Asking questions about sound files . . .

[Guest cornel]

What is the best way to remove all voice acting from KOTOR and TSL?

[Hassat Hunter 571]

Delete the StreamVoices folder; done.

[Guest cornel]

That simple?

No issues with the game not finding sound files?

That's great news! Thanks!

I already half-expected to have to do some heavy modding, lol

[Hassat Hunter 571]

Well, most dialogues will most likely skip fastforward so you need to use the dialogue log to read back on it...

[Guest cornel]

Ooops.. That's not good... I wanted to read all the dialogs, instead of hearing them. But in normal game speed... Is that not possible? i mean, other than the obvious way: silencing all the dialog sound files...

 

The ideal situation (for the time-frame-changing, and thus story-changing mod I'm working on) would be, that I could make my own (non-animated) "cutscenes" with the required dialog divided into several still images, which should be clicked (after reading) to continue on to the next frame. But I don't even know if that is at all possible with these games... I have not yet seen anything on the internet about this type of cutscene-replacements for KOTOR or TSL...

[Circa 40]

Just turn the voice volume down in the settings?

 

But yeah, the best way would be to just make the sound files silent, but keep the duration.

[Sith Holocron 2,478]

If it's not too much off topic, might I ask why you want to silence all of the voice files?

[Guest cornel]

@ Circa: LOL.

 

That's exactly what I thought aswell.

 

@ Sith Holocron: It would give me the freedom of changing the story line / events / characters by changing the dialog text, which is what I am doing right now...

 

Besides, I don't like voice acting in RPG games, I've discovered. It takes me out of the game, instead of involving me more... i dunno... must be that I am difficult or something...

[Hassat Hunter 571]

Not really, you're not alone in that... I much prefer silence in RPG's above full VO aswell... which made me go "nnoooooooo" when Larian mentioned the enhanced edition of Divinity: Original Sin got full VO... and I'm glad D:OS2 does not.

 

Also Pillars of Eternity got it really bad where VO and denoumers were intersperced in the text, but the VO was constant. Made it very confusing to read something, hear it spoken, then suddenly a part was missing that you needed to read very quickly or re-read later... it was... confusing.

 

Tl;dr: You're not alone.

[Guest cornel]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Too_long;_didn't_read

 

I learn something new every single day!

 

 

So... can anyone here tell me if my dream (replacing cutscenes with clickable slideshows) is technically possible with the available modding tools?

[Hassat Hunter 571]

Yup, by using the "delay" field of the dialogue editor.

[Guest cornel]

Sweet! Hadn't seen that one. Thank you, HH!

 

So, I assume that putting a value of -1 in the delay field is equal to "wait for click"?

[Hassat Hunter 571]

No, that means it runs the VO-line and then continues once it's done.

[1Leonard 134]

Also Pillars of Eternity got it really bad where VO and denoumers were intersperced in the text, but the VO was constant. Made it very confusing to read something, hear it spoken, then suddenly a part was missing that you needed to read very quickly or re-read later... it was... confusing.

I get what you're saying, I've been playing the Baldur's Gate saga for the past months (at Throne of Bhaal right now) and that practice is present there as well. Honestly I don't really mind either way but I get why people would be irritated by the inconsistency. 

[Guest cornel]

Is there a value for "wait for click" then?

[Fair Strides 509]

Well, you'd need to time each line and enter a second or so after the line's duration.

 

Obviously, it'd vary from person-to-person on reading speed, though.

[Guest cornel]

I noticed some references to droid sounds in the dialog.tlk that point to a sound file that does not exist... For example:

 

nm41aacart03038_

nm41aacart04119_

nm02aamain99000_

_m40aadeco99005_

 

Has anyone ever noticed that there are moments when a droid says something, "beep beep" kinda subtitles indicate that, but no sound is heard?

[Salk 374]

This is interesting.

 

I will try and investigate.

[Guest cornel]

In my last few posts I've inquired about certain details of the game and how to mod them. This should be the last one, before I start playing the game in earnest...

 

So, to be able to change the story line, I got rid of all the dialog sound files. So far so good. But somehow, it seems, that some sound effects are now also not played. This is what I've noticed:

 

In the dialog cutscene in room 3 on the Endar Spire there's a battle going on between republic soldiers and Sith troopers. Two troopers gun down the last standing rep soldier, you can hear the laser bolts, but the guy goes down silently. No grunt, gasp or sigh... Is this normal? Is this also in the vanilla game? Or is there something wrong?

 

I've located the sound file in sounds.bif (n_repoff_dead.wav). Is there anywhere where I can tell the cutscene to reproduce this file when the rep soldier goes down?

 

 

 

EDIT: Okay, so I started playing the game (couldn't wait any more ) As I advance in the game, I notice that in all the non-movie cutscenes (i.e. the dialog cut scenes), all cries and shouts are gone. You only hear the blasters. Now, I have been going through all the sound files one by one in the deleted streamingwaves folder, but I have only found two such short "voice effect" sound files (BA18CS005A.wavand BA18CS005B.wav) which I restored, so I don't understand why the shouts and screams are not heard anymore in the cut scenes...

 

Can anyone suggest some posible causes?

[LiliArch 115]

All I can think of is that you touched something you shouldn't have...
 

It would give me the freedom of changing the story line / events / characters by changing the dialog text, which is what I am doing right now...

One question... if you're going through all of the dialogues and changing them, why don't you remove the references to VOs from them? That would silence them very efficiently without any other side effects than the fact that (in my opinion) characters look dumb when they are supposed to "speak" and they just stare at you (of course, personal opinion). I mean, I got the picture you're going through them anyway.

[Guest cornel]

References to VOs? You mean, in the dialog.tlk file? I did erase those, but the voice sound files still played, so I had to erase the actual sound files.

[Kexikus 995]

No, that's not what she's talking about.

 

If you open a .dlg file in some dlg editor and select an entry you'll see a field called VO_ResRef. Whatever is written in that field is the name of the audio file used for this line. So if you're editing all the .dlg files anyway, you could just make that field blank and all the voices would be removed.

[Guest cornel]

Oh, right. I see. I actually did not edit any dlg file. I just used them to find the following order of the coversation lines. I edited the dialog.tlk file.

 

If I would edit the dlg files the way you say, would then the dialog not skip anymore?

(Now, with deleted sound files, sometimes the dialog skips because it's dependent on the duration of the relevant sound file...)

[Kexikus 995]

It would indeed no longer skip. If the VO_ResRef is empty, the game waits a certain amount of time (depending on the text length maybe?) before going to the next line.

[Guest cornel]

Great! Thanks Kexikus! You've just solved one of the few remaining irritations I have with my own mod