Removing Voices from Faction

[oldmanpoo]

I'm currently playing a mod (4 Seasons) and am about 166 turns in with the Valkyrian Principality. It's an awesome faction, but the manly French accent that accompanies the units doesn't match, since most units in the faction are female.

I'd like to just remove all of the voices from the faction, both on the battle map and the campaign map. I've tried messing around with the various sound.txt files in the data folder, but I haven't had much success. I believe the faction replaces Byzantium in this mod. Any advice?

One other thing: is there a female voice mod or sound files out there somewhere that I could incorporate into this mod?

Thanks.

[Aikanár]

You could create a new accent for the faction and leave the accent-entries in the concerning textfiles blank.

@female voices:
Have you had a look at Amazon: Total War?

I guess it's for your personal use only (not for public release) and thus you would not need the permission of the creators to incorporate their voices into your mod.

[oldmanpoo]

Thanks for the response. It should be noted that this is all in reference to the 4 Seasons mod. The suggestion you gave was the first thing I had already tried. Using a tutorial I found on the site about how to add voices to a faction, I opened the sound.txt file associated with accents and created a new accent named "Valkyrie". I moved the Byzantium faction (which I believe is the faction that is replaced by the Valkyrian Principality in this mod) from the French accent category to the new "Valkyrie" accent without adding any related sound files. I opened up the sound/accent_confirm.txt (or whatever it is called), and added the Valkyrie accent to the list of existing accents, but that didn't seem to rid me of the voices, which are still French. I would have thought doing this would remove all sound from the units and possibly the strat map models, but apparently not. And I am positive that the Valkyrian faction does replace the Byzantium faction, as the Byzantium faction was listed under French accents when I'm fairly certain Byzantium does not speak with French accents.. And the units in the Valkyrian faction are clearly speaking with French accents. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious. And my explanation may have been somewhat confusing, so my apologies.

Would it be possible to provide a bare-bones step by step explanation on how to go about accomplishing the removal of the voices from this faction? I apologize for the newbness. I will upload the sound.txt file associated with the 4 seasons mod, as well as the other unedited sound.txt files related to Medieval 2, in the hopes that someone can point me in the right direction. The below files are unedited, and appear as they are in the original files.

If any clarification is needed, I can provide some.

Thanks in advance.

[Aikanár]

Well you've to edit all the concerning sound files, but let the sections blank.
If you follow my tutorial *points to his signature* and adjust it to your purpose, hence the above said, blank sections in the sound-files, you should accomplish your goal.

[oldmanpoo]

Ah, thanks. No more French accents marring my female soldiers. The tutorial was of great use. Time to get cracking at adding some female voices.

Edit: It works fine most of the time, but I find that on really large sieges that involve The Valkyrian Principality defending in a Citadel against three other factions, there's an immediate crash, and a message pops up stating something along the lines of "fatal graphics error occurred. Try lowering your settings." I then move the old Voice.idx and Voice.dat and event.idx and event.dat back into the original folder and that siege battle works perfectly again, but the damn voices are back. I guess I could just try to avoid really large siege battles.

[Aikanár]

Ah, thanks. No more French accents marring my female soldiers. The tutorial was of great use. Time to get cracking at adding some female voices.

I'm glad it worked out for you!

Edit: It's works fine most of the time, but I find that on really large sieges that involve The Valkyrian Principality defending in a Citadel against three other factions, there's an immediate crash, and a message pops up stating something along the lines of "fatal graphics error occurred. Try lowering your settings." I then move the old Voice.idx and Voice.dat and event.idx and event.dat back into the original folder and that siege battle works perfectly again, but the damn voices are back. I guess I could just try to avoid really large siege battles.

Hm, strange one that is. What does the system.log.txt say?

[oldmanpoo]

It is strange. I'm sure I messed something up, but I'll try to outline some of the situation. When I had it working (no voices for the faction), I notice a fairly large performance hit, which may have something to do with the game's inability to handle large battles that I could play before and why I get the fatal graphics error (I got that message a long time ago when I tried for 16,000 soldiers in one battle; completely unrelated to this). I can play smaller battles fine. I'm at least positive I've edited the .txt files correctly, as I triple checked them. It probably has something to do with the Voice.dat files.

The 4 Seasons mod doesn't use any Voice.dat files of its own, I don't think, so I'm assuming it's using the original files located in the Medieval II data folder. It was those Voice.dat files that I originally moved out of the Medieval 2\data\sound folder. When I started up 4 Seasons, it recreated the Voice.dat files (Voice1.dat,Voice2.dat, and Voice3.dat) in the Medieval II sound folder, but I noticed they were all considerably smaller than the original files (some even 1KB). It worked, but like above, it was a bit slower on normal battles, and impossible on large battles. Some units with special abilities (like the Angel Principes greek fire attack) caused an immediate crash, but work fine with the original .dat files. I have no idea where to even begin on that one.

About the events.dat file, is it necessary that I mess with that for the purposes of removing voices from just the battlefield units? If I'm working with the original Medieval Voice.dat files, do I only need to mess with Voice1.dat and ignore the others? Or should I copy those Voice.dat files into the Seasons sound folder and work from there? I've already extracted all of the voices, speeches, and music (probably not necessary) into both the seasons\data\sound\etc.. and Medieval 2\data\sound\etc... folders.

Thanks again.

Edit: I'll upload the log in a bit.

[Aikanár]

Extracting and deleting only the voice.dat file necessary should suffice.
If you get 1KB files, than something went wrong, either you do not have all official released text files in your \data folder or the extracted sound files are located in the wrong directory. To my knowledge -which might be insufficient- there is no other reason for getting 1KB files when the game tries to recreate the .idx and .dat files.

[oldmanpoo]

When you mention official text files, do you mean the sound.txts you list in your tutorial, or all .txt files? I haven't unpacked much of the vanilla game, but I did place all the relevant sound.txts you mentioned in your tutorial into the seasons\data folder.

Should I copy the Voice.dat files over to the seasons mod folder? There are three: Voice1.dat, Voice2.dat, and Voice3.dat. Which one should I work with? Also, rather than going through the sound.txts and editing the text to leave blank entries, I simply removed the French accent sound files from the battle voices folder. Is this sufficient? Or not correct?

I'll experiment around in the meantime.

[Aikanár]

When you mention official text files, do you mean the sound.txts you list in your tutorial, or all .txt files?

All! You need all officially released sound text files in your \data folder in order to let the game recreate the .dat and .idx files properly!

Should I copy the Voice.dat files over to the seasons mod folder? There are three: Voice1.dat, Voice2.dat, and Voice3.dat. Which one should I work with?

Is the seasons mod (no clue man, never used it) a fully modfoldered total conversion? If so you just need to put all the official soundtext files into the data folder of this mod and create the correct folderstructure in the mod directory for the sound files.
If the mod uses the original .dat files and no own .dat files, then you do not have to extract any sound .dat files. The game will create .dat and .idx files reading from the soundtext files in the folderstructure of the mod itself and all the vanilla entries will be played from the original .dat files of the main game.
Please take note that this only will funtion if the mod you're using is a) a totally mod foldered total conversion and b) uses no own .dat files.

Also, rather than going through the sound.txts and editing the text to leave blank entries, I simply removed the French accent sound files from the battle voices folder. Is this sufficient? Or not correct?

I'd suggest to never remove anything that does no harm! Of course you could do that, but to what result, well...
I really don't suggest doing something like that.

[oldmanpoo]

So all the sound text files I need can be located in the rar file I posted above (that I believe came from your tutorial page), correct? I only used the ones that you actually had to edit, but you need all? The mod is a completely subfoldered conversion with no Voice.dat files, so I suppose I don't need to copy over any .dat files.

Well, that explains some things. I'll give it a shot and report back.

[Ishan]

Yes even if you make a slight change in your one snd txt file you need all of them that are 39 in count in you data folder as the game acquires info from every single file when compiling new .dat and .idx files.

[oldmanpoo]

Well, my luck is still mixed. I was able to remove the voices from just the one faction, but the game becomes rather unstable, with the same problems I mentioned above. Large battles cause slowdown or "fatal graphics error" crashes, and one unit in particular fires off a greek fire attack that launches fine, but as soon as it hits an enemy there is a crash. It doesn't happen when I don't mess around with any of the files.

I attached images of my folder directories below; maybe there is something wrong there. Here is the (probably incorrect) process by which I removed the voices.

1) I placed the 39 sound text files into the seasons\data folder (I also tried placing them into the vanilla data folder when that failed, then tried both at once). I then edited the following files according to Aikanár's tutorial:

descr_sounds_accents.txt
descr_sounds_units_confirm.txt
export_descr_sound_prebattle.txt
export_descr_sounds_soldier_voice.txt
export_descr_sounds_stratmap_voice.txt
export_descr_sounds_units_battle_events.txt
export_descr_sounds_units_voice.txt

I uploaded those as well. but I don't believe I messed up anything regarding those files. I added the "Valkyrie" accent to the first two, then copied the French accent and renamed it to "Valkyrie" for the last five sound text files. The mod uses the vanilla Voice.dat files (Voice1.dat, Voice2.dat, and Voice3.dat) from Medieval II\data\sounds, so there are no Voice.dat files in the seasons\data\sounds folder.

Were these Voice.dat files supposed to be created in the seasons\data\sounds folder after placing the sound text files in the seasons data folder and running the seasons mod? I extracted the voice files from the vanilla Voice.dat files and placed those in the seasons\data\sounds\voices folder (check image for directory). I then deleted (actually moved, I never delete files) the vanilla Voice1.dat, Voice2.dat, and Voice3.dat, along with the corresponding .idx files (the French accent would not go away otherwise), then ran the seasons mod, which recreated the Voice.dat files in the vanilla sounds folder (which were all strangely 1KB in size again). I went into the seasons\data\sounds\...\battle_map folder and moved all of the French sound files out of the way into another folder. This removed the voices from the faction (Byzantine faction is the faction I'm trying to remove the French accent from).

I'm sure I butchered some stuff in there. The adjustments work somewhat, but those issues I mentioned above are driving me nuts. I can manage the large battles, since battles need to be pretty big to cause a crash (is it just me or does unpacking the game in general decrease performance?). But I need the problematic unit to survive against other factions.

The unit in question...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

How can a muddy, blood-spattered, innocent face like that be causing me so much trouble?

At any rate, thanks again. I feel I may just have to conquer the world with manly French females, or play on mute.

Edit: I should mention I also tried going through the above listed sound texts and removing the the French.wav file entries from each of them. I think the problem comes back to why the Voice.dat files are not being recreated properly.

[Aikanár]

Sorry, I'm at work and do not have that much time, but looking at your screenies....
Where's the .bat and the .cfg file to start the seasons mod?
On the first glance it looks like it uses the regular MII or MIIK .cfg which would indicate that you've to do all the sound modding in the folders of the regular game.. data\ and sounds\...

[oldmanpoo]

There's a seasons.bat and seasons.cfg file in the Medieval II main folder (the same folder the medieval2.cfg file is in).

If I were to copy over all the French accent sound files into the appropriate corresponding folder directory in the seasons\data\sound\etc... folder, and replace them all with female voice files from that Amazon mod, renaming them as the French sound files, would that work without any additional meddling?

[Aikanár]

There's a seasons.bat and seasons.cfg file in the Medieval II main folder (the same folder the medieval2.cfg file is in).

Ah ok

If I were to copy over all the French accent sound files into the appropriate corresponding folder directory in the seasons\data\sound\etc... folder, and replace them all with female voice files from that Amazon mod, renaming them as the French sound files, would that work without any additional meddling?

Yep, that should work.

[oldmanpoo]

I thought it would too. It seems the game is looking to the vanilla Medieval sound folder for the sound files regardless. As a test, I placed the (female) French_Taunts.wav files in the seasons\data\sounds\voice\human\localized\battle_map folder (there were nine Taunt.wav files). The soldiers on the field still used the original French taunts, I'm assuming from the Voice.dat files in the vanilla sound folder.

How do I tell the mod to look at its own files first? As opposed to adding a new accent, I'm going to replace the French one.

[Ishan]

Why not use a mod folder like BareGeomod or Retrofit?
They are kingdoms based though and i have never had problems with them.

[oldmanpoo]

I'll try that. Thanks.