6 réponses à ce sujet

[Qutayba]

I've started figuring out how to put sound emitters and volumes in areas, which allowed me to continue to avoid diving into FMOD, which seems incredible opaque to me.  But now, I'm trying to add sound and music to my cutscene.  I can place individual sound emitters for individual sounds, each with its own set of tracks and locations (the camera needs to be in range of the emitter for it to be audible, it seems).  This method gets messy and unwieldly very soon, since every grunt and scratch has to be its own object placed precisely by the appropriate actor (Why can't something like a wolf howl be treated like VO that you can attach to the actor?).

I have not gotten music to work this way though (and would prefer not to have to do all my individual sounds this way, either).  I look at the Main Campaign cutscenes and they tend to have one long cutscene soundtrack, created through FMOD.  So, I'm taking the plunge down another steep toolset learning curve (Can you plunge up a learning curve?  Frightening image).  The existing FMOD tutorials I've seen seem to be geared either toward adding new sounds or toward modifying main campaign sounds.  I can't seem to load (or even find) any of the existing sounds into FMOD.  Where are the folders with existing sounds?  Do I need to get some third party program to extract the BioWare projects and then recompile them into FMOD from scratch? In squares five and six, the tutorials seem to make sense, but I can't get past square one.

The empty project I created I put in Documents/Bioware/Dragon Age/Addins/<Module Name>/Assets/Sound.  Is my project location what's messing me up?

[Lady Olivia]

There are several threads about FMOD, sounds and such in the Audio forum. But I'll try to give you a quick-start.

To use the sounds from the game you need to extract them from the .fsb files that live in your installation folder, modules/single player/audio. You can do that using this nice little program.

Be sure to use the FMOD programs that came with the toolset, not some new version you might have installed.

Make a new FMOD project and go to the "Sound definitions" tab. Right click on the left-hand panel and say "Add definition from wavetables" and you'll get to select a sound file, which will then appear as a folder in the left-hand panel and as a file in the lower-right, where you can click it and see its properties, or play it.

Go to "Events" tab and rename the default untitled event group you'll find there (by clicking it and changing its "Name" property in the lower right panel) to something sensible. Then right-click it and say "Add event". Enter a name in the dialog that opens; for starters, it's wise to use the exact name of the sound file you imported. Leave the "Do not use a template" option checked. 

When you're done, your event will appear in the left-hand panel. Double click it. You'll have entered the "Event editor" tab. Right click the gray area in the right-hand part and say "Add sound", then choose the one you imported. It should fill out the gray area, at which point you should be able to click the "Play" button at the top and hear it. Right click the sound and select "Sound instabce properties", then change the "Loop mode" to "Oneshot".

Now go to the "Wave banks" tab and notice an untitled folder in the left; rename it to something nice. Enter the Build menu and say "Build project". Make sure that the dialog that pops says "Build for PC", and mark the soundbank you've just named (under "Select which wave banks to build:"), then press the "Build" button. After this you should find one .fev and one .fsb file in the same place where you saved your FMOD project. The .fev will have the same name as the project file, and the .fsb will have the same name as the soundbank. 

You can now copy these two files to your local modules/your module/override/toolsetexport folder and fire up the toolset. The sound you created an event for should appear somewhere in the sound palette. If you were careful and used good names for events and soundbanks, you'll have no problems locating it.

That's for the bare-bone basics, more or less. For anything "serious", you'll want to read through FMOD documentation that came with the game - it's not that horrible, really. Also the article on the builder wiki.

Hope this helps.

 
 

[Qutayba]

Thanks, Lady Olivia. I scoured the tutorials and the sound forum, and they mostly seem to miss your very first step: i.e. that you need a third party program to get at the files you need in the first place. I had assumed that there would be FMOD-readable sound libraries somewhere included with the toolset or in the main campaign data somewhere. It seems weird that we have to do this since they included basically everything else we need for the toolset. So basically, we need to build our own wavetables.

PS, Lady Olivia: You may have unleased a monster!

Modifié par Qutayba, 08 janvier 2010 - 05:47 .

[Qutayba]

Ach du lieber! What a mess.



I've tried the following:



1) Aezay's DAExtractor: which extracted the music fantastically, but I can't open any of the sound effect wavs): http://social.biowar.../9/index/295486



2) fsbtext extractor: which seems to do the same thing, that is, extracts the music but not the sound effects. http://social.biowar.../9/index/295486



3) MusicPlayerEx: which does extract the sound effects files but names them after the library they were extracted from (eg global_amb_glo_1, eg. global_amb_glo_2), so the names are no longer descriptive. The thought of listening to the thousands of sound effects and renaming them is, well, terrifying. http://social.biowar...73/index/385958



Anything else out there I should be trying? FMOD can create fsb files, so why can't it open them and allow you to copy them to other projects?

[Lady Olivia]

Hm. I've got to say I've never done it with effects, only with music and voices. Did you try playing around with various switches fsbext has?

As to why no programs open .fsb files; it's because they are output. They are not meant to ever be extracted, much less extracted and compressed again like we all are doing: quality is lost every time. Better is to ask: why can't we have the source sounds?

'Tis a mystery.

Modifié par Lady Olivia, 08 janvier 2010 - 09:06 .

[Qutayba]

I'm certainly grateful for your help, Olivia. I'm a lot closer than I was this time yesterday, and at least I can listen to the game music while I figure this out .



By switches, do you mean those four strange files that come with fsbext? How does one turn them on or know what they do?

[Lady Olivia]

No, I meant the command line parameters (-a, -A, -r to name a few). But it doesn't matter; I tried to extract the effects, and unfortunately I have to confirm that fsbext doesn't do it right.