Scrapped "Shining Lights, Even in Death" Opening Cutscene
In the files of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, there exist a couple of .fsm cutscene stream animation files using a node header packet like older versions of .fsm files do, like in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, instead of having a separate .sand file, like in MGSV:TPP and Metal Gear Survive. JinMar of the Modders' Heaven Discord server developed a script to convert them into MGSV:TPP-friendly files. One of these two unused .fsm files in MGSV:TPP that use the MGSV:GZ format is a scrapped intro cutscene for Episode 43: SHINING LIGHTS, EVEN IN DEATH, with the cutscene id p51_070030. The skeletons for the bird models are completely different in the node data from what bones the models use in the final game, both MGSV:GZ and MGSV:TPP. The radio from Miller in the previous cutscene by the cutscene id, p51_070020, and the briefing radio the player hears in the helicopter ride to the Quarantin Platform all use the message ids related to this cutscene, meaning you were meant to hear them in this cutscene. The "missions" spreadsheet also describes the events in the cutscene, like the visual effects of the iDroid UI. You can read the selected spreadsheets snippets below in Japanese and English:
Right on the eve, I'd realized two things: nobody has made a SANTA Camo mod on the TPP Nexus page, and that the Karakul Sheep model's texture has clean, generic, reusable fur.
I wanted to closely follow the MGS3 Download camo, which had fur painted on the white highlights, so I figured this would be a nice challenge to race to Christmas for.
The reason Quiet is wearing a ghillie suit in the screenshots is because I also tried editing some EffectDescriptions of blinking red and blue lights into her .parts file, but it didn't work out, so I left it as is. Cut mod content! ...I realized too late a thing I could have tried to check to possibly make to work, I think.
I'll be posting less formal, less archival updates on this other blog from now on. Apologies for the current lack of factoids, datamining and leaked document analysis. There is a lot more yet to share.
The tentative name for The Third Child was, of course, simply マンティス->"Mantis." The description for the term, which has no English translation, asks if just "Mantis" works for TPP's name that Skull Face would refer to Mantis as, or if it has to be changed to something like "The Floating Child." The discussion is also very detailed and contains interesting unused ideas from the writing team, Murata specifically:
(Shuyo) Murata suggests a name to fit into the Ogre theme: Кобольд（コボルド->Kobold）＝コバルト(->Cobalt)＝ゴブリン(->Goblin)＝小鬼(->Ko-oni, as in small demon). A kobold, or cobold, is a mythical sprite in Germanic mythology and folklore, usually depicted in humanlike figures with the size of small children.
Murata brought up another idea for a demonic name for Mantis: ニコラス(->Nicholas, the saint accompanied by the horned demon named Krampus) = サンタ(->Santa) = nick = 悪魔(->akuma, demon) .
Murata also suggests サイコ(->Psycho).
Translations of "Mantis" in Russian, バガモール(->Bagamol) and "Praying Mantis" in Hungarian, "imádkozó sáska," are brought up. However, the note afterward considers that Skull Face wouldn't want to speak Hungarian as much as possible, giving up on the translation idea and returning to Kobold.
The Director (Kojima) comes in the end with 「新しい子供」(->The New Child) or 「第三の子供」(->The Third Child). Not noted here, but it's very likely a reference to Neon Genesis Evangelion: Shinji Ikari is referred to as サード・チルドレン->Third Children.
In the "demo_jan20151" and "motherbase" spreadsheets, the fourth section of the "Nuclear Disarmament" event containing the "Maintaining a Nuke-free World" cutscene, this note exists: "A defensive Battle Gear (or Chico in a Walker Gear) has been stationed on this strut." In the final game, we do indeed see a random Diamond Dogs soldier piloting a Walker Gear.
This is, very understandably so, in an internal document no less, a mistranslation. The localization people must have been about as confused here as with "Infiltrate the South African Base." As pointed out to me in the original Twitter thread, the Japanese text simply says チコ（ウォーカーギア）-> Chico (Walker Gear). Chico is not riding a Walker Gear. Chico is the Walker Gear.
My proof below actually puts some Chico leftovers in the game to rest.
Dumped voice clips are usually shown off with zero, or even negative or wrong context. Example being: Snake calling out to "Chico." Even with them not being in my spreadsheets, there are two ways to connect them to the also unused voice clip sets of Snake calling out to "Walker Gear" and "D-Walker."
The way subtitle strings are fetched for display is through the embedded filename marker string in the Wwise-converted .wem file. I made an open source CLI tool that prefixes this string to the names of those files if they have one. They are then lowercased (possibly because Wwise might lowercase all its strings?), hashed with StrCode32 and a string entry is looked for the game's own loaded .subp subtitle package files. In order, these are the embedded filename markers of each voice clip from above:
No subtitles for these voices exist in the game's files, however, as you can tell by this gap in the .subp file hash dictionary. The Japanese dub versions of these voice clips are also just silence - there are no Akio Otsuka versions of all six of these lines, like a few other English-unique ones. What matters here, however, is that we've proved a pattern - this is a group of Walker Gear callouts, divided into short and long distance versions, each divided into variations - Chico, Walker Gear, and D-Walker.
There is another connection to use as proof here: you can make the player play voice clips in-game arbitrarily with the "Player.CallVoice()" function.
The game uses the Dynamic Dialogue event type in Wwise to play character voice clips. An Event is called with names of states from specified groups as arguments, returning a Sound (Voice) object to play. All character Dialogue Events in MGSV use the "chara" and "condition" state groups. "chara" is obviously the name of the speaker character, say, Snake, Miller, Enemy Soldier A or B, etc. The "condition" specifies what that character has to say.
Audiokinetic Wwise Help - Understanding the Dynamic Dialogue System
This is useful for programming character voices, specifying the character speaking and the voice clip they should say. The Player.CallVoice function can be called with the specific dialogue event, the "chara" argument and the "condition" argument, but also simply with the "condition" argument, taking the rest from what's known about what the player is already.
I have unhashed a big chunk of "condition" hashes in the "DD_Player" Dynamic Dialogue event based on a few examples found in the vanilla game's Lua code, and the current notes, though not actively updated, can be found here.
Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.
Some still use hash collisions, as I still haven't figured them out yet, and they're easy to generate from Wwise's FNV hash implementation - all the strings being lowercased before being hashed by Wwise certainly helps. They all vary in format, but most of them start with "PL" for Player, a letter for the type of group of voice clip, and then various, mostly rounder numbers. The "condition" string names for the voice clips above are as follows:
PLW0010_1 -> snak1100_4t2110_0_snak -> Chico.
PLW0010_2 -> SNAK1100_4t2210_0_snak -> Walker Gear.
PLW0010_3 -> SNAK1100_4t2220_0_snak -> D-Walker.
PLW0020_1 -> SNAK1100_4t2310_0_snak -> Chico!
PLW0020_2 -> SNAK1100_4t2410_0_snak -> Walker Gear!
PLW0020_3 -> SNAK1100_4t2420_0_snak -> D-Walker!
So even with these "condition" strings, the pattern from before emerges once again!
But what does this mean? Well, as the previous post has shown, "Chico" was a nickname for "Walker Gear." But was it for the entire type, like the generic term "Walker Gear" itself, or a specific one?
It's likely to be the former, but the latter is interesting to consider - both Walker Gears "first (mentioned by name) by Huey" in the HELLBOUND mission and the previous "Chico in a Walker Gear" from the Nuclear Disarmament cutscene are the prototype model, WG-PP. This could be simple asset reuse as it would be the first, original model made. Funnily enough, the same Walker Gear model is taken apart for the development of the Battle Gear. So my personal theory is that if there was a specific one, the "Chico" Walker Gear is specifically the first one, the prototype from Huey's lab in the Soviet Base Camp. This voice clip could have been used in the mission to call over to it.
The "Walker Gear" voice clips could similarly have been a more generic term for hijacked enemy Walker Gears.
And "D-Walker" could have been used to communicate with it, just like we do in the final game with the generic common whistle or the Mode commands in the Call Menu.
There's also a few funny anecdotal story implications to consider. In Peace Walker, Amanda's men refer to unmanned gear as "hombre nuevo," despite her disapproval. Chico in Ground Zeroes, when awake and carried to the RV on the coast, says that he wants to start over, as "... Hombre nuevo."
The character in the unused concept art that he would have actually, literally become nine years later could also be what he means. It's just a funny connection.
Another interesting thing to think about is who named it "Chico," and why.
In the tape "What is Sahelanthropus?" in the album "Questioning Huey [2]," he claims that the skull painted on Sahelanthropus's cockpit was proof that he never betrayed Mother Base, only to be dismissed by the others as proof of his allegiance to Skull Face. Huey calling this nuclear-equippable, walking death-mobile after a presumed dead child soldier he knew easily fits that kind of characterization as an attempt to convince Miller and the others. But that's all my theory.
The "glossary" spreadsheet row for the generic term for the medium-size, single-seat mech, as first referred to by Huey, points out that the tentative version of it is 中メタル/"Medium Metal," which explains the acronym used by the Walker Gear model names - "mgm," or "Metal Gear Medium."
"Medium" is also likely used to differentiate from the much smaller Metal Gear Mk II from MGS4 and Snatcher (and the even smaller Metal Gear Petit from SD Snatcher).
It has a very detailed "discussion" column cell. A lot of names were suggested, for instance, names adjacent to Sahelanthropus, the main mech of the game, apparently already named. They'll be listed below.
(Koichiro) Ito suggests:
パラントロプス -> Paranthropus (a genus of Sahelanthropus)
ウォーカー -> Walker
BabyWalker
(Hidenari) Inamura suggests:
ナカリピテクス -> Nakalipithecus (an extinct great ape before Sahelanthropus, with a link to a now-defunct November 2007 post from Kyoto University)
ピースウォーカー -> Piece Walker
(Shuyo) Murata suggests taking the name from a fighter plane. Then it says "PAT" for some reason.
A few more suggestions are デューイ(-> Dewey) or ルーイ (-> Louie), in reference to Dr. "Huey" Emmerich and Donald Duck's nephews.
A discussion from Mr (Yuji) Shinkawa is cited with the suggestion メタルギアレッグズ->"Metal Gear Legs." It's noted that the Mecha Team had no proposals at the time.
Some more suggestions follow:
バリアブルギア -> Variable Gear
タイニーギア -> Tiny Gear
ベイビーギア -> Baby Gear
VxG - > Variable xxxx Gear, "x" likely marking another word to fill in, as Ito suggests, with Variable (可変) Exoskeleton (外骨格) Gear (伊東), or ExGear, for short.
A Star Wars-like abbreviation is also brought up.
In the end, ウォーカーギア -> "Walker Gear" was picked. But, aside from this column, there's another supremely interesting part of this spreadsheet - the "Official name (Japanese)" column of this row, aside from the name we know, also says this:
I have released a mod that aims to restore some features of the mission "PROLOGUE: AWAKENING" with a whole lot of them being unused voice clips. This video showcases most of the changes.
You can download it here:
Adds back some cut content to Episode 0: 'Prologue: Awakening' and Episode 6: 'Where Do The Bees Sleep?'
And read the whole feature list here:
Opening:
[list]
[*]Full opening (plane crash, mirror and tape scene, bed scene) plays on replays, excluding the title screen
[*]Can skip the
Some languages' translations of the descriptions of the COMM CONTROL game mode in MGSV's Metal Gear Online seem to be based on an outdated concept of the game mode: they say that capturing enemy comm links will consume the enemy team's tickets, most likely referring to the tickets concept from the BOUNTY HUNTER.
In Metal Gear Online 3's SABOTAGE game mode, there was meant to be an extra phase before the attackers could hack the terminals to deactivate the EM barrier protecting the defenders' missile - where the attackers had to obtain the login to the terminals from an intel file, and maybe from interrogating a defender.
Some maps, mainly excluding unused ones and the Cloaked in Silence DLC maps (Rust Palace, Azure Mountain and Coral Complex) and the very basic default map seen during free play, still have defined and placed "docs" gimmicks in their "attack" (SABOTAGE) "ruleset" (game mode) packages, using a customized copy of a generic intel file model seen in The Phantom Pain, the one with a blurry screenshot of Miller on it. They seem to be registered in some script tables, but are most likely simply left deactivated.
In my recent mod where I try to reinterpret the SABOTAGE game mode into a single player side op in The Phantom Pain, I have reused those voice clips, also in TPP's soundbank for some reason, and the idea for this "login obtaining" phase by having the player either read an intel file the usual TPP way or interrogate a VIP (not any enemy for balancing reasons of course) before they can hack any of the terminals to deactivate the EM barrier and destroy the missile.
i found these lines in the sound files ages ago and i assume they were supposed to be for if you ran into ocelot moving around on base(?) but that was removed in the final game
Raw Animation Data for Kingdom of the Flies Cutscenes is Still in the Game's Files
These .fsm files contain raw animation track files for cutscenes seen rendered Phantom Episode on the Collector's Edition Blu-Ray. By "raw" I mean it's animation tracks without the context of which bone or object they belong to; this information is stored in .sand files, which are stored in mission packs, and not out directly in an archive. They are roughly 40 MBs in total, and don't have audio tracks.
I'd asked id-daemon, the only person I knew who had ripped cutscene animations from MGSV before, to take a look at these files. They manually guessed the most of the tracks meant for Eli in the "post-credits" scene from Kingdom of the Flies, and it matched!
The "demo-jan20151" spreadsheet is how I identified these .fsm files at first.
Sadly, I'm not super proficient in animation formats, but we have mostly reverse engineered the .fsm and .sand formats, leaving only specialized tooling left to reconstruct the missing .sand files in the way of actually playing these cutscenes in-game, which I thoroughly believe is feasible with enough educated guesswork and a good previewing environment.
If you'd like to know how to help, visit our MGSV modding Discord server!
A community for modding enthusiasts to discuss topics related to Fox Engine modding. | 2,914 members
The PF Gas Mask is Eli's Gas Mask from Kingdom of the Flies
The only remnant of Eli's model from Kingdom of the Flies in MGSV is his gas mask textures, because the gas mask model was reused and reshaped for the PF soldiers. The textures the model uses are in the "lqd"/Liquid folder, and it uses the model name "lqd1," opposed to "lqd0," which is Eli's default model from the rest of the game.
I used this model and its textures in my old recreation of the Kingdom of the Flies Eli and XOF models, links below.
so is it over yet or not
So those XOF scum live on, even after Skull Face's death.
While it does belong to Eli and not the XOF soldiers, the only leftover of whom is a dummy .fv2 Form Variation file named "wss3", I still used it for my recreation of the white top helmet of the XOF soldiers from Kingdom of the Flies.
Metal Gear Survive contains a handful of models in the tpp/.../fly_kingdom folder, none of which are anywhere to be found in MGSV proper, even the folder itself.
The models are a "bed" bench, just as high as other beds soldiers sleep on in MGSV. Another is a cage, presumably for hostages, though it doesn't have Fulton blocking flags in its collision file. The others are a fence and its debris variation, which share the material with the cage. The final one is a bush. All of these, except maybe the last, are not even seen in the Phantom Episode on the Collector's Edition Blu-Ray.
Another set of models is in the ssd/... folders and not in the tpp/.../fly_kingdom folder, but it does use the same materials as the fence and cage models, and it's a few barriers made of the same spike models.
Hi, sorry for the English. I am a big fan of yours, I think you're an expert when it comes to MGSV. I wanted to ask your opinion about a theory of mine, related to episode 51: the ending in particular. There never was a cutscene in the game ending with a fade to a static image such as the new york skyline at the end of the video. I think it was obviously edited in to cover the real ending of the cutscene. In fact it appears in the middle of a tracking shot of Eli. By now I'm pretty used to the directing style of the game and I think that a tracking shot of a close-up of a person is always meant for something important. My theory is that the cutscene ended with the burning bodies of the child soldiers. I think it would fit very well with the theme of endless cycles of revenge. In fact Venom would end up doing exactly what was done to him (well on big boss): destroying all his world (mother base) and his soldiers.
In fact, the child soldiers are never to be seen in episode 51 after the destruction of Sahelantrophus. They're only briefly seen before the battle being scared by the initial attack of XOF troops. What was their destiny? Where they killed in the napalm strike because, being almost the same age as Eli, they were starting to show symphtoms? It'd have also been the cause of the reasonable decision of cutting the episode. Haven't kojima said that the game would have been pushing taboos? I think that dead children could have very well be the decision behind the censoring of the ending of the cutscene with the new york skyline.
What is your opinion? Is there something in the spreadsheets about the fate of Eli and the child soldiers?
Hello, thank you for the question! Your English is fine!
The "demo-jan20151" spreadsheet with the Kingdom of the Flies cutscenes says that the kids who ran away in the Phantom Episode render disappear into the forest, and if the children have been recovered in the gameplay leading up to the scene, they wouldn't appear in this cutscene at all.
In one piece of concept art in the Art of Metal Gear Solid V, we see the kids being led away by the Diamond Dogs onto a helicopter. So presumably, either you or the Diamond Dogs later recover the children, with whom Eli communicates in Kikongo.
As for the "post-credits" scene, nothing of the sort or even New York are mentioned here. The document just plain ends here. That's beside mentioning that the Phantom Episode puts it right before the end credits, and not afterward, like it's described here.
I think the point of the scene was just to show that Eli has now been left to walk on his own two feet, him and Mantis now being where Snake and Miller were after Ground Zeroes, completing the cycle.
An acronym-friendly name for the Uranium Enriching Archaea used for the armor of Sahelanthropus was thought up by (Hidenari) Inamura. They also seem to have sought a Navajo name for Code Talker to use, but no further references or a separate row can be found.
The UEA would have come into play in the Kingdom of the Flies segment.
While not shown or referenced in The Phantom Episode video on the Blu-Ray of the Collector's Edition of MGSV, in the "demo-jan20151" spreadsheet, the last phase of the battle against Sahelanthropus manned by Eli is described to have involved him quoting the cutscene in MGS1 between the two phases of the boss fight against Metal Gear REX, before using Sahelanthropus's Archaeal Blade to make it enter Seppuku mode, which enriches the depleted uranium in its armor, causing a nuclear fusion reaction, essentially initiating its nuclear self-destruct sequence. The player would have had to shut down Sahelanthropus before it completed. This is why Sahelanthropus is split in half in the cutscenes afterward and in Metal Gear Survive.
The cassette tapes Sahelanthropus [1] / Sahelanthropus's Armor Material [1] and Sahelanthropus [2] / Sahelanthropus's Armor Material [2] explain this mechanism in full. The "motherbase" spreadsheet notes that the first tape is unlocked when the mechanism becomes known, and the second, after listening to the first, and maybe "*Following the (Kingdom of the) Flies segment?"
The tentative name for the 古細菌ブレード->Archaeal Blade was メタル微生物ブレード->Metal Microbe Blade. (Hidenari) Inamura's initial suggestion was 「腐蝕の剣」->"Ruster Sword," and (Shuyo) Murata suggests ワームサーベル->Worm Saber and アーキアン->Archaean (?), and also says that simply "sword" or "machete" is fine.
The tentative generic term for the メタリックアーキア->Metallic Archaea was メタル微生物->metal microbes.
The final name was (Hidenari) Inamura's idea. It claims that Chris (Johns) said that they shouldn't the use "Germ" too much. They also say that they can't find a good translation of 錆因子->rust factor. Another suggestion is 鉱物に寄せる->mineral absorber(?). One more is 生きている金属->living metal.
A final suggestion is "Metallophilic Archaea," with "Metallophile" being an association with Extremophile. However, they note that there is already a font that uses the name "Metallophile."
