Radio Station help- songs not playing

[DorostheConqueror]

I'm making a radio station mod, but I can't seem to get the songs to play. I checked a couple of tutorials and community made radio mods to see if I could tell what's wrong, but I can't figure out the problem. I know it's probably something really stupid and obvious, so would anyone like to give me a hand?

 

The radio station appears on my PipBoy. The songs play fine in the Geck's preview window, but the radio station in game is nothing but dead air. I've done the following:

 

. Converted some .mp3s to .wav, and made Sound objects out of them.

. Added a Talking Activator for my radio station and set it to broadcast everywhere.

. Linked the Talking Activator to a Radio Station Quest.

. Used the Radio tab to create a Greeting and Playlist topic.

. Left the Greeting blank and Linked it to the Playlist.

. Added the .wav Sound object data to the Playlist responses.

. Linked the Playlist back to the Greeting.

. Saved and tested to no avail.

 

Any ideas on what might be causing the problem? I'll try uploading the mod here if that would help.

 

-edit- I uploaded a stripped down version of what I've got so far and set it to hidden, but I'm not sure if anyone can download it. http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=37655

[Trueform]

I have had a very similiar problem which unfortunately I haven't been able to solve as of yet, though I believe it's something to do with how the .wav is imported and converted. It needs to be converted as a mono .wav instead of a stereo, and I think you need to record it in the dialogue menu. Any help anyone can add here would also be very useful to me too :)

[DorostheConqueror]

Well, I've been playing around with it, and I don't think it's the .wavs. I converted them to mono like you suggested and tested them by overwriting some songs in a downloaded radio mod. They play fine, so the sound files work. I'm not so sure the recording is the problem; I read a F3 radio tutorial that recommended doing this, but it creates sound files in Sound/voices, rather than Sound/songs. The working radio mods I've seen as well as the vanilla radio all use music stored in Sound/songs and linked to a Sound object.

[Trueform]

Hmm that is odd. If no solution is found soon, I may contact someone who has already made a radio station and see if they can help find out where we've been going wrong :)

 

I have managed to get one song to play before, though I don't know how I did it because to my knowledge, I didn't do anything different than I did when trying the other songs, and then it just played once. Very strange :pinch:

Edited November 21, 2010 by Trueform

[DorostheConqueror]

Still nothing. I'm going to try playing around with FNVedit to see if there's some hidden screwup preventing us from making radio stations in the GECK. I've got about 120 working wavs sitting in a folder waiting to be modded in, and it's driving me NUTS!

[Trueform]

Still nothing. I'm going to try playing around with FNVedit to see if there's some hidden screwup preventing us from making radio stations in the GECK. I've got about 120 working wavs sitting in a folder waiting to be modded in, and it's driving me NUTS!

 

Where are you putting your talking activator? Mine only worked the once when I placed it with both the vanilla radio stations, in New Vegas.

Edited November 22, 2010 by Trueform

[DorostheConqueror]

Sweet Azura...

 

Well, I figured out what went wrong. It took me about three hours of painfully slow reverse engineering, but I finally isolated the problem. There are actually two, both related to the radio quest dialogue.

 

1. The dialogue response text in my song Playlist. I had them set up like this:

"{ Song title }"

"{ Song title }"

...like how they wrote them for Radio New Vegas, placed inside those comment tags. The game doesn't like that, I guess it assumes there is no dialogue for that response, so it doesn't play the sound? I removed all special symbols from the dialogue response text, and it works.

 

2. The initial topic's editor ID. I had my dialogue greeting topic labeled as:

"zmodRADIOstationnameHello"

It seems that the radio works ONLY when the greeting dialogue topic is set to "RadioHello". No clue why. Switching the topic to RadioHello makes it work fine.

 

There's a third problem, too. The wavs work great, but they're big. REAL big. A few wavs might not be a problem, but twenty or so wavs takes up a full 300 MB. I'm going to have to figure out a way to get around the mp3 "play for four seconds then skip" problem, because there's no way in hell I'm going to use 2 full gigs of harddrive space just for New Vegas songs. The TA location doesn't seem to matter, at least not for me; I have my TAs set up in a custom built cell. Just be sure to select the TA in the render window and set ti to broadcast Everywhere! That's an easy step to miss.

 

I'm not sure if you're experiencing any of these problems, but if you still can't get your radio running, let me know and I'll try and help.

[Trueform]

That's excellent info, and thank you very much for the help :)

 

I'm currently working on a rather large mod, but once that's done, I'm gonna head back to the radio station and see if I can't make it work using the tips you have given.

 

Thanks again for letting me know, and kudos to you for the assistance and research :)