Sound replacement possible?

[LiQuiD911]

I tried cooking the the mission control track but I probably got the naming wrong. My plan is to set the Ready for battle music to Pacific Rim since I spend like 10 minutes just equiping the squad and after a while the music gets annoying. And adding other McCann battle music :) Too bad we can't distribute those. So yeah, could you post the patch/istructions for the music array config? Also I noticed that there are sounds in the EU folder which are not present in EW, like the SoundAmbience-<continent>_SF.upk. I'm not sure if I've heard those ingame (could it be that they are integrated in EW maps?)

[tracktwo]

JohnnyLump: Basically what WGhost said. There is no requirement that the new voices have 15 banks, or the banks have exactly the same number of unique clips. I posted that just to give you an idea of what a stock bank looks like. The naming scheme is just a convention for organization purposes and doesn't really play any part in the actual game logic. The 01 in SM01 just means voice 1. In general they map to the voice # you select in the UI, but not exactly. For females it seems to be the case, but for males it works a little differently. There is no male 2 english package, voice number 2 in the UI is actually the male 3 english package.

 

I do think you need to have a clip for each event in each bank you choose to have. Having partially empty banks would mean that if that bank happens to be cued up when the event needs to play, it'll play silence instead of trying to find another bank that actually has something in it. That's just speculation on my part, but I believe it's accurate because the cueing of the next bank happens after a sound is played, not while trying play a sound. So if you want 15 banks per voice, but have only 9 healing ally clips, then yes, 6 of them will have to be re-used to fill out the remaining banks. This is precisely what the stock banks do. And yes, they'll be slightly more commonly chosen, simply because you have fewer clips to choose from. Having fewer options for rarely used events is likely fine. And again, I think this is why they went to using random cues to have two move and dash clips in most of the banks: 15 wasn't enough for those events, so they added more. Adding more banks just for the two really common events would mean more duplication of all the other sounds to fill out the remaining 12 or 13 new banks, which would just take up disc space and memory on multiple copies of exactly the same sounds. They probably determined 15 to be the best number for most events and so went with 15 banks, filling up the infrequently used sounds with duplicate copies in some banks, and adding random nodes for the more frequent ones to get more variety.

 

LiQuiD911: Be careful with the cue names, because by default UDK uses the suffix "_Cue", which is the case in all the voice banks, but the music packs don't use an underscore, it's just something like ActionMusic1Cue, for example. Did you replace the HQSound_MCMusic_SF.upk package? (I think that's the loadout one?)

 

Edit: I'll post the patch for the combat music when I get a chance. But that's specific to the tactical music. Changing the HQ music needs to be done slightly differently, and you can't just list multiple cues to the ini for the MC music to get it to play one randomly. However, you can import multiple tracks into one package and use a random node in the cue to get the same effect. If you're familiar with hex editing the UPKs the class you want is XcomHQSoundCollection. Making that one customizable is less useful though, because like I said they're done differently with a single track for each "event". Probably simpler for HQ music to just overwrite the package with a custom one, making sure the package and cues are named identically. Open up your new package in UE explorer to verify.

Edited October 13, 2014 by tracktwo

[johnnylump]

 

 

I do think you need to have a clip for each event in each bank you choose to have.

 

Ideally, then, the number of clips per event should all be divisible by our max banks per voice (move and dash notwithstanding), so if we keep to 15, 3 or 5 would be best.

[tracktwo]

That would ensure no one clip is more likely to play than any other, yeah. But the stock clips aren't that careful, lots have 6 or 7 or 11 clips.

[wghost81]

I do think you need to have a clip for each event in each bank you choose to have. Having partially empty banks would mean that if that bank happens to be cued up when the event needs to play, it'll play silence instead of trying to find another bank that actually has something in it. That's just speculation on my part, but I believe it's accurate because the cueing of the next bank happens after a sound is played, not while trying play a sound.

Yes, it will "play" silence and load a next bank.

 

Basically, a number of banks is determined by a number of different sounds you want to have for a least frequently occurring event. The most frequent events, like moving and shooting, can be randomized by adding 4-5 additional random sounds to each bank. The more sounds you have in one bank, the more memory you'll be consuming in game. I think, vanilla system tries to balance sounds variety over memory usage.

Edited October 13, 2014 by wghost81

[LiQuiD911]

Mission control is the hologlobe music, I was just testing how cooking works so I chose the easiest to access. Sorry if I didn't explain myself, I would like to add battlemusic but replace the hq ones.

I have an Idea about adding "legit" mccann music (however it's too complicated and probably not worth the effort xD), there are the 2 "Ambient chase" tracks at soundcloud, they are freely downloadable. My idea is to create an "illegal" upk out if one of them, then replace the bulk ogg with zeroes, so it can be distributed freely. The next step is to make a script that "wgets" the mp3 from soundcloud,transcode in ogg (that fits the one above ) and replaces the zeroes with the actualy data.

 

Edit: also, a random finding, the Choose-your-squad on that site is a variation on the one in-game (or is it just louder?)

https://soundcloud.com/michaelmccannmusic/xcom-eu-ready-for-battle

Edited October 13, 2014 by LiQuiD911

[tracktwo]

Ah yeah, I see the battle music cue now in the soldier select package. WGhost's recent changes to patchupk allow it to patch new ogg data into a package even with resizing, so you don't necessarily need to have them be the same size. I'm not sure if the version on nexusmods has been updated or if you need to compile from source on github to get the new feature that allows updating the absolute offsets in sound nodes.

[LiQuiD911]

Oh wow, it would be easier than expected (:

[tracktwo]

There is a post much earlier in this thread with a sample patch file that Wghost posted. Getting the size right is a little tricky because you have to count the native data (0x50 bytes), the size of the ogg, and the size of the default param array.

[wghost81]

Yes, I have updated nexus version with a new features. Haven't yet worked on auto-calculating default properties and sizes out of ogg file, though. Edited October 13, 2014 by wghost81