Lance Dragon fighter computer voice

Seether85

Spaceman
Hi everyone, new entry here :)
I've been playing the WC saga for years as a kid, to the point that Seether is still my nickname almost everywhere :)

I was wondering if it was possibile to extract the Dragon computer speeches from WC4, I'd really love that!
I've been trying with some of these tools in the download section here which eventually allowed me to pull out some IFFs. Too bad most of them seemed to be unreadable, or perhaps I was looking in the wrong places (TRE files).

Is there anyone here who has already taken these files off, or knows where to find them exactly? Thank you :)
 
TRE files will be the right place, but IIRC WC4 uses xTRE archives and doesn't always list the file names in a logical manner, here's how our resident genius HCl put it when I asked him about getting inside WC4s cockpit files:

One of the difficulties should be actually locating the files, since WC3 / WC4 XTRE files are a bit tricky and only store the file names optionally, instead using a name hash to identify the files inside the TRE, instead of the full name.

Now I can probably use Audacity and make a pretty clean recording of the sounds you're looking for, off the top of my head the Lance's computer doesn't have much to say. I can recall "Enemy near, autopilot not allowed" - but what other lines are there?
 
Well, in fact during the gameplay there isn't much to hear more than the line you quoted. But if you listen carefully, during the opening sequence of the game you can hear different things: something when the Dragons are approaching the confed convoy, a "collision alert" when there is a brief impact with an Hellcat, and something else when Seether is loading the flash pack.

Of course these could all be lines only included in that video, not existing as stand-alone IFFs. But since I couldn't find anything, I still can't tell...
 
Like you, I'm struggling - although having watched the intro vid again I'm certain the computer voice is part of the FMV rather than a unique sound file. For that one I'll try to make a clean recording and cut out the background noise. Give me a day or two as my PC is going to be stripped right down tomorrow for a big upgrade and I won't be active on here. I'll get back to you sir.

Also, welcome to the CIC!
 
Whoa! To be honest, when I signed up here a few days ago I wasn't even expecting an answer at all, being my question quite specific.
I definitely couldn't have proven any wronger. :)
Thank you so much kind sir, your effort is way appreciated.
 
I thought I had extracted all the comms audio from the PSX version of WC4 at one point...

I'm not sure what I did with it, but pretty sure the various bitching-betty (or would it be Bob?) voices were in there.
 
I thought I had extracted all the comms audio from the PSX version of WC4 at one point...

I'm not sure what I did with it, but pretty sure the various bitching-betty (or would it be Bob?) voices were in there.

I can find the WC4 PSX sound effect zip on the CIC, but it doesn't seem to have the bitchin' Betty sounds, you included all the player choice dialogue too.

On a side note I also just discovered the WC3 MIDI pack you extracted, those are wonderful!
 
Hmm, I'll have a look. I probably have the files around here somewhere.
 
So, I ended up going and seeing about re-ripping all the audio files from the PSX version of WC4. I think I was moderately successful, but I feel like I only got about half of what was available. Anyway, here's a zip with 3 of the Black Lance computer voice files, and just for fun I added another zip with a bunch of Pliers' lines from when you're looking at the loadout terminal.
 

Attachments

  • lance_computer.zip
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  • Pliers.zip
    1.5 MB · Views: 116
@AD Thanks!! That's definitely something compared to nothing, isn't it? :p
Now I wonder how hard would it be to find similiar pitch/shift parameters to put into Audacity or similiar software and produce arbitrary statements with such voice.
That would be fun and would make a nice smartphone theme!
 
Whoa! To be honest, when I signed up here a few days ago I wasn't even expecting an answer at all, being my question quite specific.
I definitely couldn't have proven any wronger. :)
Thank you so much kind sir, your effort is way appreciated.

We are all Wingnuts here! Anything to help a fellow fan is what our community is all about.

Welcome to the CIC! Always good to see a friendly ship!
 
" PSX2_00048.wav "

would make a neat sms ringsound :D

edit: I recall the sound quality of the PC version is better :/
 
" PSX2_00048.wav "

would make a neat sms ringsound :D

edit: I recall the sound quality of the PC version is better :/
It's possible... I would have to compare but I suspect they're probably actually quite similar in quality. I was looking into getting the PC sounds but I was having some issues trying to find/extract the audio so the PSX version was kind of an intermediate... anyway I'm pretty sure this isn't all the comm audio but it's what I was able to extract last night. There's a ton of red shirt and generic wingman dialogue I don't remember ever hearing in-game.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1iogidc4da4e6in/wc4-audio-snipitszip.zip?dl=0
 
Lots of loot there @AD, thanks! Sent directly to my Dropbox ;)
Quite a little trasure we have here, well done! A few lines by Maniac already helped making my day :)
 
So I went digging and figured out how to get most of the audio files from the PC version... there's just so many that it's going to take me some time to parse them all into something usable. Anyway, here's a few more of the lance fighter for you!
 

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  • lance_computer.zip
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Alright, another update https://www.dropbox.com/s/2t8f8u6dd353wxu/wc4_audio.zip?dl=0

This pack is a bit hefty (124MB zip) for various reasons. This is the majority of the audio from the PC version (I thought I had included the inflight music but it looks like there's only half of it). I'll start with what's missing: The majority of the sound effects and ship flyby sounds are missing. The various things like the Pliers dialogue when looking at the various terminals is missing and maybe a few other bits. But the majority of the comm audio should be in this pack.

Now about the files, I didn't try and categorize all the nearly 6000 files. I left it separated by disk. I did do a quick runthrough of the first disk, so all the named files in the root directory of the zip should be duplicates of disk one. But I've made a preliminary attempt at naming them. So what you will find in the disk folders are a bunch of sequential wav files... It's not as much of a mess as it would first seem. You can pretty much ignore the last four digits of the 12 digit file-names. The first eight are the ones that count. The files are named after the extracted IFF files that they came from (@HCl 's awesome but ancient treman doesn't preserve the original internal IFF naming unfortunately). So the program I batch converted these in preserved the IFF file number and appended a four digit sequential numbering on the entire batch.

WHY this is important? Basically if the first 8 numbers match they are from the same batch... Usually the game will group one wingman's replies into one IFF so a batch of 20 files with the same first 8 numbers will probably be someone like Maniac's replies to comm commands.

Now about duplication: Yes... There's a lot here. But it wasn't practical (at least short term) to get rid of them all. Quite a few of the comm audio replies are repeated between disks (but not all) and in a few cases are repeated even within the same disk. (one trick is to put them all in the same folder and sort by time length and file size. Pretty much all duplicates will be side by side but it will be time consuming to get rid of the extras)

Looking at all these, I was a bit amazed at the sheer variety of audio clips in the game. It's kind of funny that you often end up hearing the same half a dozen replies anyway.

I also find a number of the "wing 2" comm lines interesting since it's fairly obvious the team had planned on a much more robust and fleshed out system for the secondary objectives that you would have had to step in and help complete from time to time, but it doesn't seem like the system got fully fleshed out in the final game.

Also easteregg.wav was found on disk 6... I'm not sure why it exists on the disk, but it's a 30ish second audio clip from the Simpsons.
 
thanks for the hard work in extracting all those audio files @AD

There are so many unused comm files, that these may provide useful for further fan projects
 
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