Cluster

Features

Supported Audio Formats

Cluster supports most commonly used audio formats including WAV/MP3/WMA/MIDI/OGG/FLAC, the Tracker formats XM/S3M/MOD/IT as well as the PSX2 ADPCM format.

In general there is no separation in support for these formats between either of Sound, Music or CD emulation, except that PSX2 ADPCM support is not available for CD emulation.

Recommended Audio Formats

Outside the use of tracker formats, I recommend using the MP3 file format as it's efficiently supported inside FMOD.

PSX2 ADPCM Notes

The PSX2 Sounds and on disk music files to not contain an identification header in the file data itsself, so Cluster identifies them based on the FileType stored on both "Sound" and "Music" (which is based on the file extension on import).

Sound objects in the PSX2 version were converted with the PS2ConvertCommandlet, which alongside convertion, added a small header and set the FileType to PS2. In case you reimport these files, make sure they still have PS2 as file extension. I recommend using tools which use the stored FileType as extension for the exported file (e.g. fullbatchexport commandlet).

The music for the PSX2 games was stored directly on disk with VGM (Unreal Tournament and Rune) or 000-006 (Deus Ex) file extension. These files do not contain a header and are always encoded in a fixed format. You can import these files as is, and they will be identified by FileType VGM or 000-007. These files are not interchangeable with the FileType PS2 Sound objects above.

CD Music Emulation

Games such as Klingon Honor Guard or X-Com: Enforcer shipped used CD music. Cluster emulates this feature by reading the individual music tracks from files within the game directory.

The individual tracks must be placed directly inside the Music directory and named Track<Number>.<Extension>, where <Number> is the at least two digit track number and <Extension> is any of the following file extensions: wav, mp3, wma, asf, ogg or flac. For example "KHG/Music/Track04.mp3".

The UseCDMusic option needs to be enabled.

Configuration

SoundVolume

Volume of sounds played except music. Some games will have additional options for parts of the sounds played, e.g. Deus Ex has a separate setting for voice over.

SpeechVolume (Deus Ex)

Volume of the voice over played in Deus Ex.

MusicVolume

Volume of music.

UseDigitalMusic

A slightly oversimplified explanation of this option would be "music which comes from umx files".

UseCDMusic

Enables CD music emulation.

CDMusicVolumeFactor

Correction factor intended to deal with a potential missmatch between volume in CD and Digital music in case both are used.

UseFrenchLipsync (Deus Ex)

Uses a different lipsynch implementation. The term french is used as in "french rifling", not in relation to a particular language.

EffectsChannels

Upper limit of concurrently playing sounds. Higher values tend to just oversaturate the output. The sweetspot is probably around 8-12, the highest useful value is probably around 16. Sadly stock Unreal Engine lacks proper a priority system...

UsePatches

Injects patches to modify or fix broadly audio related functionality in parts of the Engine outside of Cluster. You may or may not need to disable this to comply with anti cheat mods or software when playing online.

How to obtain

Standalone builds of Cluster can be obtained on it's website.

Known issues

• FMOD will not reset S3M state such as volume on loop, and will break for S3M files relying on this non standard behaviour.

Frequently asked questions

TBD.