ahhh.....UTF -> XML project

all i want is a dang preview button for .tgas and .wavs - its nice to be able to extract all those voice files, but ah...finding where they go by CRC?ugh! So,what are these crc's to? the GCS voice sounds?

Yes, that's what they are. I even thought (very briefly) of making them exterior, named files like other Sounds (I am pretty sure that you can do that), but I'm far enough behind on the next release of Toolkit as-is...

i see what you mean after looking at the difference between dialogue and voice sounds - have you substituted a voice message for one from the UTF? if so there should be some way to generate all the data by checking the crc's against the voice entries and then extracting the UTF data and naming it correctly and then generating a list of sounds - but how do you assign those sounds to a voice when they're external i wonder - i don't see any linkages,so it seems the dialogue files are probably called in storyline scripts

All of the NN_Voices, etc. refer to the name of the file. Therefore, one must presume, when you find the right Voice... you're looking at the CRC. I'll tell you now- hunting through the UTF just for the two Messages I wanted to replace with nulls was a completely mind-numbing chore...

But I see no reason why those sections couldn't be re-written with proper [Sound calls... the rest of their entries is about the same... they refer to the same dropoff level stuff as other Sounds. Methinks that they're just packed into the UTFs either to pack them tighter, or because they could be pre-loaded better. Or something. But I think that they could all be recoded and have the proper references added in the Missions, etc.

That'd knock out all of the bad Voices errors... or at the very least, give us a way to see what FL's calling for that it cannot find, come to think of it.

I just don't have time to re-build this right now- we're talking about a lot of hunting through files, extracting things, giving them unique labels, and then assigning them in the Voices sections as "proper" sounds with regular references. But I am still pretty confident that this will work just fine.

Louva-Deus was talking about cleaning up the sounds at one point, but he's been busy with other things lately. I might take a look at this later, but quite honestly, I doubt it- somebody else is going to have to volunteer to fix this particular mess

Edited by - Argh on 10/4/2005 12:52:47 AM

Man, you're putting more work into that toolkit than I've ever seen.

Nah, compared with Free Worlds, this is just a lark- I'm hardly creating any new content at all right now. It's all code-side stuff, and most of it's boring optimizations that only about one in ten modders is going to get anyhow. OK, so there are a lot of cool things in the mod, like the visuals have been drastically improved, I have (a few) custom planets with penumbras ala X3, and ... a few surprises... but still, it's not about adding new stuff to FL. At this point... it's about refining the codebase, so that fewer crappy mods get made. The last (really hard) part is the Encounters code, which I'm going to finish this week... then it's time to beta-test, add a few special things I've been working on, and put the mod out. Hopefully two weeks from now, it'll be done and I can take a break for a week before getting the next things done...

I am obviously going to have to make time to have a look asap...