Hacking Customs on Disney Sing It Party Hits

ctkxtreme

Well-Known Member
OP
Member
Joined
Jan 30, 2008
Messages
185
Trophies
0
Age
34
Website
Visit site
XP
338
Country
United States
So this is a project I started working on October 2nd. Basically, I wanted to try to make a custom into Party Hits for a number of reasons:

1) The sequels to Disney Sing It are better polished, in fact if you take out the Disney portion of the game, they can function as great karaoke games on their own. But the problem is nobody has attempted customs before for it, only the original. A lot has changed since then, since we've had Riivolution for many years. No longer would you have to change files on the disc and burn a new copy every time.
2) I already like Disney and Disney Channel, but these games lacked any variety of showcasing it, instead bulking the same artists with multiple songs leaving very little. Especially when there's only 30 songs per game.

I decided to fix these two major problems by not only managing to bring a custom over to the game, but also learn apparently that the game can read MORE songs than it had originally. Doing so, I was able to bring the entire setlist of Family Hits (the Disney movies) over to Party Hits with very minimal changes (only the thumbnails and adding a preview video). I will be working on doing the same thing for Pop Hits, as well as the original and High School Musical 3 games. I will also work on charting my own songs for the game, which will be Disney Channel related and span more variety.

Video showcasing that customs work:


Family Hits songs on Party Hits:


Everything I used to get this working:
-A copy of Disney Sing It Party Hits (you can find one dirt cheap at Gamestop for $3)
-CreaContent - This is optional since changes have been made from the original to Party Hits, so the stuff that apply to this program may not work with this sequel.
-ConvertTex - These are for image files. You must have 2, one thumbnail as 128x64, another as 64x32
-RAD Video Tools - What you'll use to convert the video files to .bik. What I did was take an HD video, export it in Adobe Premiere as an .avi for 640x480 29.97 (must be this exactly), then convert to .bik. Once it's converted, you can rename this to .vid, the file the game recognizes. You must also have a preview video, which can be 10-30 seconds.
-Riivolution - How the game will read the extra/custom songs, it's all "patched" through the SD card. This program is very popular with Smash, Mario Kart and New Super Mario Bros Wii because there's many example of different kinds of patches. The same applies here, allowing different songs.
-XML2SingIt (for SingStar/UltraStar charts)
-WiiScrubber40 (to extract the games files, but in this case, only the "game" and "songs" folders are the important ones that need the changes, nothing else needed to be extracted)
-Notepad++ for XML files, which is A LOT of them. The content_en.xml is the file that reads all the content in the game, the one you'll have to individually check for each artist, video, and song ID. The song charts themselves are also in .xml, which I will explain further.

This is an example from the original Sing It:
4c27651056e91964d1fe6e4c79913250.png


And this is an example from Party/Family Hits:
4f3df843da3251efc141662156bfb4fe.png


The 4 major differences in the charts:
-Notes can either be curved, spoken parts (like talkies from Rock Band), or rap parts. This is all stuff the original Sing It lacked, and in many cases, they put rapping parts as actual singing parts.
-Players can be awarded more points for hitting bonus notes. They must hit 95% of the notes in that portion to get the points. You can add as many as 10, but the game only did 3 per song, so that's what I'm keeping it as for my customs. There are also duet bonus notes, if two players hit the notes together, this is entirely optional.
-Harmonies after </Notes>. This was in the game before it, Pop Hits, where players could also be awarded points for hitting Harmonies, however this is entirely optional to chart. It it required to include in every batch of notes even if there is no harmonies.
-The "beats" in the game. Again, also optional to chart. It is basically the beats on the side of the screen that pop up with the timing of the song. This does not affect gameplay in any way, so this can be left alone or modified. It is also required to have in the charts either way for the song.

Currently at the moment, I was only able to get up to 60 songs to show up, which I'm not sure if it's because I did something wrong in the content file, or because that's the file size limit for Riivolution, but 60 songs is still a lot for a karaoke game.

The reason I decided to take on this project is because of my own love for Karaoke games, and Disney in general. If you need to know anything else, feel free to comment about it!
 
Last edited by ctkxtreme,
  • Like
Reactions: pelago

Oo_Ice_Deep_oO

Well-Known Member
Newcomer
Joined
Apr 27, 2020
Messages
47
Trophies
0
Age
48
XP
320
Country
United States
That is pretty awesome, let me know if you posted anywhere. I would love to try and play what you did. I am Wii karaoke crazy right now and trying to find all the old custom made ones, but they are hard to find.
 

Site & Scene News

Popular threads in this forum

General chit-chat
Help Users
    SylverReZ @ SylverReZ: @salazarcosplay, Morning