<aside> 🚨 This tutorial assumes that you already have a music file which is in a Zandronum supported music format and looped properly, if your track requires looping.
</aside>
Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch has support for the creation of addon music packs. These music packs can both add additional tracks which can be called upon by the changemus console command or they can even replace existing tracks with covers of the same track or entirely new tracks. This page will cover both use cases.
<aside> 💡 Required Materials:
For the sake of starting fresh, we’re gonna start this tutorial by just creating a new PK3 archive in SLADE. We can do this by opening SLADE and clicking on the buttons shown to the right.
Starting to create a new archive.
Once you’ve clicked that Archive button, it’ll prompt you for which type of archive to create. You’ll want to create a Zip Archive. With our new archive, let’s go ahead the music folder which we’ll need for our music.
This folder must be named like this for the music to be recognized proper!
Now that we’ve made some changes to our archive, we can go ahead and save it by using the save button in the upper left, or its shortcut hotkey, CTRL + S. Be very cognizant when saving this archive, because we want to save it as a PK3 file, not a standard ZIP file! The screenshot below shows me saving the file with the name v6b-Thielcore-v1a and a file extension of .pk3 so that we create a PK3 file.
Don’t forget this step!
Now that we have a PK3, we can begin adding our music into it. As you may have been able to guess from the chosen file name, we’ll first add one of RRThiel’s tracks then later add a RRThiel inspired cover of Stone Man by MarkTherence to replace the base game’s Stone Man track.
A simple way to add files into the PK3 via SLADE is to first click the folder where you want files to end up in, then to click the Import Files button. This will bring up a file browser where you can select all of the files to import. Select all the files in there, then click the Open button to bring them into SLADE.
<aside> 🚨 The filenames for all music tracks should only be 8 characters or less (not including the file extension itself). If it is longer, it will cause insidious errors which may be difficult to track down and correct!
</aside>
A classic RRThiel track.
You’ll then be able to verify that it was put into the desired location and if the music format allows for it, you can even preview the music.
