Corrupted Sounds Solutions and Discussion

[Steph]

I don't understand your issue here. The sound_packed is a file that I then integrates inside my own pack.
I don't put it alone in the data folder.

[DARTH VADER]

Steph, have you made it to work with Shogun 2? We are talking about Shogun 2 issues here not Napoleon.

[Steph]

I don't have Shogun 2, only NTW. But when I see some of you are using it differently from what I did in Napoleon, and what I did work in NTW, I make suggestion so you can try to use it the same way with Shogun.

[Kurisu Paifuaa]

I don't understand your issue here. The sound_packed is a file that I then integrates inside my own pack.
I don't put it alone in the data folder.

Right, that would be ideal. Just keeping it separate for now as it's one less step while testing and that's how crux3d laid it out in the instructions.

I was just speculating that the game may treat a pack with that directory differently because it seemed to be loading it despite removing it in the user script (packed as type mod). Hadn't encountered that before and it led to some confusion.

[DARTH VADER]

I have updated the test packs.
Please test again **URGENT** TEST THIS OPEN BETA! (Update 2, 6/6/2012)

The mangonels still sound like cannons though. What else sounds weird, can you find?

Also, I hope that the mod is enabled fully. Some files may not be enabled due to the error reported by Crux. The solution would be that proposed by Hedge Knight, to make the sounds load as movie or patch as these always load first.

[Kurisu Paifuaa]

I have updated the test packs.
Please test again **URGENT** TEST THIS OPEN BETA! (Update 2, 6/6/2012)

The mangonels still sound like cannons though. What else sounds weird, can you find?

Also, I hope that the mod is enabled fully. Some files may not be enabled due to the error reported by Crux. The solution would be that proposed by Hedge Knight, to make the sounds load as movie or patch as these always load first.

Darth, your fixed sound pack is an exact match to the one I generated...

MD5 checksum E47B7361969255B6FA7A338AA14F437C

I have mangonels making the correct sound and no other mismatches I can find so far. I'm loading only your mod and the fixed pack (both type mod). I have it like this in the user script:

mod sounds_fixed.pack;
mod test_darthmod_shogun.pack;

Maybe it's being picky and I got lucky with the naming convention, so try it that way with Symphony's pack first and possibly the same file names, just to be sure.

I'll try it again now re-ordered and see if that breaks it for me.

[DARTH VADER]

Strange, I never used any other sound pack than what I have created. My new sound pack is created today based on darthmod_shogun.pack. Can you upload your sounds.pack to test?
I have also loaded all the movie type packs along with darthmod_shogun.pack. Test with these enabled as well (just put them in the data folder, they are movie type).

[Kurisu Paifuaa]

Here's exactly what I'm using, along with the script.

I've tried various additional mods in movie format that contain no units table (including the ones from your upload) alongside and they don't cause any problems. Nor do they affect Symphony's output if they're present when I build the corrected file (thus our files match)

[DARTH VADER]

**100% FIXED SOUNDS?** TEST THIS OPEN BETA! (Update 3, 6/6/2012)

I updated the file by only renaming it to sounds_fixed.pack like yours and all works! I do not remember if I have done something wrong to my previous testing so I heard wrong mangonels sounds but this renaming I did made the file 100% correct as it seems. Can you test if naming does matter?
For example change the name to DMS_Sounds.pack.

[Steph]

Congrats! Now there's still a problem: this correction will work only if a player uses only your mod and doesn't try to mix it with another mod altering the unit table.

[DARTH VADER]

Probably yes. But since I do not add units, maybe some other modders who have gameplay mods can try the included fixed sounds pack to check if it suits them.
It is weird the way it works but it seems it does.
That is the true spirit.
When there is collaboration, there is evolution.
Thank you Crux and to all that have given feedback in this thread.

PS. Crossing fingers because I need more feedback to know that all units have correct sounds.

[crux3D]

Though Im not really 'with this' would it not be best to have symphony generate a movie pack rather than a mod pack as those always load last.

Order should be
Boot
Release
Patch(1-x)
Mod (a-z)
Movie(a-z) (In the old hot patches for big Ntw mods we named them ZZ_patch.pack and it overwrote everything important every time).

Nice idea but unfortunately the problem is not when the corrected sound packs are loaded, but the order of the other packs.

There do seem to be some arrangements that won't work.

Do you have any more detail on this?

IMO, this symphony thing isn't user friendly enough for most users, so it's not the best solution.

What's with the lack of support from CA?

Symphony was originally envisioned to allow modders full control of the sound packs and be able to add/modify/remove sound events, music etc. As a consequence of this it can also be used to fix the scrambled sounds resulting from modded units tables, but as you rightly point out, it's not ideal for this. I'm working on a much more user-friendly variant which only provides the sound fixing functionality, but I want to make sure I've fixed all the known issues with Symphony first (for example, failures when modders replace the db/units_tables/units file). With regards to the lack of support from CA, I view modding as being equivalent to opening up any piece of consumer electronics and poking around - it's perfectly fine to do it but you're breaking the warranty, so don't expect any support.

I have updated the test packs.
Please test again **URGENT** TEST THIS OPEN BETA! (Update 2, 6/6/2012)

The mangonels still sound like cannons though. What else sounds weird, can you find?

I tried your v2 fixed version before you updated it to v3 and starting from a vanilla install and placing all your packs in the data folder and using either of your scripts (I tried both) everything appeared to be working fine and mangonels did not sound like cannons.

Congrats! Now there's still a problem: this correction will work only if a player uses only your mod and doesn't try to mix it with another mod altering the unit table.

As per my answer to epaacccc, in the future I hope modders will distribute working sound packs plus the automated fixing tool, so if a user mixes mods they just have to run the automated tool and the sounds will be fixed again. By the way, I've made quite a lot of changes to Symphony recently and haven't had time to do any backwards compatibility testing with Empire or Napoleon, so beware if you grab an updated version and please let me know if anything isn't working.

Thank you Crux and to all that have given feedback in this thread.

Indeed, thanks to everyone who has helped and provided feedback. I've still got a bit of work to do to address a couple of corner-cases but I think Symphony is at least useable now.

[Kurisu Paifuaa]

**100% FIXED SOUNDS?** TEST THIS OPEN BETA! (Update 3, 6/6/2012)

I updated the file by only renaming it to sounds_fixed.pack like yours and all works! I do not remember if I have done something wrong to my previous testing so I heard wrong mangonels sounds but this renaming I did made the file 100% correct as it seems. Can you test if naming does matter?
For example change the name to DMS_Sounds.pack.

Great! Good to hear

I'll keep trying to figure out what circumstances could cause load failure. Otherwise, I played about 30 turns into a darthmod campaign and had no bad sound calls, along with testing in custom battles. I listened for relatively close sample swaps like muskets vs rifles and couldn't find any.

Can someone share some insight on how to get an extraction containing modded data? I'm trying to fix some minor problems with TROM3 custom units. Symphony fixes the projectile problems, except for one custom naval unit. It also leaves a few bad sounds for alternate event/order responses (e.g. bugles for samurai charge). I would suspect manual editing for custom units would help. Do I just extract with the mod in place and go picking through the sound events csv? Or do I have the wrong idea?

Thanks everyone

[Steph]

By the way, I've made quite a lot of changes to Symphony recently and haven't had time to do any backwards compatibility testing with Empire or Napoleon, so beware if you grab an updated version and please let me know if anything isn't working.

"If it's not broken, don't fix it". The Symphony version I have is working fine for my needs, so I have no reason to replace it with a more recent one at the moment

[Steph]

Can someone share some insight on how to get an extraction containing modded data? I'm trying to fix some minor problems with TROM3 custom units. Symphony fixes the projectile problems, except for one custom naval unit. It also leaves a few bad sounds for alternate event/order responses (e.g. bugles for samurai charge). I would suspect manual editing for custom units would help. Do I just extract with the mod in place and go picking through the sound events csv? Or do I have the wrong idea?

From my NTW experience, you may have to modify the sound events csv (to point to the correct mp3), but also to edit the XML (so the events and units are linked to the correct event).

In XML:
"Unit_Selected" for "Unit01" or "Unit02"--> Use sound event "Unit_Selected_Infantry"

In CSV
Sound_event "Unit_Selected_Infantry" --> cycle through "Selection1.mp2", "Selection3.mp3"

If you don't add your new units in the XML, then sometimes they can be associated to a wrong sound events.
For example, in Masters of Europe, I forgot to explicitly add a british unit, and it was using the German voices (last events in the XML file, used by default in my case).

[Noif de Bodemloze]

If Darth Have 100% soundfix for his game, when we others get "normal" sound-fix to game, who not use darthmode?

[DARTH VADER]

Now if I want to edit some stats in unit tables (not add new entries and units) will this affect the sounds? Should I generate a new sounds.pack whenever I mod unit tables?

[Steph]

I'm 95% sure that if you just edit the stats it should not have an effect.

What can have an effect:
- Add a new unit
- Delete a new unit
- Exchange the position of units

If you change the unit class, may be in can also change things (depending if you voice events are based on unit class or directly units?)

[DARTH VADER]

OK Steph. Thank you a lot for letting me know.

[The Hedge Knight]

Fingers crossed, I think I've "fixed" it. I think the problem was the dependencies I was generating for the packfiles created by Symphony - or equally, the lack of dependencies in most mod packs (to be fair, it's probably harder for other tools to generate dependencies). Symphony lists all pack files it loaded data from as dependencies and it looks like mod packs are used to determine dependencies, even if they are not loaded.

This could get confusing, so for the following explanation I'm going to use darthmod_shogun.pack (a pack containing db/units_tables/Darth_units) and DMS_Sounds_Packed.pack (a packfile generated by Symphony, containing sounds_packed/sound_bank_database and sounds_packed/sound_events), replace them with whatever your particular packs are called.

For most mods DMS_Sounds_Packed.pack ends up with darthmod_shogun.pack and patch21.pack as the dependencies. When Shogun 2 loads the packfiles it sees that it has to load darthmod_shogun.pack before DMS_Sounds_Packed.pack and that it must also load patch21.pack (and all its dependencies) before DMS_Sounds_Packed.pack, regardless of whether or not it is going to load DMS_Sounds_packed.pack. What it doesn't know is the relative ordering between darthmod_shogun.pack and patch21.pack. This means that, depending on the name of the mod pack, sometime it will load patch21.pack first and darthmod_shogun.pack second, in which case everything will be fine, and sometimes it will load darthmod_shogun.pack first and patch21.pack second, in which case the contents of darthmod_shogun.pack will be overwritten by the contents of patch21.pack, and you get the result that Darth and Kurisu Paifuaa saw.

I have uploaded a new version of Symphony with the dependency generation disabled. Please give it a go and see if it fixes your problems. Please be sure to delete all previously generated sound packs first!

Alright then, would these rather snazzy user.script commands I just help.

#this is a comment#
set_pack_file_precedence a.pack b.pack #lhs pack precedes rhs pack (lhs < rhs): lhs will be searched before rhs for files#
exclude_pack_file 1.pack #Exclude pack file from the virtual file system#
#also#
#set_pack_file_dependency <pack file name> <pack file name>#
#lhs pack is required by rhs pack (lhs < rhs): lhs will be loaded first and used by rhs pack#

set_precedence and exclude seem (very rough test) to work as expected though I must admit I didn't test set_pack_file_dependancy because I was busy and couldn't think of a simple test quick test and got bored with how slowly shogun loads.