ExodusRisen Posted October 26, 2014 Share Posted October 26, 2014 (edited) I have the strangest problem with Fallout 3. I’m playing the vanilla game (Game of the Year Edition with all DLC), but no mods or anything… and every once in a while, quite randomly, NPC will just have no voice when I am talking to them. The subtitles work, and their mouths and gestures work, but no voice. Then all of a sudden I’ll pick another conversation topic and they’ll start talking again. When I talked to Vance’s girlfriend in the Family’s base this bug one time affected all her speech except greetings and farewells. It was all totally random, however, and on my last play her speech worked but the old lady, Manya, in Megaton, her speech didn’t. I Googled this problem for like a week before considering posting about it here, and I tried every possible “fix” for voice issues that anybody could come up with. Here is a list of all that I did to try and solve this problem. I have pretty much exhausted all possibilities I could think of. 1. Going under my computer’s control panel to check if my sound is set to just Stereo and nothing like Quad sound or Surround or anything. It’s just set to normal stereo desktop speakers, nothing fancy. Just for laughs I tried setting it to all the other settings and then to off. Nothing helped the voice bug in Fallout 3, however. 2. Playing the radio with the radio volume down during conversations. This also did nothing to fix the voice bug. Just as well, since this was annoying to do every time I wanted to talk to someone in the game. It seemed dubious at best anyway, but I had to try it just in case it was a working fix. It wasn’t, however. 3. Extracting all the voice files from the game’s bsa and putting them in their corresponding folder where the game is installed. This was simple using the Fallout Mod Manager (about the only thing I did use that program for, since I’m not using mods in my game). It did nothing to solve the voice bug either. And took a while to do. 4. Setting the Audio Cache size in the Fallout.ini file to something higher, such as iAudioCacheSize=4096 … this too did nothing to solve the voice bug, though I have left the changed setting since it can only help rather than hinder my game’s audio regardless of the voice bug I have been experiencing. 5. Somebody once suggested the “Skullaputra” fix, as I believe it is called. I tried it and it too did nothing to solve the voice bug. I honestly didn’t think it would work, and hated to try such an odd “fix” but by that point I figured it was worth a try just to see what would happen. It was a no-go however in the end. 6. Installing the latest K-Lite Codec pack. I fully installed K-Lite Codec 1080 Mega and it as well did nothing to solve the voice bug. As with the Audio Cache setting, I decided to keep the new pack since it’s handy and will work well with programs other than Fallout 3. Can’t have too many helpful programs, I say! 7. I also made totally certain that .ogg files are associated with Windows Media Player on my computer, which they totally are, so that's not the answer to the problem either it would seem. The sheer randomness at which this bug hits is annoying, to say the least! Yesterday it struck in Rivet City when I was talking to Doctor Zimmer, today it struck in Megaton as I mentioned before. One day, at the Family’s base and another time at Big Town when I was talking to Dusty. There is no rhyme or reason to the bug, it just happens after a certain amount of time playing, ranging from an hour and a half to two or more hours. One time though, it struck after only fifteen minutes of playing. I have no clue what the cause of this bug could be, and I have read about countless people all over the Internet complaining about it and each of them trying different fixes with different results. But for many, including myself, no fix (at least none I’ve tried or read about) seems to work. Is there any fix for this issue that I am not aware of or have not yet tried which is known to solve this, or is it one of those random Bethesda game bugs that players just have to live with? For the record, I do not have this problem in New Vegas, Oblivion, or Morrowind. Only in Fallout 3, which seems like it’s something in just this game’s coding perhaps. Here are my computer specs (more than enough to run the game without crashing and with no slowdowns or other issues): Dell Inspiron 530 Desktop with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2.00 GHZ (2CPUs)2046 MB RAM, DirectX 9.0c, ATI Radeon HD 3600 video card with 512 MB on it, and Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio for my sound.Lastly, I am running Windows XP. I am running the game in 800x600 resolution, no Antialiasing, Anisotropic Filtering at 8 Samples, Vsync on, and HDR on. Graphics-wise, I have no problems. Both my video card and sound card are updated with the latest drivers available for them, too. So, any idea what could be causing the voices to cut out randomly like this, and if there is an actual proven to work fix for it? Edited October 27, 2014 by ExodusRisen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ExodusRisen Posted October 31, 2014 Author Share Posted October 31, 2014 Well, after much trial and error it appears I have found a solution to this problem at long last! I downloaded and installed Windows Media Player Classic, which specializes in the handling of .ogg files, and I simply associated all of my sound-related (and video related) files with Media Player Classic instead of the default Windows Media Player. I just got through playing Fallout 3 for several hours, and experienced absolutely no voice cutting out at any point. It was a pretty flawless play-through this time, all except for the usual gltiches that are normal with Fallout 3's engine. So that takes care of that! It's a pretty cool game too, now that I'm finally getting to enjoy it. :D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts