New sounds for ToEE

Shouldn't be a problem, what did u have in mind? (Email me at shiningted@yahoo.com if its elaborate).

 

Small Leap Forward

Ok, I was actually IN bed trying to get some sleep before work but worrying about that Elmo script thing when it struck me, "hey I forgot to add a colon!" (Thats something that prevented a script working once before, no colon at the end of the line, and i thought maybe thats why Elmo's script didn't work). So i leapt out of bed and powered up the PC.

No luck: yes the colon was lacking, but it was not needed in the bit of script i was werking on.

Anyways, I was in the mood to hack, so I kept going. Here i had a bit of a breakthrough: there is a combat vocal thing that will come up under very specific conditions: the 'leader dies' comment. That is, when the party leader dies, one of the NPC's will bemoan this fact with some vocal comment ("On no not you!", "she died so young", "all must pass according to the plan" etc) in place of the PC's deathcry ("aaargh, avenge me!", "nooooooooooo" or whatever). The specific conditions are as follows:

The 'leader' - the person in the left-most position in the icon list - has to be THE PERSON WHO RECRUITED THE NPC. The NPC's seem to 'remember' who recruited them: for instance, you may have noticed no matter who is doing what in the party, they will always speak in the gender of their recruiter - "hey lady my pack is full!", "lotsa baddies in this place lady" etc.

Now for the details: there is only ever one NPC who will make the comment: there seems to be some pecking order. For instance, Furnok will trump Turuko, Zert and Elmo; Elmo will trump Turuko; and Turuko only seems to speaks if he is last man standing or if the other NPC's don't have this response (both Kobort and Spugnoir lack this line {12056} in their dialogue, much as Kobort lacks an Emridy Meadows and Deklo Grove comment). If the 'highest character' is incapacitated (and I do mean dead with a '?' on the icon - twice the 'highest' guy spoke from inside a frog when triggered by their recruiter's death, including once when he was unconscious! THEN the next highest will speak up. To elaborate on how strange this is: I tested it at the moathouse, when we first got there someone would RANDOMLY comment on the place ("smells", "baddies here", "danger surrounds us" etc) but after that, when the leader got killed it would ALWAYS be the same character who commented on it, according to the pecking order.

If the 'recruiter' is not the leader, the leftmost PC gets killed, you click on the question-mark and remove them so that the recruiter becomes the leader while the combat is still going (I realise that this is unlikely to happen outside of testing, but what the hey) and then the recruiter / leader gets killed, then the NPCs WILL comment. This whole thing seems to be implemented very consistently according to its own bizarre rules. Note however that the battle cries (for critical hits, being wounded, dying etc) still don't sound in this situation - no luck on those.

Ummm well thats it for now. Next I plan to finish this element off by testing what happens if different people get recruited by different folks - will that break the pecking order (ie Furnok trumps Turuko, but what if the leader who dies recruited Turuko but not Furnok?)

This is not much of a leap forward I know - after all, you always get a comment when a PC dies, if only from them - but its a step in the right direction. Tonight if i get a chance after work i will codify everything so we can see exactly what does and doesn't seem to work.

I am also gonna post an appeal on the main forum for anyone who has ever seen the other battle cries under ANY circumstance. Since things like this one and Zaxis' fleeing thing only happen in specific situations, maybe someone playing a bizarre setup - thingy's one class party, or Liv with her NPC stacked group - has actually heard them on occasion. Can't hurt to ask.

O one other thing. I tested this at great length with about 6 different party setups, different NPCs, different orders of the same characters etc. I ALSO toggled the 'combat taunts' thing in the cfg file on and off periodically - its default is on (go figure). It did absolutely nothing to get the battle cries going <sigh>. I also tried several combats with text switched on: this showed that when the leader / recruiter died, her death comment would come up as text but Turuko's vocal comment (which also came up as text) would override her, and we would only hear his. That may be something. I also intend to test with the violence filter on - since this affects combat, it may do something. We'll see.

 

Lord Spike, stick it in a zip file, that'll both shorten it and change the file type (protos.tabs are about a meg and come in zips so that shouldn't be a problem).

 

Well, if the dialogue is mp3 format it could practically go straight in

 

Follow-up to my help thread

Ok, had my last hack before being distracted for a few weeks and since the modding was stalled, tried this sound thing again. Recruited Fruella (hacked Dad's dialogue since I couldn't find the option to get her to come) for her death comments and took Zert cause of what Gaear said regarding him commenting on being critically hit. (Too much effort to grab Meleny too but will keep her in mind). Off to the frogs!

This time i tried shaking up the positions of the NPCs in the party, particularly putting them at 1st position which I dare say people avoided. No luck, despite Zert getting several critical hits including some that led on to a cleave. (Didn't draw any though, luck of the dice, but did witness some critical missses without commenting). Played through to both getting killed, but no death-throes in any position (including NPC or recruiter at #1).

Now... when the recruiter was the leader and got killed, Zert commented each time, he is above Fruella in the pecking order. When he was already dead and the recruiter / leader was killed, she said, "All right now its personal" or some such thing - actually she said that pretty much simultaneously to getting killed herself but i am confident it was the death of her recruiter / hubby as i wrote about above.

Now for the complicated part - on one occasion, when the recruiter was NOT at leader and got killed, Zert still made his "I warned him to be careful" comment. You may remember he never did that before despite me testing several times, and only did it this once this time.

This would seem to be one of those rare random ones that the other comments (for the moment) appear to be. I will draft Zert into my regular party and try him for an extended test when I am back in gaming mode.

O and Graywolfe, send me a few .wav files you have in mind, the game does recognise them though whether they werk in dialogue mode is an unknown atm (only seen mp3's there, .wavs are used for sound effects etc). I'm at shiningted@yahoo.com.

 

Addendum

For anyone still keeping up: just found ToEE3\mes\pcvoice. The PC's themselves (according to their chosen voice) should ALSO be gloating over their critical hits, mocking their comrades' critical misses, mourning their loss etc. This just keeps getting bigger <sigh>.

 

Its a bugger all right. Mind you the 'mourning their loss' thing should almost certainly be eclipsed by the PC's own death throes which certainly do work - you wouldn't want 8 comments just because someone died - but the critical thing is a real eye-opener.

I guess I should check the sound file to see if there are mp3's to go with the mes file... o well, soon enough.

Am also spending some spare time hacking at the dlls, I am in way over my head but I have a very strong hunch there is something somewhere that ties all this together, and if i can trace back from the calls to mss32.dll that seem to activate the sound stuff, I might be able to pull off a fix based on my old z80 code programming ability from bygone days.