New sounds for ToEE

This is a continuation of the discussion at
http://www.co8.org/forum/showthread.php?p=11959#post11959

What I am currently interested in is, if u create a new map using the methods mentioned in one of the modding stickys, how do u then attach an mp3 to play on that map as background music? That specific map, not just in general (as with combat music, or some of it anyway).

Any ideas? I will do some testing tomorrow and let people know if i come up with anything, though I am not even sure where to start and trust Gaear when he says he has already looked into this, it may be in the .mobs... and i will try to add a step-by-step for adding new vocal stuff for new dialogues.

 

Hey Ted -

Best of luck with this endeavor. I think some new sounds / voices / music would be pretty cool, not to mention a huge contribution to any future new content.

Point of clarification: I was somewhat unclear in my fatigued post last night in the other thread. I've never actually "looked into" anything about ToEE in the true modding sense. (Thanks for your vote of confidence though.) My brain is engineered to operate in an entirely different fashion and I'd probably have an embolism if I tried to comprehend the things that Liv and Morpheus and the like do here. If they are the Ward Cleavers of the modding world, (or should I say Ward and June? ) think of me as the Eddie Haskell. I'm able to manipulate the system to make it work for me, but nothing I do will ever rise above the level of a cheap imitation. I get by on wits and a bit of mental dexterity. This naturally lends itself to exploits like I've achieved with some of the audio issues discussed lately. But "exploits" is exactly what they are - not creations, inventions, or anything resembling original thought.

Just thought I'd clear the air before you began to put too much faith in me. I can see you slaving over your PC at 3:00 a.m., confounded by some modding problem, and thinking, "Damn, its just not working! No matter, tomorrow Gaear will figure it out." :-D

 

Yeah thats fair enough Gaear, I am simply copying stuff that already works far more than I am figuring it out myself - i just don't want to learn the fulness of Python, I only wanna know enough to get by so I can mod properly (and bug free) and get on with my life.

Anyways I had no chance to look at the music (domestic responsibilities after work <sigh>). But I did get the completely new speech going, it was straightforward so I will just do a step-by-step for everyone (bit of an insight into my mod too so other modders will know what values I am using in this n that file n we don't step on each others toes ;-). I realise this is old hat to the established modders here, but I know i get a lot from people keeping it simple so I will.

Firstly, how I number things (I will put this up front so it doesn't interfere with the speech bit). Liv tends to leave a gap after the official stuff, go forward to a nice round number and put her stuff there. This is a very sensible idea and anyone interested in modding can immediatley see where she is working.

I am putting my stuff directly behind Liv's, that way she can expand her mod as much as she likes and there should never be a conflict. Eg normal quests end at 69 or so, Liv's start at 100, so my main one is 99 and i work backwards for the subquests (98, 97, 96 etc). Ditto the variables and flags (start 699, werk backwards). And hence Lila Renton's dialogue stuff is 00299, which is what we are about to look at. So lets do it!

Ok so I have added a 'new' character with a totally original dialogue file and script file. The character is Elmo's mum Lila, who is in the game but has no dialogue at all (just a stock response when u click on her, like the worthies in the Nulb pub or the pirates n wenches wandering the docks. There are two or three characters like that in Hommlet for memory).

Lila is already in the protos.tab and description.mes etc, but has no dialogue file. So, in col 277 of her row (the san-dialog field, that tells the game where to look for dialogue for this character), I introduced the number 299 (299 0 0 0 0). This points her dialogue scripts at the file in the dlg folder numbered 299 where I duly create a new dlg file, 00299Lila.dlg. I also create a file in the scr folder that has those basic scripts to get her to talk, py00299Lila.py (this is gradually expanding into some complicated scripts ;-)). 299 as I mentioned above is a convenient number: the current dialogue and script files go from 00001 (a test file), 00002 (Black Jay), 00004 (Burne) etc up to 00261 (the cook in the labourer's camp) and 00262 (Burne's apprentice).

So, to add speech to all this, I added a folder numbered, u guessed it, 00299 to the data\sound\speech folder.

So to test out how easy it is to add vocals, i simply copy-and-pasted all Elmo's stuff into this folder (I can't make mp3's atm, as I said somewhere else). These have names like V10_m.mp3, V20_m.mp3, V30_f.mp3 etc. The v stands for vocal i assume, and the m or f stands for male or female response (if Elmo just says something or adds 'purdy lady' to it). If response is non-gender-specific (most seem to be) there is only the one _m file which will play either way. The number is the line number in the dlg file you are emulating.

So for instance, line 10 in Lila's dlg file, practically the first thing she says, is "Hello young man, I'm sorry I haven't been very chatty, I've had a few things weighing on my mind." (An ironic comment on how she has previously had no dialogue, and a teaser to get you to ask about the new quest).

So now, with a speech folder 00299 to match the dlg file 00299 and the scr file 00299, when it plays line 10 on the screen, it also goes looking for v10_m.mp3, and finds it too. I am treated to Elmo's witty reparte: "no I'm not drunk, I'm Elmo". I really do need to record my own dialogue (not that I am going to do it for Lila, she has far too much as the principal character in the mod).

Now I know I have violated Liv's principle regarding creating a completely NEW critter to test with, rather than a current one (Lila is already in there) so this test isn't conclusive. But then I dare say other people have already done this before me. The main thing is I got a completely new dlg file to access a completely new speech folder, just like the existing ones do.

So if you want to add speech to your new characters in your mods, or you have new dialogue for an existing character, its seriously that simple. Rip yourself an mp3 (Madeleine Kahn in Blazing Saddles perhaps - or who wants Calmert to sing the 'every sperm is sacred' song from Meaning of Life?), title it to match the line number that will trigger the dialogue it is reading out, and put it in a speech folder numbered to match the dlg file (the folders currently aren't there because they are in the .dat files, so don't worry about that, just make up a new one. For instance, yesterday to get Elmo to use a line of Fruella's dialogue I invented a new folder 00091 in the (at that point, empty) speech folder and pasted in a copied mp3 file from Fruella, with a new name to match the line of Elmo's dlg file I was using. The new stuff meshed happily with the existing stuff in the .dat file, and the game switched back and forth between Elmo's existing mp3s and this new one seamlessly).

Thats all there is to it, as far as I can tell. But remember, bad dialogue is WORSE than no dialogue (think Episode I - "this is rubbish, just draw your light saber for heaven's sake!") so perhaps we should use this SPARINGLY (the reasion, I suspect, for people who doubtless already know how to do it, like Liv n Allyx, not having done it!!).

Coming soon - music files (I hope), and Elmo as an appalingly stereotyped drunken samurai. "Ah so, me no rikey smacky skull until me scully saki!"

 

Its 4am and where the hell is Gaear??

Ok this is just a spew at the game, feel free to skip.

Its literally 4:15am here, I can't sleep (who needs that? Its not as though I have work at 7 or anything) so I got up to have a fiddle with the game (specifically, maps, mobs - whatever they are - and music).

So I find something called 'schemeindex.mes' and I tihnk 'ooo that sounds good' and open it. I find references to the following:

'Hmmmm' thinks I, 'that doesn't sound like ToEE'.

So i move on to 'schemelist.mes'.

This explains it with lines like:

Well thats just FABULOUS. The game shipped with files from Arcanum in place, presumably, of some reallly useful files for ToEE.

Great. Just great.

[/spew]

 

Here I am

That's funny - I remember puzzling over those files myself.

Your progress sounds really encouraging, Ted. We'd still actually have to have appropriate audio files of someone saying, "Hello young man, I'm sorry I haven't been very chatty . . .", right? This is the part that worries me. It worries me very gravely, because despite good intentions, amatuer voice recordings sound just like what they are, and we all know that crappy voice acting makes people cringe. When they here it, they say, "That voice acting sucks," rather than "This mod is cool."

My personal opinion on this is that we simply shouldn't do it unless :

a. We happen to have a few professional voice actors in our midst who are willing to provide audio recordings of the text.

b. We rip stuff off from other sources.

I realize there aren't likely any games out there that just happen to have your mod dialogue in them. But maybe we could rip off generic stuff like "Hello there!" and "Greetings!" and intersperse it with your text dialogue, unspoken.

At any rate, I can help you with converting to mp3. Wave files are huge, so e-mailing them back and forth would be prohibitive. But if you want to use any resources that we might both already have at our disposal, I could convert them and e-mail you the resulting mp3s, which are much smaller.

Anybody else got an opinion on this? We're not a conspiracy of two here.

 

I agree completely: I actually have some friends who are actors, and with my sound engineer friend i might have a party one day, gather them round the mike and do some proper dialogue recording. But skipping the amateurish stuff is definitely a must.

I looked through the map files and they seem to access about 25 background music settings - slightly more than are in the music folder. I still think there might be a couple more in there somewhere. But at the moment I have no idea how the game links the map files to the mp3's. O well, if i don't get a custom music track on the one screen where I want it, I will live ;-) I dare say people play with the music down anyway, even if they leave the voices etc on.

Of course, being an amateur myself, I then got distracted by the issue of spawning things. Hey, I'm easily distracted, what can i say?

 

This all sounds cool.

Shiningted - have you seen any way to get the battle cries in yet? Are they coded correctly?

 

I've actually reconstructed all the opening vignette videos to include the original video and original voice audio, but different music. That's entirely doable with the proper tools. Again though, I'm limited to replacing stuff. If we could engineer new ones, that would be great. I'd love to be able to insert a movie to play upon first entering the Moathouse and Nulb, kind of like the Hommlet and Temple ones. The Moathouse and Nulb are key points in the story, after all.

The vignette voice-overs are located in TOEE3.dat I believe, so you can re-integrate them any way you want to. If you can find a way to place them, I can provide the movies!

I second Allyx's battle cries request. You wouldn't want that stuff playing all the time, but as it is now you almost never hear about half of the available spoken dialogue, and I do believe there are some that are never played at all. I've listened to all of them from the DAT and there's some I've absolutely never heard in-game. Sadly, a lot of it is crappy. But you could replace the crappy stuff with quality stuff from BG or whatever.

Soldier on, Ted.

 

Spike -

Do you have this cavern music of which you speak in an mp3 format file? Which maps do you want it to play over in-game ? . . temple, moathouse, etc.

It's simply a matter of replacing the appropriate mp3 file in the data/sound/music folder with the cavern music - in mp3 format.

 

Hey, there's a healthy response.

I spent much of yesterday evening hacking away at .mob files with a hex editor (I may as well have used a tomahawk for the impact I had, though i DID create a new map, that's a step forward). I will do something more useful this evening, and get to the bottom of this battle-cry (etc) thing: I doubt I can fix it, but I can at least codify it so we can see the problem more clearly and the more script-minded folks can do something.

Til est ho!!!! (tally-ho to the ignorant ;-))

 

If we fail, we fall: if we succeed, we move on to the next task.

Ok, some mixed news for the Americanians waking up Sat morning and logging in.

Over here in Oz, i spent about 5 hours this afternoon hacking away, trying to get to the bottom of the battle cries issue. I won't bore you with the details here - suffice it to say after much testing, I have narrowed the problem but am no closer to a solution. I have established that the comments made by NPCs when you first visit a map DO work consistently, because some (Zert, Kobort etc) are not meant to say anything. Since other non-combat comments work (overburdening, looting etc "awww and I'm only getting a half share") - not all by any means, but some - I have come to the rather obvious conclusion that it is something about going into combat mode that is the problem. Further testing will occur, but for now I am flummoxed <squirms in seat, wishes for anti-flummoxing ointment>

However, I do have some good news. While scouring the .dat files for anything resembling a combat script file, I found the schemelist and schemeindex files for ToEE - those are the ones I found for Arcanum that I was lamenting above. (They're in ToEE2.dat). Well, a kwik investigation, a hack, a fiddle, and shazaam! My new map I mentioned above had all new music! So... with regard to the issue of adding new background music tracks to new areas, I hereby declare,

SUCCESS!!

As with the new speech, I don't think I am the first person to do this - there was a reference to a 'Colosseum' soundtrack with cheering (Morpheus' Arena of Heroes?) But I'm glad it can be done. Which is to say, I'm glad I can do it ;-) I will put a step-by-step in the next post. Its actually quite simple, no harder than adding extra speech. Isn't it bizarre that adding sound to ToEE (once you know what you are doing) is simple, yet getting what is there to work is proving darn difficult? Aaaah, Troika... if I didn't love your engine, I'd hunt you all down with a bill-guisarme... Hook 'em and hack 'em, thats my motto!

PS Oo oo almost forgot - I am adding my testing 'results' as a txt file for anyone who is interested, far too dull to put here (but a few surprises for anyone who reads it, right Ed? [Ed nods])

 

Before I do anything else, better reply to some of the stuff here.

A la BG, where u see a vid each time u go to a new place? Yeah I'd love that too... u could even throw in a few kobolds sneaking up, anachronism or not they're a personal fav. I gotta say, that first shot after the vignettes, where u go over the hill and see Hommlet b4 u... well its not quite a goosebump moment, but since Hommlet is an old friend of 20 years from the module, its quite a moment. If u could match that... WOW! But I have no idea how u would do it. If u think u can graywolfe, more power too you, let us know how we can help.

Yeah, as gaear said, its a copy n paste over the existing stuff, thats easy enough.

Go to ToEE.dat/maps and find the map you want to put it in - the fire node i dare say if it is lava, or wherever u have in mind.

Open the map folder, and find the txt file 'mapinfo'. That'll tell u what soundscheme the map is currently using.

Open ToEE2/sound/schemelist.mes, and have a look what is playing for that scheme. You can do it by name or number. For instance, the Fire node is marked as such, and since the scheme in 'mapinfo' was 10, 0 you go down to line 1000 (ie 10 00, it goes in hundreds). Here you find (not surprisingly) that the scheme uses the file 'music\elemental_fire_loop.mp3'.

So, if you have your diablo file in mp3 (or, I am pretty sure, wav) form, paste it into the folder Program Files\Atari\Temple of Elemental Evil\data\sound\music. Then delete elemental_fire_loop.mp3 (or rename it elemental_fire_loop_original.mp3 or something) and change the name of your file to elemental_fire_loop.mp3 or whatever else u have in mind. Or you could just simply change schemelist.mes to point to your diablo file by pasting the name of it in place of elemental_fire_loop_original.mp3 or whatever u r replacing (handy if it is a .wav file - the game doesn't recognise other forms than these two). Since your file is in place of the old one and named the same, the game will happily play it - nothing easier. Let us know how it goes.

I have answered this at length in the text thing, but if u mean are they correctly coded between the sound files and the dlg files, yes all the ones I checked are. If u think about it, the dialogue stuff doesn't come up when it should either (with or without sound) so thats not the problem. Thats why i think its a combat mode issue. I will keep looking, but if its a .mob thing or hard coded, its way over my head.

And about time too. Thanks for the support.

if the music is appropriate (not Marylin Manson, perhaps?) then that sounds fabulous. Are you saying you simply replaced new music? Or restored voices that were missing, like the battlecries? If it is the original stuff reclaimed, even with new music, that should go straight into Co8 4.0 - who wouldn't want the vignettes with voices restored to their original form?

Speaking of which, one way of restoring the battle cries might be to script each one in... not quite as bad as it sounds, since the same cry is always in the same place (just a lot of copying and pasting), but still a pain. But it could be done: it seems to be how Liv added the 'selling inventory' thing (and she changed the inventory to match the individual characters, champion that she is).