Sound Editing

[ambershee]

Hey all, nice to still see a Dune Community out there :)

Quick question, as it irritates me beyond all belief. Does anyone know how the sound links up with actions that units undertake, for example with firing.

For the puroses of example, how could you take the sound from the kindjal weapon and make that the sound for a weapon firing, if the said weapon didn't already have a sound (and thus eliminating the file renaming option)?

Thanks!

The Ambershee

[Inoculator9]

Switching sound effects can be done with the sfx files in the sfx folder of Emperor. I personally haven't messed around much with these. I'm sure Timenn and Apollyon would know, since they frequent this board, you'll likely get a more learned response soon.

[Apollyon]

Well I'll try to explain as best as I can remember. The XBF files (those are the unit model files) contain various hooks for calling SFX. This will be a description of the animation and mesh followed by obvious words like ORTROOPERSHOT. These hooks link to their counterpart in the SFX folder (There are various text files in here and the SFX will be in 1 or more of them). To simply turn one sound into another find the hook you want to change and change its data to that of another hook (keeping the name the same). Then when the hook is called it will make a new sound depending on what you told it to make. If, however, you want to get a unit to make a different firing sound without affecting other SFX then you need to edit the XBF with a hex editor, find the hook and, if its called say ATSNIPERSHOT, rename it to MYSNIPERSHOT (notice same amount of characters), then go into a corresponding SFX text file, find the sound hook you want, copy and paste it and rename it to MYSNIPERSHOT. I hope you understand that, it's a little complicated and I don't know how much you know about XBF files.

[Inoculator9]

Lol, perhaps a good subject for a new tutorial Apollyon?

[ambershee]

Hey all again  :)!

I'm still playing around with Emperor, heck, you might even see me release a mod sometime in the future, lol!

As it happens, I'm back to playing with sounds files once more. I've noticed that BagTool will export the .w sound files that contain all the units sounds such as firing fx to .wav format so that it is readable. Does anyone know how to replace existing .w files with new ones? I'm assuming you need to convert from a 22khz stereo file amongst other things, but a simple rename does not seem to suffice. On a similar note, how about importing new unit speech files, the cmp files?

Lastly for now, how about importing custom mp3 music into the skirmish game? I've been fiddling to no avail, it seems to refuse to load from HD.

On a non-related note, is it possible to edit the landscape details so that spice mining is disabled totally on the Arrakis maps - just editing the 'hasspice' tag doesn't work. I've the feeling the solution is much more nasty. Also, is it possible to allow for worms / storms to appear on non-arrakis theatres on all maps where possible?

Thanks all, you've been most helpful before, and I'm sure you can be helpful again :D!

[Apollyon]

"Lastly for now, how about importing custom mp3 music into the skirmish game? I've been fiddling to no avail, it seems to refuse to load from HD."

Easy. Put the mp3s in the bag file and play em from there.

As for importing sounds, I've tried a fair few times without success.

Spice mining is easy to disable but only through the rules files. Same with the worms and tornados, possibly.

[ambershee]

However, the skirmish music is always loaded from the CD, not the HD - that's the issue. When modifying the group I get a crash. What group should I be using for the skirmish tracks?

Importing sounds can't be so impossible, surely people have managed somehow - after all, if you can covert a .w file to a .wav file, can't you do the reverse, and replace an existing ingame sounds file?

I've not managed to disable spice mining from the Rules files - on a map that has spice, if you were to remove the harvester and refinery structures from each factions build tree, wouldn't you end up with no cash flow whatsoever? I've commented out hasspice in the 'Type Arrakis' entry in the MapInfo.ini, but is hasn't done anything it seems. What am I overlooking? I can't find any other references to Spice harvesting and Cash Delivery outside of mapinfo and rules.

Mystery to me.

[Apollyon]

"However, the skirmish music is always loaded from the CD, not the HD" No, you're wrong - it's from the HDD.

"Importing sounds can't be so impossible, surely people have managed somehow "

No one has the encoder which means no one can encode them to work on emperor, and no, no one has managed it who is not an IG employee.

As for the spice thing, you never specified that you wanted to have cash delivered, you only said that spice should not be mined. I can't help you on that, I'm afraid.

[ambershee]

My mistake, but if a music file wasloaded from the CD, how would it be replaced?

I find it odd that we have a functional community made decoder but not an encoder. I'll have a go at the author about the decoder.

I'm thinking for the Spice thing, it's going to take hand editing of all the skirmish maps. Ah well, it can be done at least.

[Apollyon]

"My mistake, but if a music file wasloaded from the CD, how would it be replaced?"

You'd have to change it's "Group".

[LocalDefaults]
Volume	=	80
Group = Atreides CD2

[ambershee]

Thanks ;)!

I believe I may have cracked the .cmp sound file format and can convert from .mp3 to it successfully  :O!

However, it may be some of my esrs' (software that will detect format and run sound files using an external program) interrupting the file format and playing it back anyway.

However, I'm willing to put it to the test. If you want to send me a short mp3 of 6/7 seconds of sound, and tell me a specific cmp file to replace, I'll mail it back to you in the correct format for you to try out, providing of course, that your not running similar software.

Send to ambershee@fastmail.fm

I'm eager to get this working!!