OK, here's how you change the impact sounds

[Moraelin]

Sorry if anyone already figured this out before, but seeing that the latest FOMM doesn't have a form for IPDS, I thought I'd share it.

 

So, say you made your cattle-prod (as in FO2) or lightsaber, even added custom sounds, but it still sounds like a plain old sword when you hit someone with it. How do you change that?

 

Well, the answer lies in the IPDS entry that your weapon uses. At least the melee weapons reference it in its INAM sub-record. No idea about guns, but I'm guessing either the gun or the PROJ must have the same. So just get the ID from there and you can search for that form ID in the IPDS group.

 

You'll want to make a copy of it in your own mod, and give it a new form ID and EDID, as usual.

 

The only field it has, other than ID is the DATA field, which is a mess of binary data. It's actually easier to dig inside this than you'd think. It's simply made of groups of 4 bytes (groups of 2 hex digits), and each group is an IPCT form id. Just place the cursor at the beginning in FOMM, and copy the id from the Form ID field below, and search for that form id in the IPCT group. Then advance 4 groups of digits to the left, get the id there, and so on.

 

This gives you all the IPCT entries that your weapon uses. Each is for a different situation. One is for when you hit wood, one for when you hit normal flesh, one for hitting ghouls, one for hitting metal, and so on. The EDID of each already tells you which it is.

 

You'll need to copy them to your mod too, if you want to edit them.

 

You'll also want to give them new FormIDs and EDIDs.

 

But, here comes the less fun part: obviously, you also need to change the IPDS->DATA sub-record to the new IDs.

 

So to sumarize: for each such group of 4 pairs of digits, if it was "12 34 05 00", you'll need to search for the IPCT with the ID "00053412". Now you'll want to copy it to your own mod. You'll want to change its id, say, to "00F53412" (be creative with the new ids, though). Now you'll need to find that group of 4 pairs of digits in the IPDS->DATA again and change it from the old value, to the new value: e.g., from "12 34 F5 00".

 

Repeat for all such groups, or rather, for all that you plan to change. If you're ok with some sounds, you don't need to redefine them.

 

Now this gave your weapon new IPCT entries, but not actually new sounds.

 

The sounds are in the SNAM sub-record of each IPCT.

 

But again, you don't think they'd make it easy. Each SNAM is _not_ directly the filename of a .wav file, but rather the ID of a SOUN entry.

 

To actually register your new sounds, you'll need to define new SOUN entries in your mod. Or copy the ones you want to change, give them new FormID and EDID, as usual.

 

_Now_ you can finally enter the filenames of your sounds. Each SOUN entry has a FNAM field, which is simply the filename of a .wav file. The original ones tend to be mono, 32000 Hz, btw, maybe it's safer to stick to that.

 

Don't forget to update the IPCT->SNAM entries with the ids of your new SOUN records.

 

 

BONUS CHALLENGE

 

At this point you might discover that your sounds are way too soft.

 

The SOUN record doesn't just hold the filename of the .wav, but also at which volume it should be played. If the devs recorded, say, a sword-draw too loudly, they then just reduced the volume in the SOUN record. Unfortunately now you copied that together with the .SOUN and your mega-nuke sounds softer than your cat's footsteps. Darn.

 

I found that that information must be somewhere in the SNDX sub-record of each SOUN record. Namely it seems to be in the last 4 bytes (pairs of hex digits) of it. Setting those to "00 00 00 00" seems to make all my sounds louder.

 

Or if in doubt, just copy the whole SNDX contents from something really loud, e.g., from the firing sound of Lincoln's rifle.

 

The crappier ones are those which have a SNDD instead, but those don't seem to be referenced by IPCTs. At a superficial impression, this fields seems to be simply a concatenation of what other sounds have in SNDX, ANAM and GNAM. It beats me why Bethesda would do the same thing in two wildly differet ways, but maybe it's not the same thing. Mess with that at your own risk.

 

 

TARGETS OF OPORTUNITY

 

Since we just copied the IPCTs, there are more things of interest in there.

 

E.g., the MODL entry, which is the path to a .nif to be used on impact. For example, if your cattle prod should do a big lightning effect on impact, model it in a .nif and write its filename here.

 

The DNAM sub-record also gives you the decal for that kind of impact, so your cattle prod could leave a scorch mark instead of a nick on wood. This is in the form of an ID of a TXST record.

 

Mind you, I haven't experiemented much with decals and impact visuals, so you're mostly on your own if you do.

[Sephlyn]

Thanks for sharing!

 

 

Aren't you the one who's doing the Lightsabers in the first place?

I love that mod (I'd love it if you introduced versions of the weapon with higher and lower damages,[but more so a longer blade]) but that is a different story

Did you find this out while toying with that kind of stuff?

[Moraelin]

Basically, yeah. I got annoyed at it still sounding like a chinese sword when I hit anything with it.

 

About the damage, well, as I was saying in the readme, it's not even possible to please everyone. For the vanilla game, the damage is too high, but together with some mixes of rebalance mods out there it's actually much too low. If you want a different value, just open it in FOMM and set it to any value you wish.

 

About the length, well, the thing is I don't know how much 1 unit is in the .nif. I know how long a lightsabre blade should be, but when working in unknown units, how many of them do I need? An inch its obviously _not_. Is it a centimetre? I'll be darned if I know. Maybe someone more skilled in this kind of thing can enlighten me :/

[Sephlyn]

I sure do hope so other then that I think its great (cause you seem to update it often which is awesome. and last version I have you said you still wanted to synth better sounds)

[Moraelin]

I got a bit side-tracked and gave it a better glow instead ;)

[LordNapalm]

Hey man, I was racking my brain about these idle sounds.

 

Not sure if you know this.. but the idle sounds actually have markers set into the wav files that define where the loop is.

 

If you're able to get one of the original sounds to loop, I can put the correct markers into a new sound file with adobe audition. I've tried it out, doesn't seem to work.

 

Maybe the SNDD value refers to these markers?

I don't know.

 

Let me know your thoughts.

[LordNapalm]

SO.. in the idle sound files from Bethesda, it's set up like this.

 

equip[loop]unequip.

 

There don't appear to be equip and unequip files in the folders if the idle is set up this way.

 

I tried setting a file up like this, then deleting the equip/unequip entries for the weapon.

Strangely, they still played until I deleted the actual files.

 

This game is a strange animal.

[Moraelin]

Yeah, it's weird all right. I think I'll just wait for the GECK and see if I have more luck with that.