Hi all, long time reader on this forum but this is the first time I actually had something to say. First off, great job on all the mods, I rather enjoyed the game a year ago with only Atari patch 2 and just started a second go around with Co8 4.0 and I am enjoying it even more. Unfortunately, as is often the case when modders do such a great job enhancing a game, I am going to ask for even more! My gripe has to do with the character aknowledgements, that is, every time they say 'yes' or 'ok' or 'right away' every time I give them a command. I used to turn that off via the preferences panel because it eventually annoys the hell otta me, but then I miss out on some of the humorous quips that characters will do on certain events (which, from what I understand, have been added to by the Co8 team making me want to hear them even more). Is there a way to disable command acknowledgements, but keep all of the other 'party banter'?
Find whoever is annoying u (it should only be recruitable NPCs, Meleny - Elmo - Fruella etc - the regulars have enough responses to be slightly less annoying, and the new ones in the voice pack have even more than normal) and pop their dlg file in the data/dlg folder (it opens in Notepad). Make a copy of the file and stick it somewhere. Then, delete line 12020. Delete the whole line. Repeat for each offending NPC. That should do it
Thanks for the response, Ted, but unfortunately it is the PC acknowledgements that I find just as annoying and there doesn't seem to be any dialog files for them (though your solution worked for the NPCs). Do you think the PC acknowlegements could be found in a dialog file somewhere?
Try recording a 1 second long blank MP3 (no sound) and make 5 copies, name them 0 - 4. now make the file extension... data/sound/speech/pcvoice and make 22 folders (assuming you don't have the new pc voices) in the pcvoice folder, name them 00 - 21. now copy your 5 blank MP3's into each of the 22 folders. Now when you click the mouse, the game will play your blank mp3 instead of the normal coments.
Worked like a charm, Allyx, thanks! On a side note, after downloading the voice packs and checking out how they were done, I was wondering why the voices that came with the game (0 - 33) do not have .mes files in the mes\pcvoice folder like all the new ones do? How does it know what to say for each of the original voices? NOt too important to know, I guess, but I am interested in modding and while the code itself shouldn't be a problem (I'm a professional software developer... but business software is a far cry from games!) the architecture of the game logic and files is hard to get a hold of at first. I'm sure there is a better place to post this, so I apologize if I am out of line here.
The original voices do have .mes files. They are in ToEE3.dat and ToEE4.dat. Most of the game is in the .dat files. The files in the data folder suplement or, in the case of duplicates, supersede the files in the .dats.
Ah, that makes sense. I'm pretty impressed by the modular nature of the ToEE engine, seems pretty flexible in *some* cases. How can I look into those .dat files? Are they simply compiled/encryped/compressed and need some tool to turn them back into readable text?
You need Zane's ToEEExtractor: http://www.co8.org/files/tools/toeeextract.rar Unzip ToEEExtract.exe to the ToEE folder. Then drag & drop the .dat file you want to extract onto the .exe file. A DOS window should now open, where you can follow the extraction progress. When ToEEExtract has done its job, you'll have a new folder in the current directory - if you extracted ToEE3.dat, for example, the folder will be named "ToEE3".
And after I extract to, say, ToEE3, is that the source that the game will then use? Or will I have to move it to the 'data' folder?
No the data stored in the ToEE3 folder is not accessed by the game, the .dat file is where the data gets loaded from, the data folder contains all the files that overide the dat files. The dat files are useful for finding information the game uses that hs not been modded since the game was made, but there are a lot of Arcanum leftovers in the dats that have no use in ToEE.
