I would also like to improve the PC version's music, the tracks are heavily compressed mono WAVs which was for keeping the installation size small on the tiny hard drives of 1997.
The editor XWE which was mostly used for Doom WAD editing had some limited functionality for MDK built in. I can't post links here yet, but if you Google "xwe web archive" the first Doomworld link has a web.archive.org link. It needs to be run in compatibility mode for Windows XP.
Data for MDK is in the FALL3D (freefall sections) STREAM (energy stream sections) and TRAVERSE (minecrawler levels) folders.
The level order for the minecrawlers is:
1: LEVEL7
2: LEVEL6
3: LEVEL3
4: LEVEL4
5: LEVEL8
6: LEVEL5
DTI files are the sky backgrounds.
MTO files are presumably wall textures but XWE can't read them.
MTI files are the textures for the models. Most can be viewed but the palettes are usually messed up.
SNI files are the sound files, there are two for each level: one for sound effects, and one for music tracks and ambience. Opening the music file for level 1, TRACK11 is the first music track you hear upon landing on the minecrawler. This matches to track 13 "Gunter planet" from the soundtrack as downloaded from GOG. If I convert it into a .wav it is 31MB, much bigger than the 492kb for the track as it is found compressed in MDK's resources.
Unfortunately, XWE never had the functionality written to replace MDK's resources. They can be deleted, extracted and duplicated but not replaced, as the option is greyed out (see attachment)
XWE was abandoned in 2009 but the source code is on Github, Google "xwe_source github"
Hopefully one day someone will finish off the MDK editing code and we'll be able to mod better quality music into the game!
Post edited August 03, 2021 by Raztan
