» Sat Dec 20, 2008 10:31 am
I just got done updating the wiki's songs and radio stations pages, and I used the GECK to actually check what tracks are set to play on various stations and in different areas of the game.
There's really only one bug, in that someone accidentally linked Big Iron into the Radio New Vegas playlist twice. Based on the link title, the second one was supposed to be Stars of the Midnight Range.
Radio New Vegas has 19 tracks, which are played in random order, with code that is intended to guarantee that once a song is played, it can't be replayed until three different tracks are played. Unfortunately, because of the bug with Stars of the Midnight Range being linked to Big Iron's MP3 file, it can end up playing Big Iron more often, even twice in a row. Also, there is some complicated code to guarantee that when Mr. New Vegas introduces a specific song, like, "Here's B-B-B-Bing Crosby..." then the correct song plays. So the songs that have a specific intro may play more often; it's unclear to me at this point.
Mojave Music Radio and Black Mountain Radio are simpler. They have the same playlist of 15 songs. Black Mountain Radio just alternates songs with talk segments with Rhonda and Tabitha.
Interesting tidbit: all the instrumental tracks on Mojave Music Radio/Black Mountain Radio are by British twangy guitar sensation Bert Weedon. And all the instrumental tracks on Radio New Vegas were composed by unsung German TV composer Gerhard Trede, who composed the popular "Fox Boogie" and "Jolly Times" tracks used on Galaxy News Radio in Fallout 3.
The radio stations have four songs in common: Big Iron, Heartaches By The Number, It's A Sin To Tell A LIe, and Johnny Guitar.
Stars of the Midnight Range was also supposed to be common, but isn't right now. Maybe the patch will fix it.
A lot of the feeling that you only hear four songs is just that if you play the game for, say, 2 hours (which as we all know isn't very long) and listen to the same radio station the entire time, you're guaranteed to hear the same songs several times. And some of the songs are really distinctive, like Johnny Guitar, so when you hear it again, you think, "Hey, I just heard that song. Stupid radio," when it might have been 45 minutes. Of course, with a minimum of three songs in between, and most of the songs about 3 minutes, a song can repeat after as little as 9 minutes. Usually, it will take more like 30 minutes for a song to repeat on average.
So radio stations account for 34 tracks (19 + 15 - 4 because of the 4 in common). The rest of the tracks are used by performers in the Aces theater, the classical music that plays in the Ultra-Luxe, the jazz music playing in Gomorrah, and the music when the rockets launch from Repconn. The Tops plays a subset of the Radio New Vegas tracks (the ones with the most "Vegas lounge" feel). That's it.
Wiki links:
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Radio_New_Vegas
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Mojave_Music_Radio
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Ultra-Luxe#Music
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Gomorrah#Music
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/The_Tops#Music
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Fallout:_New_Vegas_soundtrack
Don