New sounds for ToEE

'Mob combat scripts'? That might be relevant, do you remember where she mentioned it?

 

Was arranged for but didn't get implemented is my bet. Another in the long list. Who has time to impliment extra PC/NPC dialogue when you've still got to script half the battles and the game has to ship in 2 weeks? :roll:

btw Ted, I see a shining star in your future . . . something to do with an entry in "Released Modifications and Tools" . . . Shiningted's Dialogue Expander or something of the like. It's still kind of foggy to me . . .

 

Thanks for the support guys, I bought a book today called "secrets of reverse engineering" that should bring my old z80 assembler knowledge up to scratch (or back from the dead) and for the first time i actually feel vaguely confident of a fix or two, not just a specific cataloguing of the problems which is where i was heading (once i realised it was not scripting problems but something deeper). Anyways, don't hold ur breath, do hold your rosary ;-)

Of course, the sound we really need is one of the monsters singing, "C is for cookie, thats good enough for me!!!"

Thanks Ki Rin, not at all familiar with the intricacies of NWN, but the thing i am werking on this very sec is some IWD sounds Lord Graywolfe sent me to go in, so if i can pull that off i'll let u know and we can move on to those (or i can post a step-by-step and u can put them in).

 

I won't work with that Drifter, he showed up without a word, shot my brother, made love to my wife and rode my horse outta town.

Or did he shoot my wife, make love to my horse and...?

Never mind.

 

Step-by-step to introduce new PC voices

Ok, inspired by Lord Graywolfe's efforts I have worked out how to add new PC voices to the game, and indeed have done so, to the tune of EIGHT new characters so far, 4 male and 4 female (haven't uploaded them yet, have hit the limit on my cable for the month <sigh>). Figured I should explain how here, especially since it sheds a little light on the missing voices issue (not a lot, and nothing good, but a little none the less).

First things first: thanks again to Graywolfe, but I wasn't able to use the files you sent me either: they are indeed codeced by something I don't have. That being said, i don't have much sound stuff on my PC, I just keep WMP up-to-date. But from d/ling lots of other BG and IWD soundsets, I can tell you BG uses a form of .wav that it recognises but no-one else seems to - we are not the only ones who have this issue. O and for any smarty who thinks the can help, try getting some BG files here:

http://modlist.pocketplane.net/index.php?ax=list&cat_id=38

and see if u can figure out the codec necessary.

Anyway I have downloaded a few codecs for this and that (div-X and what-not) in my life so i went looking and tried a few, but no joy. So the particular voices I have used are actually made by amateurs like us (though making quality stuff), who have created voices for mods and distributed them in normal .wav format. I stole them and fiddled them for ToEE: hey, who ever heard of a ToEE modder who wasn't a rogue? ;-) O and while I am giving credit: I used MTHree's .wav to .mp3 converter (2.3), thanks for ummmm I think it was Gaear and Taltamir for advice in this area. Acknowledgements for the voices will be with the files of course, i think their creators would probably be chuffed they are helping ToEE as well as BG and IWD etc.

Finally, yes there are plenty more voices to come, I have only done eight so far. It is a simple but very time-consuming procedure to 'convert' them to ToEE.

So, the step by step.

There are only 2 files you have to alter as far as I can tell (though I am looking for others to see if i can fiddle with volume, reverb etc: but these two certainly do the job). These files are both called 'pcvoice.mes', one is in the rules folder, one in the mes folder, and both can be found in ToEE3.dat.

Crack them open! (Notepad will do, 'tools' are for sissies.) In the file from the mes folder we have the familiar names of the current PC voices, "righteous warrior", "zealous healer", "raspy", "gruff" etc. The numbers stop at 21 (29 once my voices are up ;-)) but you can include up to number 63 if you want: with the instructions at the top about how the 2 pcvoice.mes files interact (the one points at the other), its an interesting indication that this was one area that was always intended to be modded. Hey Troika got something right! Imagine what might have been <sigh>

Ok, so lets pretend we are adding an "ordinary bloke" voice (because I did). So, lets make him #23, we therefore add {23}{Ordinary bloke}

Thats what will show up on the creation screen. Now for the other pcvoice.mes file in the rule folder.

Open it up. Here we have bizarrely named things like:
{5}{FHmnRog.mes}
{6}{FHmnSor.mes}
{7}{FHocFtr.mes}
{8}{MDwfClr.mes}
{9}{MDwfFtr.mes}
Etc. You can probably figure out what they mean, the thing to notice is the male ones start with M and the female with F. Follow this. This is why we can't give our characters cross-gendered voices (c'mon, we've all thought of it...)

So, for our ordinary bloke, lets call him 'MBlokey.mes'. That will show up as
{23}{MBlokey.mes} The 23 part connects it to the previous file of course, but what is this MBlokey.mes thing?

Go back to the mes folder in ToEE3.dat and you should see a folder called pcvoice (anything to do with this exercise seems to be called pcvoice, you get that.} Open it up, and there are the files FHocFtr.mes, MDwfClr.mes etc. So of course we are going to add one called MBlokey.mes. To do this, simply copy one (lets copy MElfRgr.mes so we are both on the same page) and rename it MBlokey.mes.

Ok, open it and lets get on with the fun part. There are a number of different catagories:

// Acknowledging an order (saying yes)
// Unable to perform an action (saying no)
// Encumbered
// Death Cry
// Near Death
// Death of a party member
// Combat start
// Critical hit BY a party member
// Critical hit ON a party member
// Critical miss BY a party member
// Accidental damage
// Opening a chest with a lot of gold
// Entering a map for the first time by Area Number
// Encountering a boss monster
// Tagged scenery (special areas like Thrommel's room or the big bronze doors)
// Bored...zzz (whining when nothing is happening)
// Using the power of a deity (crying out to various Gods)

I list them all because as u can probably see, MOST do not ever appear in the game. "What a fabulous polished piece of software", you say. I agree, have a cookie. The only ones that do seem to appear regularly are saying yes, saying no, encumbrance, death gurgles, accidental damage, and opening a chest with lotsa treasure.

Why not the area ones? They work with NPC's after all... well, heres a fascinating thing. They DO appear here in the dlg files (thats what these are by the way: this stuff will show up on the screen if you switch on subtitles) but there are NO corresponding MP3s in the sound folders! Why not? I'm glad you asked.

I have added appropriate mp3s to 'ordinary bloke' and the others - i mean they are not exact, but if u have an mp3 that plays "what a nice forest" u don't need to be a member of Mensa to figure out it plays better in the deklo grove than the fire node. However, when I play-tested these, they were very erratic: the moathouse ones played the mp3 for Hommlet as often as for the moathouse, the Emridy Meadows didn't play at all, the Ogre cave mp3 played when I went into the traders establishment, and I forget what played when I went up onto the second floor of the Wench but since nothing should have, you get the picture. Anyway, I have left them in since it is easy to 'turn them off', just recruit an NPC and they will trump the party vocals as they normally do. Also, I or someone more knowledgable may be able to fix the whole thing at a later date and it will be good to have them there.

Hopefully a fix will present itself, but I have to say, the erraticness of the playing combined with the lack of mp3 files in the PC's folders for this stuff (they stop at the 1100's) suggest to me Troika couldn't get this working at all due to time constraints and scrapped it. Ho hum. Not something a n00b hacker like myself is going to be able to fix in any hurry.

Back to the 'fun part'. Keep MBlokey.mes open, and then get out your new sound files you want to put in. Doesn't matter if they r .wav or .mp3, if they are .wav we can convert them later. You want to put them all in a folder named, u guessed it, 23. This goes in Temple of Elemental Evil\data\sound\Speech\pcvoice, so in the end you will be working in a folder called:
Temple of Elemental Evil\data\sound\Speech\pcvoice\23

Put all your .wav or .mp3 files in there. (If you want to work on them seperately then convert them and stick them in there later, its not a problem). Now the fun begins: and this is fun, but its also dull and tedious. A bit like sex: lots of fun but goes on and on and on... well at least for me ;-). Probably if there was someone else there with me it would be different lol.

Take your first file. Play it. Check MBlokey.mes. Find somewhere it matches. If it is complaining about encumbrance, it goes in the 200's, if it is just agreeing with you, put it at 0 or 1, if it is saying how they don't like deep dungeons, perhaps 1214 is the go.

Now... change the dialogue of the line number to match what you hear. Then rename the file to match the line number exactly.

Example: my Ordinary bloke has a file where he eulogises a fallen comrade with a mangling of Hamlet. So, lets put that at 500. Change the dialogue line and it will now look like this:

{500}{Alas, poor... hmmm, I didn't really know you.}

Then we change the mp3 file to match: we rename it 500.mp3.

Its that easy.

Then we do it with ALL the mp3 files. <Yawn>

If you have lines left over at the end, extras you have not replaced, best to delete them (if they are in the 0-1100 range). For instance, you may notice there are 5 seperate options for encumbrance (200-204). If you only had one mp3 complaining about encumbrance, stick it in at 200 obviously and then delete the rest. Otherwise, the engine will pick one of these 5 lines randomly, and if its not 200, then nothing will sound (it won't crash or anything but nothing will happen, which sorta defeats the purpose).

Ok, so go through and do that to all the lines. Dull, init?

All that remains now is to convert the .wavs to .mp3 if necessary, and then store the other files in the game itself.

The pcvoice.mes from the mes file goes in Temple of Elemental Evil\data\mes. Also in here should be the pcvoice folder (Temple of Elemental Evil\data\mes\pcvoice) in which to put mblokey.mes. And finally the pcvoice.mes file from the rules folder of course goes in Temple of Elemental Evil\data\rules. These folders should already exist if you have the Co8 patches (but create them if u have to). Folder 23 should already have been created by u since we were working in it: Temple of Elemental Evil\data\sound\Speech\pcvoice\23, remember?

That's that! Remember don't start before number 30 or it will get overwritten when u put mine in later (u will d/l mine won't u???)

Speaking of which, how do i save path names in zip files? I gotta squish many mbs of mp3s in here.

 

Sounds like some very good work there. Kudos to The Ted.

I d/led a random soundset from your link and had no problem with it. Not sure exactly what the problem is . . .

I've got a couple ready-made sets from IWD2 if you want them - both fems, one "hot" sounding (says provocative things) and one sort of normal but with attitude at least. I could get every one for you from the BGs and IWDs if you want. The existing resources would suffice I guess, but I noticed the one I d/led sounding sort of crappy; it had an 11025 sample rate, iirc.

Just a note, in my hijack attempts at ToEE sound editing I simply duped any redundant files. That is, if I had 2 different files for bitching about encumbrance, but ToEE accomodated 4, I copied each of my files and used it twice. I was afraid ToEE looking for a file and not finding it might CTD. Not sure if it actually would.

Carry on, Ted. I think that cracking this thing open will improve the game much more than people really understand.

 

Good thinking: I tried that with the area vocal things to make sure there were no gaps causing problems, no joy alas.

But I didn't pare the dlg files as much as I should the first run through and there were no crashes, just sometimes you asked them to click on a door or something and there was no sound. Another use of obj_handle_null or whatever it is called, the game seems pretty good at that. After all, the NPCs are hit and miss whether they have files about entering areas. Since i got 2 more days before I am back on my full cable allowance, I will polish things up.

Was it an actual BG or IWD set, or one of the custom ones. The custom ones should work. The ones i have tried are 5 from HoW (thats IWD II or something?) that Lord Graywolfe sent me, and Drizzt and Sarevok from BG (I remember Sarevok ;-)) and a few others too I d/led seperately, all in .wav form, none worked. Do you think you have any special codecs installed? And what did u use to play them may I ask? Hmmmm... maybe I should reinstall BG, that might be a plan ;-)

 

Okay, here's the deal. I tried a Warcraft Ranger set initially, and that worked. So I tried Sarevok today like you said and it doesn't work. But a closer look shows what the problem is: they're not actually .wav files, they're raw data. That's like taking a digital photo without defining it's format - not very usable in general.

Wave files are Windows' native digital audio format, so if you're running Windows you should be able to play any .wav file. (Or at least Windows PCM, which is what I think most .wav files are.) I use Cool Edit Pro (which later became Adobe Audition).

I wonder, can Lord_graywolfe play the files he sent you, or did he just pass them along or something?

 

He said he couldn't, and i noticed other sites that mentioned the files would play inside BG but not in WMP.

Hey send those two girly soundsets over, my email is up the thread somewhere 8^)

 

On the way. You'll see that some are kind of a stretch, but there simply aren't selections for every possibility ToEE accomodates. The yes and no stuff is easy, but IWD2 didn't have encumbrance bitching, for example. I substituted with "I'm tired, we should rest" comments, which might actually be better than "THIS PACK IS FULL!"

(I always wondered, What pack? Oh, you mean your pack. You carry your pack, I'll carry mine, a-hole. )