Faction-Specific Marching Music (Need HEX MODDER!)

[Aykis16]

Alright guys this is a call to all modders, Mech_Donald and I need help. We've been trying for a while now to make marching music that would be faction specific but everything we've tried has not worked.

Here is what we know/have tried so far.

1. There are 4 default snares in the game. You can replace those 4 but it does not seem that you can add more. Also if you replace them with 4 different songs, those songs appear randomly for each unit and play for all factions

2. The pack file "sounds_non_wavefile_data" looks to be promising as it has files in it called "sound_bank_database" and "sound_events" but we have as of yet been unable to open/edit these files.

3. Mech tried to do a work around by going into voices.pack and attaching the marching music to the orders to march, but the sound does not follow the unit, it merely stays where the order was given which is rather awkward. If we could make it follow the unit, that could work.

4. In Sounds.pack under events there is a file called "sound_events_battle.csv" but editing this file seems to cause no difference!

So lets try to brainstorm possible solutions since it seems clear to me that we won't be getting any modding tools in the near future.

[Jingles]

I'm stumped... I remember in Rome and medieval, battle music was faction specific, is it possible that we can make sounds faction specific using some file lurking in the packs?

[Aykis16]

As of yet the only thing faction specific we've found is voices. As for music theres only a few different types: Euro, Indian, American, Ottoman

[Mech_Donald]

Yes, the question is, how to link the voice or music to the drummer or some other sound played by the infantry unit. The only thing we have to do, is to find and edit the file, where this linked information is.
Unfortunatly, modding the sound_events_battle.csv has no effect and the other files aren't readable.

[Aykis16]

I wonder if the files we can't read could be edited with hex. Are there any good hex editors out there? Perhaps LT Chambers could help us out?

[Mech_Donald]

I know hexworks. I put this in the attachment. You can open the files with that program, but i wonder how you wil find some importend figures? There are a lot of them, but wich are the ones we are searching for?

[Aykis16]

I downloaded hexworks too. But I can't tell what I'm editing . We need someone who can read hex.

[L'Ost]

It isn't db-related ?

Can't you find the names of the march in the db ?

I was watching the musician, from the unit (drummers), because, in my original guess, units are related to musician (1 per unit), related to musician animations then related to... sound, maybe (it's just a guess). Then it would be easy to duplicates drummer's records with uniques keys to go on different animations (the same previous animation records but with unique keys) pointing to different sound records pointing to different sound files.

That was how I wanted to investigate in, but i did not find the time (played too much :p)

-edit- hmm... DBFileTypes is not complete so I can't tell

[Aykis16]

Well we know where the marches are located, thats how we figured out how to change the original stuff. But what we need to do is make it faction specific. So far we haven't been able to do that. Perhaps if we can give each faction its own unique drummer that plays its own music we could but right now we don't know how to do that.

[L'Ost]

I'm searching for this kind of thing in the db :

Faction specific unit <-> Walking animation <-> sound events with filename
Or
Faction <-> Faction specific unit <-> Walking animation <-> sound events with filename

Since you only change filenames, in how I think the db works, there is no link from units or faction to these.

So if we could open and edit sound events, we could : duplicate sound event with new filenames, duplicates walking animation with link on the new events, with new animation ID, put duplicate walking animation ID in units.

Where do you think the link are located ?

[Aykis16]

Check the sound packs. The one I think its located in is sound_non_wavefile_data.pack but those files are in hex and I don't know hex.

[GeorgiaPeanuts]

I will look into this for I would love to make each of my factions use different march music.

[Aykis16]

If you could figure it out Georgia, we've already got the music ready.

[L'Ost]

*bump*

This file could lead to others in the same format... :-/

If somebody knows lua, maybe they should try to watch the script sources and see if there is any hint in how these files are read.

[Mech_Donald]

*bump*

This file could lead to others in the same format... :-/

If somebody knows lua, maybe they should try to watch the script sources and see if there is any hint in how these files are read.

Did you mean *.lua files? You can just edit it with notepad. For what specific file are you looking for?

[Aykis16]

Where are the lua files?

[Mech_Donald]

The lua files are included in the main.pack file.

[cozmoisme]

Im a competent lua programmer, over 2 years... but i have no exp in total war modding. mainly CoH work.

[Kolath]

Im a competent lua programmer, over 2 years... but i have no exp in total war modding. mainly CoH work.

Cozmo!

[Shigawire]

I've had some experience modding sound (voice mods for EB)

What are the files I have to look at in order to mod these?
I'd like to see if I could help.

Is there any way you could make the marching sounds unit-specific rather than faction-specific?
I ask this, because all voices in Rome:TW were unit-specific primarily, and culture-specific secondarily.
In M2TW, they were also unit-specific primarily, but are now finally faction-specific secondarily.

For each voice to be played, the unit had to be defined under the EDSUV file (export_descr_sounds_units_voice.txt)
If a unit wasn't mentioned there, it wouldn't speak at all.
The same was true for group voices (group_charge etc) - all units using one group_charge had to be mentioned.. a very long list.
which we did for gallic_group_charge for example.. so that Romans wouldn't yell "Baaazbh!" - all the gallic units had to be listed in that txt-file.

I don't know how this works in ETW - I'm just getting around to looking at the .csv and pack files now..
I see that sound_events_battle.csv is indeed useless as there is no way to determine faction based on the list.
But one way to find out how the factions are listed, is by looking at the sisterfile sound_events_voices.csv
And when I looked in that, I noticed that only "Uk" is listed - none of the other languages are listed!
So what on earth is going on? Is this the real file at all? I know that there are german voices in the game. I played Prussia. All the voices are in there. But in this textfile, only british voices were listed. Are these files useless for us?