New Horizon on 3/11/2005 at 13:53
Has anyone extracted the sounds in T3 and noticed how bloody fast the schema browser loads when the sounds are extracted? I think I used to wait 3 to 4 minutes but it's opens in less than 30 seconds now. What the heck?
Definately another vote for programming some kind of extraction tool that will take things a step further than DXIW Sound Drone.
Another thing that would be neat is if the extractor could create empty 'dummy' .wav files for all the .oggs. As it stands now, the perl script won't load the oggs into the metafile without the dummy wav files. If the extractor just created empty text files and name them....oggname.wav ..etc...it would be very helpful. Unless there is some way to rewrite the perl script to be more efficient?
On a related topic. I wonder what it is that prevents some sounds from being played when the metafiles aren't present. None of the guard chatter will play at all. Such a shame. If we didn't have to package up these silly metafiles, we could provide a single download and have people drop only custom sounds into their folders.
Ziemanskye on 3/11/2005 at 17:19
How do the schema files work anyway, I mean I have 5 of them in my sound directory...
Just thinking (hoping?) there'd be someway to bake mini schema files with new sounds in them, rather than having to play with the fat old ones.
Given that sound drone appears to open all of them at once I'm guessing there's some pointers in there that go around each other, so maybe some part of the old files would need patched/unpatched with the new schemas, but I'm reasonably sure that if the idea works it'd be possible as a GL plugin bit that just gets on with it as you try play the FM.
New Horizon on 3/11/2005 at 18:04
Hmmm, that got me thinking. I'll have to try this later to see if it's possible.
If I understand the process correctly, the perl script searches for the sound files in the same folders as the one the utility folder is stored in. This might not make a lot of sense...but...
If we were to locate the utility folder outside our main folder and set it up like this.
dummyT3Ed/ Utility
dummyT3Ed/CONTENT/T3/Sounds/...place custom schemas and sounds here.
Then we simply navigate to this directory in the dos prompt and have perhaps rename the output files to custom 1, 2, 3, whatever...
If you're using ogg files, make sure you have dummy wavs and then compile.
I don't know if T3 will use the extra schema files or not...but it's worth a shot. This might work for only packaging the custom sounds.
OrbWeaver on 3/11/2005 at 18:12
I don't think you can modify the schema filenames or add extra ones. All of the metadata is in SchemaMetaFile_HardDrive.csc and the others contain raw sound data that is referenced from the HardDrive file. Internally the files are referenced numerically, so presumably the names are hardcoded in the game itself.
rujuro on 3/11/2005 at 19:43
If you look at the custom conversation thread, you will see that this has already been implemented to a degree. There is a tool that can be used to add new schemas to the HardDriveMetafile without disturbing the functionality of the DVD ones. Hopefully I can get it to work seamlessly with GL. Problem is it can't remove old schemafiles or anything like that (assuming I've understood what is being discussed here).
(
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=100761)
OrbWeaver on 3/11/2005 at 21:14
The issue here is to move data in the other direction - from the schema files into separate folders. That tool won't do the job, although its author would have a pretty good understanding of the file format so if he was willing to extend its functionality...
