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AVI and Music


PeabodySam
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Alright, so here I am. I finally joined Rock Raiders United. Might as well make use of some of my options here while I'm around.

Anyways, to make a long story short, I recently got Windows 7. Not much of a gaming computer, but it'll do. I downloaded Steam and, with it, my Orange Box collection and Portal 2. They work magnificently on my new computer (with the exception of the "Water Hazard", "Highway 17", and "Sandtraps" chapters of Half-Life 2, which cause the game to crash to the desktop every ten minutes or so).

But while Valve games are all fine and dandy, I found himself feeling... what's the word I'm looking for... it's kind of like homesickness, but referring to nostalgia, not home... nostalgiasickness? More specifically, I was listening to some "System of a Down" songs (don't ask me why [i actually know the answer, but it's a long story], but for some reason, that band makes me think of Rock Raiders) and realized how badly I wanted to play Rock Raiders again. I'm kind of busy these days, but on weekends, I have enough time to kick back and relax a little, and what better way to spend my weekends than to command miners on Planet U?

Some of my BZPower friends might remember my "Rock Raiders Vista Log", where I detailed my gameplay experiences on Windows Vista. After getting the Orange Box, my Rock Raiders activity came to a sudden halt, and the next time I played the game, I left off with a Mission Failure during "Lake of Fire" and hadn't played it since. But now that I've finished playing the Half-Life and Portal series, LEGO Universe is closed, and Dino Attack RPG is about to come to an end, I'm ready to finish what I had started. So, I picked up my old Rock Raiders CD that I had purchased over eight years ago, transferred my save file and the d3drm.dll file into a memory stick, and installed Rock Raiders on my Windows 7.

Once d3drm.dll was transferred over, the game worked. And boy, was I overflowing with nostalgia as I played Rock Raiders again. I only just transferred over my old save file tonight, and it appears to have worked, but I haven't played any levels on the file yet; I've been busy testing to see how long the game can go without crashing to the desktop. During these tests, I took note of a few minor problems:

  • When the level starts, the CD drive is very loud. After a minute or so, it will fall silent, and the game will freeze for a few terrifying seconds before thankfully resuming normally.
  • For the most part, first-person view works fine. However, occasionally, everything in the world will disappear leaving only just a blue backdrop, which can thankfully be rectified by switching back into third-person view.
  • Jet's sound byte "An Energy Crystal has been found!" does not always play when the message pops up; it only plays sometimes. This might just be a minor detail that I've forgotten about, but I seem to recall that the sound byte always played with the message on Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Okay, minor problems, but one of them goes away on its own, one of them is easily rectifiable, and one of them is more of a nitpick than anything else. "No biggy", as some might say. However, there are two major problems with Rock Raiders' performance on Windows 7... one of which dates back to the Vista, and the other dates back all the way back to the XP. I hope you guys who are more tech-savvy than I am can help me out:

  • None of the .AVI intro movies will play. This is a problem that I first found on the Windows Vista. Supposedly, there is a file or something that I can download to fix this problem, but I'm not willing to dig through a number of topics in search of this answer. I'm much too lazy busy for that. So, if anyone can offer a solution, I'm all ears. Or eyes, in this case, since I can't hear what you're saying.
  • Aside from the main menu and the results screen, there is no in-game music. This problem dates back to the Windows XP, and it's a problem I've had ever since I purchased the game. Supposedly, there are three music tracks that play in-game, and they can all be found on the Rock Raiders CD and played in Windows Media Player. I have never heard these three tracks in-game (the only place I've heard them is on... YouTube! Wow! It's so amazing being able to say "YouTube" instead of "#####"!), and when I open the Rock Raiders CD in Windows Media Player, nothing happens. I am led to believe that my CD is part of a batch (since I have heard one or two other people who have this problem) that does not have the music files on the CD. If there is a patch or something I can download, or even if someone could be so kind as to upload .mp3 (or .wav, or whatever format you please) files of the music tracks for download, I'd be most obliged.

Since I'm new here and I don't know what I'm doing blah blah blah, if this topic is in the wrong subforum (dang, there's so many subforums devoted to Rock Raiders, but what do you expect on a webstie called Rock Raiders United?), hit my hand with a ruler, tell me I'm wrong, and please correct my error-filled ways.

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Welcome to the forum.

You've got the right place for this thread.

The minor issues are situational - every installation is different. You're going to run into quirks and oddities like that. My installation won't let me use first person at all, and my game seems immune to idleness syndrome.

As for the odd CD rev-up, you may want to check the disc for smudges and scratches. If proper disc maintenance won't help, you may want to get a different drive as the sound is due to the disc drive's speed.

The issue with the movies and music, on the other hand, is one we've had more questions for than answers. There is a codec available, but if the music isn't loading even loading in a media player then there may be another issue. Download and install Foobar2000, Winamp or another audio player and see if those detect the CD music tracks. If they don't then it's an issue with the disc, but if they do then it's probably a per-installation issue like most of the ones mentioned above.

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It is most excellent that you have joined this little site of ours. Welcome.

None of the .AVI intro movies will play. This is a problem that I first found on the Windows Vista.

The easiest way to fix this is to run the program in compatibility mode for Windows 98. This will most likely make them play properly. If you're looking to fix this problem further outside of Rock Raiders, you will need a codec, but I forgot what.

Aside from the main menu and the results screen, there is no in-game music. This problem dates back to the Windows XP, and it's a problem I've had ever since I purchased the game. Supposedly, there are three music tracks that play in-game, and they can all be found on the Rock Raiders CD and played in Windows Media Player. I have never heard these three tracks in-game

There were indeed some copies released without the music. My old (broken) disc did not have them, but my new one does. Fortunately, you can still play audio CDs of any type, and if you mod a line in the .CFG file you can play any amount of tracks.

MP3 files of the music can be downloaded here. If you're looking for CD quality I can try to send you something if I'm ever able to.

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Welcome to the forum.

Try installing the AVI codec which LRR uses. You can find the link to it in this topic: http://www.rockraide...sked-questions/

For the music issue, the game requires WINMM.dll (MCI API) and DSOUND.dll (DirectSound). You can make sure your computer has them by searching in the Windows directory. If you don't have them do a Google search. While you did mention the music plays in WMP, do note that some later re-releases of LRR did not have the audio track (only the data track) added to the disc when it was mastered, an oversight by the publishers.

I hope this helps you.

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  • 2 years later...

Since this topic hasn't technically been confirmed as resolved yet, this was how I was able to solve my AVI and menu ambiance+mission report music.

 

I extracted both WAD files and merged them with the Data folder in my Rock Raiders installation and therefore all the required files needed to play the game were in my computer already and thus the disc was not required.

 

Since I have personally tried all means to get the AVI's working (eg. register the Indeo 5 codec via command prompt in administrator mode, running in compatibility mode, manually editing registry to incorporate the ir50_32.dll into the system) with no luck, I managed to install the game on an computer with windows XP to see if the AVI's would play on an older-than-current but newer-than-game system. I personally have Windows 7 64-bit and seeing as my system would not play AVI's due to the codec not working, I decided to convert the AVI's from the Indeo 5 codec to a playable/modern AVI file type on the XP system(DivX codec + mp3 sound codec) 

 

I placed these newly converted files into the Rock Raiders/Data/AVI folder in my Windows 7 computer. I made sure the names of the files matched the ones that it replaced and lo-and-behold, all the AVI's worked flawlessly.  (Note that there are two other video files in the AVI folder named "Imi640.avi" and "loop.avi". These files worked since the beginning even on Windows 7 so I did not need to convert them)

 

Another thing I noticed is that the menu ambiance sound file (Atmosdel.wav) as well as the status report music (stats.wav) after you've completed the mission was not working for me as well. I did the same conversion (wav file to wav file, placed them into the same folder as they were before "Rock Raiders/Data/Sound/Streamed") and they worked as well.

 

Till this day, I still have no idea why the old menu music and mission report wav-file was not playing on my system compared to the other wav-files (the Lego transport truck sound, raider eating his sandwich while in the main menu). 

 

I still don't have the music unless I use Cafeteria game launcher or use Oboe Shoes Music Fix Tutorial over in the Modding Tutorials section which I still have not tried yet because it requires a physical disc to be in my CD-drive.

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Since this topic hasn't technically been confirmed as resolved yet, this was how I was able to solve my AVI and menu ambiance+mission report music.

...

 

 

Yep it's all about the codec's. I used to have a link to the one they use, but I think the link on Intel's site was removed. With the disk, you only need to copy over those missing AVI files into your data folder, you don't actually need to extract the WAD's before those videos will play.

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The videos didn't work for me either on my Win7 32-bit but I didn't have to convert the old AVIs to work on the newer computer. I only had to run LRR in compatibility mode and that's it. Otherwise I'm not sure whether the reason for this easy fix is the re-release of the LRR I own or whether it is the 32-bit OS...

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