Thoughts about reviving the project

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It would be great if we had a tool, which can replace the sound. The sound system itself is kinda buggy and it can play only four sounds at once (for some reasons there are channels which kill all other active channels  :|).

Someone has started to give Cloud's attack a voice over but it can start to be annoying when Cloud makes the same 'Hua!' all the time.
https://www.ff7catalog.com/posts/202968/

I guess I leave the official welcome back to LeonhartGR. He will give it ... well the right flavor.
 
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The ideal perfect solution would be a combination of scripting and expanding the game to allow more sound effects, without the need for an external tool. Unfortunately, as easy as this would be for developing a new game, I'm not even sure it's possible to make the game itself allow infinite sounds without more modding than its worth.
 
On a related note, I tried modding the FF8 exe to expand the built-in sound effect limit (which is either 12149 or 19999 depending on who's counting), and I could not find the part of the exe that references these numbers. I even changed ALL of them (and all numbers +1 of them) and it didn't do anything (surprisingly, the game didn't crash). The hard-coded cap must be stored as some other number, and we have no way of knowing what that number is. I'm not good enough with cheat engine to read the disassembly while playing to find it that way, either.

Chances are it will be just as difficult to increase FF7's sound effect cap. I'll keep looking into FF8 and see if I have a brilliant idea.
 
The ideal perfect solution would be a combination of scripting and expanding the game to allow more sound effects, without the need for an external tool. Unfortunately, as easy as this would be for developing a new game, I'm not even sure it's possible to make the game itself allow infinite sounds without more modding than its worth.
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Doing it from an external tool probably wouldn't be massively difficult, to be honest. Not to say it's trivial, but I'm fairly sure it could be done. Not really related to the voices project at all, though, except that digging around in the assembly to implement the voice hooks will give me a bit of a headstart making any other changes.

Anyway, I've got the hooks into the dialogue working more or less properly now;

http://www.ficedula.co.uk/voices/test.jpg

...so I'll begin working on a nice way of configuring which sound files to play.

Is anybody interested in actually managing this project? I'm happy to do the technical work of coding up the tool(s) involved, but someone will need to do the work of compiling all the audio files, naming them appropriately, and so on.
 
I'm totally down for the mind numbing almost-bureaucratic side of things if a proper project manager doesn't show up to do it instead, renaming files and all that boring stuff, but I have zero interest whatsoever in voice direction, or any involvement in any recording sessions at all except as an actor.
 
Initial test version;

http://www.ficedula.co.uk/voices/Voices_0_10.zip

Download, unzip, edit the .config file and set the three paths appropriately (path to FF7.exe, path to the VoiceHook.dll included, path to the Voices folder included). Then run the program and click 'Go'. If you don't have the latest version of .NET installed, you may need to grab that from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=397703

I've included a few test files for mrkt2 (Wall Market) - the boy by the cat statue & the hawker at the inn. Hopefully they'll play...? The format of the files in the Voices folder should make it fairly obvious how things are set up.


EDIT: I've hacked around a bit with the sound playback code and I think I should be able to override the game's sound playback to allow for playing any number of sound effects [and in higher quality too - aren't the standard ones 4-bit ADPCM?]. The question is - what extra sound effects were people wanting to load in, and how were they expecting them to be triggered...?
 
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For me there are two main objectives: Random sound replacement and a play sound if condition XY is fulfilled. As an example if I reach the engine room in the highwind then it should play an engine sound (like the one when you are on lower deck on the boat). Background sound would give the game a much deeper experience as it currently is, and I guess we have one I could bother to create new sounds: https://www.ff7catalog.com/threads/10436/  :evil:
I think that Field ID, PPV (or game progress) and a play sound if variable has value: XY should be enough to trigger a sound. Similar as 7th Heaven allow us to replace files https://www.ff7catalog.com/threads/9844/
Sadly this project is dead. The tool is very useful, but Iros isn't active here anymore and we don't have the source code for it. It actually has needed some fine adjustments to be able to replace everything of FF7.

The last great thing I could imagine would be sound for footsteps. Maybe it is possible to bind sound to the characters of the current scene and if they move and play animation 1 (walk) or 2 (run) the sound will be played. Of course there are a lot of circumstances to let the footstep sound correctly (distance to the camera, ground you are stepping at, etc), but that's something we should bother later.
 
You can add random sound placement and background sounds through Makou Reactor (up to the 750 limit of course). The main reason you need a watchdog process for a FF7 voiceover project is because of that cap (you can't voiceover everything with only 300 sound effects).

I've been trying to increase FF8's sound effect cap (even though I don't need to because it's already really high) by looking at its disassembly, but it's been a huge pain because all the sounds are played through the scripting engine (so there's a lot more code to trace through). If I ever find out how it sets its limit, I could probably find how FF7 sets its limit too and increase it.

I will eventually finish converting my FF8Audio program to FF7, but auditions closed this week for my VO project and I've been trying to finalize the cast list so I haven't really done anything else.
 
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I want a solution without doing to much edits to the flevel (I already have done this). The problem with it is that we don't have a tool to patch the flevel.lgp and every huge overhaul tends to use its own flevel. A program which works in the background looks for me as the best solution for it. I also think it is easier to set up as the partial broken sound system. As I have mentioned there are channels which kill other active channels (the alarm after you set the bomb disappear after the battle swirl sound). It looks like that they have accidental swapped the channel set (the first set of the channels kills all other active channels and the second set plays all channels fine along side. If this makes an sense to you).
The random sound is more interesting for the battle module, because there it is the only possibility to edit the battle script, for which we have neither a good tool nor do we understand it entirely (also NFITC1 is presumably the only one who could do it).
 
I want a solution without doing to much edits to the flevel (I already have done this). The problem with it is that we don't have a tool to patch the flevel.lgp and every huge overhaul tends to use its own flevel. A program which works in the background looks for me as the best solution for it. I also think it is easier to set up as the partial broken sound system. As I have mentioned there are channels which kill other active channels (the alarm after you set the bomb disappear after the battle swirl sound). It looks like that they have accidental swapped the channel set (the first set of the channels kills all other active channels and the second set plays all channels fine along side. If this makes an sense to you).
The random sound is more interesting for the battle module, because there it is the only possibility to edit the battle script, for which we have neither a good tool nor do we understand it entirely (also NFITC1 is presumably the only one who could do it).
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OK, that makes sense ... and yes, I definitely intend to implement it as a background process - it makes it easier to program, and if it also saves having to modify flevel (along with every other mod that wants to modify it...) that's a bonus.

So;

1) Allow replacing standard game sounds with an external version (possibly higher quality), and allow more than one replacement sound so the tool will select between them randomly.

2) Monitor certain variables (FieldID, PPV) and when particular variables are matched, start/stop playing a background sound effect.

Should be possible. I'll probably split it out from the Voices program though - it's not really related.
 
OK I have tested the tool in many ways but I don't get any voice. One thing is that the dll can be placed in DLPB's folder DLL_in (https://www.ff7catalog.com/threads/9110/) without the need of locating it. The program reads the text correctly but there is no voice played when I talk with the boy or man. I tried it with the correct path as you suggest it but there I had no luck either. The tool reads the text box but no sound.

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I got an idea why. I think you let the program checking for the text in the box and if it is the same as in the xml then the sound will be played. But the text in my flevel has been updated through the retranslation project from the Reunion mod. So the text isn't equal. Isn't it possible to check the text ID of the field instead of the text? At last in Makou Reactor it looks like the text must have some kind of ID. Maybe DLPB knows more, because his Box FF7 can edit text while the game is playing and writes a text file for Toughscript.
https://www.ff7catalog.com/threads/9795/
 
Yeah, it's currently going by the text, but I've included the dialog IDs in the XML so I can switch over to using them once I've got that part working ... should be possible.

EDIT: And I've only just realised that - unlike some of the other project forums ; the FF7Voice forum is private, so it's not visible globally. Is it worth throwing an open topic onto one of the other forums to gather support / interest?
 
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EDIT: And I've only just realised that - unlike some of the other project forums ; the FF7Voice forum is private, so it's not visible globally. Is it worth throwing an open topic onto one of the other forums to gather support / interest?
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Not sure why it was set like that, but that problem has been fixed.
 
Not sure why it was set like that, but that problem has been fixed.
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Cool, thanks.

Isn't it possible to check the text ID of the field instead of the text?
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I've got this working at my end, so pending testing that's ready. The only obvious thing left to do on the tool would be to implement choices properly - but I'm thinking there's no point doing that until there's some indication the project has sufficient interest/support to actually happen. I may post a topic in Audio Mods to judge interest?
 
Seems to me choices shouldn't play a voice clip at all; generally, the line of dialogue immediately afterwards will just be Cloud saying whatever you just chose anyway, or something similar.
 
Unless I'm particularly unlucky, none of the examples I've checked has followed that pattern - you usually see one line of dialogue 'introducing' the question - which could be either Cloud or an NPC asking a question - then as part of the same dialogue screen, you've got the options. Whichever option you pick, it goes straight to the NPCs response as the next dialogue line - you don't see Cloud actually 'say' the chosen option in a new window of dialogue.

That's not impossible to deal with, but you probably do want to deal with it somehow.
 
I ran into that in FF8. It seems to be done both ways in equal amounts. I just changed the scripts so the choice is always spoken as a separate box. We could have someone do that for FF7.
 
The best solution is undoubtedly to NOT voice the dialogue choices and have the character speak only the selected one.

I don't remember how FF VII works in this regard but I trust it would not be impossible to standardize the game as to follow the above mentioned behavior?
 
Not impossible, but certainly more work - since you're having to edit any affected field files to add more dialogue entries and tweak the script to display them at the right times.
 
SRy that i wasent here or a kinda long time, damn university ^^

Ok after reading all the stuff here, is seams hat there are some people who would like such a project to get alive. Ok first of all I will try to convince square to allow such a project . Law is a bad thing after all and in the past square closed many project, I also was involved too.
And realy I dont want to see again that we get a lletter from square ^^

And the tool ficedula is working on, hmm I can just say great work :)
After working evrything out we can start looking for actors but that will be the last part
 
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