Modding the demo

[Brickulator]

I've been poking around the files in the LEGO Racers demo from one of the old demo CDs. Looking at the JAM it would appear that pretty much everything from the full game is in there apart from the tracks. All the character pieces are in there anyway. I managed to access them in the demo by simply copying my save file across from the full game. More tracks also appear to be unlocked when you do this, but they will crash the game if you try to play any other than Imperial Grand Prix because, as I said, all the other tracks have been removed from the JAM. I'm not sure how useful this would be to anyone but it's kind of interesting right?

 

If you have played the demo, you'll know that LEGO Media logo, High Voltage logo, and the intro are all rendered in-game instead of being the FMVs used in the full game. As such, they each have their own folder in the JAM and can be modded. After a simple bit of texture swapping I made this:

The game didn't like the different coloured arms and I didn't do anything to the hat, but I'm sure it's possible to swap it for something else. Strangely, by changing the face/torso/leg textures, the hat was recoloured white instead of blue. I don't know if the textures work differently for this cutscene, maybe the hat texture is joined to the torso or something? I don't know how to convert the textures into something viewable so I don't know.

Another thing about the HVS scene is that the SFX and music seem to be separate PCM files so I assume it's possible to isolate the music, in case anyone wants to add that to a soundtrack collection they have going. of course it might just be as easy as swapping the tun files but I haven't tried that, and the tun for the intro video also contains a lot of sound effects so I don't know. I'll investigate.

[RobExplorien]

His head is huge for his body proportions! (or that has always been the case with the demo?)

[Brickulator]

Yeah, the proportions of that model have always been weird. I don't know why because all the other minifig models look fine.

Anyway, I was right about separating the music and sound effects from the HVS logo. Turns out the tun file was just a copy of win.tun so it's not even used. Here's the separated audio:

Music

Sound effects

[le717]

I knew something was different between your modded one and the music/SFX only, but it took me a second to catch the latter was the normal AVI.

 

I've known the Demo intro were rendered on-the-spot, even did a video with me modding it once (I'll try to find it).

 

What are the TUN file names for the audio and SFX, and how did you convert them so clearly? (Or did you do a reversed-overlay to remove just the SFX/music?)

 

 

His head is huge for his body proportions! (or that has always been the case with the demo?)

 

Always has been. Like I said, I'll find that video.

 

EDIT: Found the video:

 

[Brickulator]

What are the TUN file names for the audio and SFX, and how did you convert them so clearly? (Or did you do a reversed-overlay to remove just the SFX/music?)

The music is HVSINTRO.PCM in the MENUDATA/HVSINTRO folder. The other PCMs in that folder are the SFX, you should be able to easily work out what they are from their names. I didn't convert anything, just recorded stereo mix.

To get just the sound effects to play, at first I tried deleting the music file or replacing it with an empty file, but the game didn't like that and crashed both times. So I just replaced it with one of the "zap" PCMs and it worked. I edited the zap out of the recording later.

To get just the music, I replaced the "mix" sound, as in the character randomizer, with HVSINTRO.PCM. Then went into the game and selected "mix" on a new racer to play the sound. You could swap it for any sound, I just chose that one because it was easy to activate in game without any other sounds, and wouldn't be annoying like if I'd used a more common menu sound.