As I mentioned in my last post, I decided to try to alter the ending credits of Ultima IX so that they sport a more traditionnal musical instead of that terrible Electro track that butchers both Stones and the mood of the ending.
I am pleased to share the result:
I’ve used the Ultima IX rendition of Stones (taken from the same MP3 that was then offered on the Ultima IX website) and I basically extracted the original audio track of the video, cut the credits part and pasted this version in before reencoding the whole thing.
The downside is that the track comes a tad short, thus ending while the THX credits appears on screen. I’ve tried to make the opening of the track loop to make it a bit longer, but the result was not satisfactory. On the whole it works since it stops almost as it should – but if anyone feels he can do a better work, feel free to do so!
The good thing however is that I can confirm this works IN GAME by simply replacing the old video by the new one and the tone really fit the feeling of the ending. Hopefully fans will enjoy that!
In addition I also made another version, this time based on the Ultima Online 2 Stones MP3 – which was also a beautiful rendering by George Oldziey.
It’s certainly better than Electro track… but it just doesn’t feel quite as well as the other version IMO, probably because it wasn’t meant to be used in Ultima IX, while Oldziey’s Ultima IX remix was done to fit stylistically with the rest of the music.
So I hope you guys like it – and for those who’d like to try this in game Aiera will we hosting the MPEG fils of both version very soon (probably in a couple of days) and the Forgotten Worlds team has already expressed interest in integrating this altered video into their upcoming patches.
Neat heh?
I know already I’ll be replaying Ultima IX a couple of years when Forgotten Worlds will have released more fixes!
