// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Creating the Aetheryte Radio
sometimes when i work i like to listen to ambiance. one video in
particular is the "aetheryte asmr", which is an in game recording of
the aetheryte crystal. for the past 6 years i've been listening to
the same youtube video on repeat. there are a number of problems with
this approach:
none of these were deal breakers for me. 6 years is a pretty long time
to go facing some struggles before sitting down and deciding to tackle
a problem.
nevertheless, one day i finally sat down and thought to myself.. "how
can i get the best experience for the ambience without sacrifice?"
the first answer is that i needed to get the game assets. whatever the
game was using to play the noise, i needed to extract. with those in hand,
i could recreate or play with them in whichever way i wanted.
ffxiv isn't a super well protected game (at least i don't think.) if
you web search "ffxiv data explorer" there are old java apps that load
up the asset packages from the games install directory and let you
export (presumably) compressed assets. i don't remember which fork i
used, but i do know that it came with a hash table that mapped the
file to an english file name.
you're going to laugh at me (and honestly that's ok.) i spent 4 hours
coming through 4000 audio assets trying to find the audio assets. i
literally ctrl+a'd all 4000 .wav files and pressed the left and right
arrow keys to move back and forth within the large mpv playlist,
looking for the aetheryte noise. the funny part is that i didn't find
them, and had to go to sleep at 3am.
i'm an engineer though, right? work smarter, not harder (why didn't i
do this before doing the tedious work? idk.) was there any better
way to get the sound? did i miss it during my 3am comb over? (hint. i
did.) turns out, there is! ffxiv has an extensive modding community
and platform, and while i don't play the game much anymore, it was
exhilarating to see how much effort people put into customizing their
experience.
if you boot ffxiv using xivlauncher (endorsed by my roommate who has
180 days of play time) you can load up plugins. one plugin of interest was
soundfilter. i know the name is a bit misleading, but it has the
ability to display the names of now playing assets. this helped a
ton because i was able to teleport to a new area in the game (the
aetherytes are basically waypoint / teleport crystals) and figure out
which sound was being played. quickly after i found that the asset i
was looking for was
bgcommon/sound/fst/placednpc_ethelight_big_loop.scd/0. i quickly
exported said asset and was on my way.
an interesting note about that asset is the /0 at the end. i'm
pretty sure the sound "asset" contains multiple sounds (i think they
were called tracks in game.) 0 was simply the "hum" or the low
frequency of ambiance.
sadly, getting the actual ambiance would require a bit more elbow
grease. i could have just thrown these together in logic pro and
called it a day, but where's the fun in that? plus, i'd have to create
an excessively long track. i didn't want to be subconsciously aware of
when the loop repeats. i wasn't too worried about this though, as i
had the right tools up my sleeve to solve my first world made up
problem.