Blood – Dynamic Music Pack
All of my Music Modding System packs are compatible with both Vanilla and WotC
This is an MMS music pack created from the CD soundtrack to Monolith’s cult classic Blood. It’s a dark, gothic collection, full of menace and unsettling chords. It makes you aware of the near impossible odds faced by XCOM and the doom which is so near at hand.
I encourage using this pack on its own in order to enjoy an altered tone. Ensure that mix-in-indifferent is turned off, there are a few custom mission cues set which really enhance the mood. Every composition from the official soundtrack is here except for Dark Carnival which didn’t really fit. That’s only eight tracks, but such a number is misleading. Most of the songs are actually a collection of thematically related parts which fade into each other over 4 to 7 minutes. Each piece has been chopped up into its component parts and is reassembled dynamically in-game as you play.
This was a huge amount of work. Much of the soundtrack’s dynamic range required altering in order for it to fit into XCOM’s more busy soundscape. More substantially, the separation and reintegration of track components required pushing the sound cue system to its limits. Crossfades, randomized intro times, custom transitions; each of these things required a new and often ludicrously complex solution to what would usually involve a few lines of code. If you’ve ever played TIS-100, it was like that but with a ban on recursion and no conditional statements. I had to build a clock in the cue editor.
My thanks to composers Daniel Bernstein and Mike Cody for the great soundtrack. The same to 3D Realms and Monolith for such an excellent game. Lastly, to Chris Vile who made the Blood Lust font that I used as a basis for the new text in the icon.
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Technical Information
28 loops + 3 singles + 8 intros + 8 transitions + 6 stings
~305 MB
Sample rate dropped to 22 KHz on files with minimal frequency information above 11 KHz
Volume normalized through compression, EQ and sound cue volume
Authored using vanilla tools for maximum compatibility
