep! :D

@Djackdau The version of Wwise required for WotC has been available for a while from Audiokinetic. Wwise Mms itself is %100 compatible with WotC (actually, it fixes an WotC-related bug from MMS as well)

Just checking in to make sure this is still only compatible with vanilla.

TY for the answer!

This is probably a matter of statistics.

Once a fully specified Wwise Mms pack starts playing, it will keep going for quite a long time (IIRC the default is 7 minutes), because the transitions and everything are part of the pack. In contrast, MMS packs are designed so that they always change when you enter a different game state. This means that once a Wwise Mms pack is randomly selected, you will be using it for some time to the exclusion of anything else.

The only possible solution to this would be adding and
option for Wwise Mms to have a random chance to change music definitions on state change, regardless of how long it had been running. Maybe I should have done this, I will bear it in mind for the future.

@nintendoeats

on mission prep, strategy layer, and maybe some other places, i ONLY get your SS2 tracks. never mixed in with the other music packs i have.

Ah, ok, I understand. I thought you were trying to take a load off the main thread for use with a low-power CPU. I was recently playing STALKER, which has serious single-thread performance issues, so I guess that's where my head was.

In that case, I think you have answered your own question and I am in agreement with the answer.

I thnk you misunderstand me: I'm not referring to "performance" per se, merely audio stuttering. The basegame's music - and, as I recently verified with your System Shock music pack - runs smoothly regardless of what's happening in-game. When I use a pack with the Music Modding System alone, however, the music will cut out and stutter anytime the thread is under load, which is extremely jarring and ultimately a dealbreaker for me. The effect is most obvious when loading things like the Character Pool or a large list of modded cosmetics.

I hope that makes it clear why I'm interested in this extension. The additional functionality is great, and I hope to make use of some of the extra events as I learn my hopelessly noobish ways around the SDK, but mostly I just want a smooth music modding solution, you know?

All that being said, there is no way to "convert" an existing music pack to a Wwise Mms pack. The audio files can be extracted using the SDK and the config files can serve as a basis for writing your definitions, but ultimately you would just be getting the source files for use with a Wwise Mms pack. If I could do something about this I would, but you need to actually generate Wwise SoundBanks and link them to objects in the mod UPK files. It's not as though you can toggle a switch and say "play this file using Wwise instead of Unreal".

On the other hand, Wwise Mms, MMS, and the base game all trigger changes using the main thread. This is how it has to work, since the code written in UnrealScript cannot be multithreaded. In this respect, the audio system that performs the most game-state checks and does the most decision making will be the most demanding on the main thread. Wwise Mms makes significantly more checks than MMS (in order to enable a lot of custom music options), which in turn makes more checks than the base music system. I doubt that even Wwise Mms has a significant performance impact over the others as far as the in-game logic goes, because in the end it mostly just does simple things like compare values and run timers.

@DigThat

AFAIK, the answer depends on what exactly you mean:

MMS uses the built in Unreal 3 sound engine, and I believe that means audio processing and mixing is handled by the main thread (I'm not sure if Unreal 3 spins in-engine audio onto its own thread by default, or if that is something that the developers have to implement deliberately). Wwise Mms packs and the base game music are played using the Wwise audio engine, which is a black box that runs alongside the game and is therefore on its own thread by definition.

Hey nintendoeats. I don't want to bother you, but I'm a layman and I think your mod might be the only chance I have to get the effect I want. Let me explain.

I've been told that the MMS runs its changes on the "main thread" of XCOM 2, while the basegame's music (and packs created for this mod) run on a separate WWise thread. Among other things, I think the greatest benefit of this extension's approach is that it eliminates stutter when the main thread is under load, such as loading screens, cosmetic lists, etc.

I understand that modifying existing music packs to run on this mod's WWise thread would not be an easy task - but could it be possible? And could it be possible to do so without the SDK installed?

Or would it be easier to just create my own music pack from scratch? Haha.

Great, now I just need a complete immersive Star Wars music mod

Just for the record, I talked to Astral Descend elsewhere. TLP doesn't help any, but I have posted in r/datahoarder

It might be a nice idea to try and revisit the idea with the new TLP soundtrack choice option. For finding old software (especially free) i highly recommend r/datahoarder - i saw those guys pull out some serious stuff

@Djackau: The authoring tools are free, 2016.1.6 simply isn't available. Audiokinetic is loathe to provide versions of their tools more than a couple years old. It's basically luck that there was a version available which could create sound banks compatible with vanilla. Even that version is no longer up on their site; I'm having to host my own program install folder for use with the guide.

Is it a question of cash cost, regarding the authoring tools?

@Djackau: I cannot say with 100% certainty without testing it, but I strongly believe that it would take a copy of the Wwise 2016.1.6 authoring tools. I don't expect to ever get those at this point. On the plus side, it may be possible to port Wwise Mms over to whatever the next XCOM thing is.

What would it take to make this WOTC compatible? I love the idea of it.

@Djackau:

Yup. Wwise Mms and and MMS packs can be installed and used in the same play session. There are systems in place to make sure that both kinds of tracks will get play time.

This feature is THE reason why I extended MMS rather than creating a standalone system.

Does this work with the separate music mods released for the old system?

I know. I KNOW. I know...

On the plus side, Audio Kinetic provides a large selection of more recent versions, so I'm hoping that Wwise Mms and its packs can be updated to whatever the next XCom thing is.

Oh man though, it is totally cool to create custom transitions and do odd things based on game parameters. I find it very satisfying.

Oh, hey, this sounds like exactly what I've been looking for! I've been meaning to put together some custom music packs that would include more complex behaviour than what's supported in the base Music Modding System. Only thing is the lack of WOTC support...