Lazy sound setting in BG2

[temnix]

This is a question for those who know their way about the technical side of creature sound sets - and what can be done about them. I just discovered that where in BG1 all animals and monsters had sounds defined for each in their CRE file (BATTLE_CRY, SELECT_COMMON1 and so on), the designers were lazy as shit in BG2 and simply let creatures go on sounds in their animations' INI files. The CRE files are all mute, as far as I can see. In BG2, then, all brown bears sound like the brown bear animation, all xvarts like the xvart animation, all minotaurs like the minotaur animation etc. Now in my mod Animate Dead assigns new CRE sounds to give creatures different voices after they have been killed and risen as zombies. In BG1, therefore, I can edit animation INIs and remove embedded sounds there with no loss to anything, because it is CRE sounds that are actually heard, but in BG2 the zombie sounds are going to be played mixed with embeds, which sounds terrible.  And if I clean the INI files here to make room for potential voice additions, then animals and monsters in their living state are all going to be mute. What can I do about this 20-year-old corner-cutting by Bioware, other than recreate creature soundsets from the first game for the second? 

[Jarno Mikkola]

10 hours ago, temnix said:

...the designers were lazy as shit in BG2...

What can I do about this 20-year-old corner-cutting by Bioware, other than recreate creature soundsets from the first game for the second? 

First of all, not assume it was Bioware. The .ini's are infact only a BGxEE feature. They don't have that in the original BG2:SoA or BG2:TOB games at all. In those games, the animations are hardcoded to the .exe, and thus need a soundset in the .cre files.

And the simple solution to the zombie mode soundsets, at least in BGxEE's, is to copy in the animations, aka copy-rename them using weidu's .tp2 command, make a new .ini based on the new files names, and have a different soundset in the new .ini's, and change the .cre file during the re-animation to the new one, you also get to set stats to the reanimated creature as a .cre file, as you do this thing via polymorph opcode 135 in addition to whatever you do with the resurection/reanimation.

And yes, this was a little bit lazy™, but before we conclude that the EE games made it so to be lazy, you should know the former systems hardcoding of the animation into the bgmain.exe is jancky system enough to infuriate a lot of people, and there's only space for some. So it's an actual bypass to needing 10+ years of moding technics that were never perfect ... before the next version of the Infinity Animations, if even then. Cause the current state one is a whole lot of hubble hobble. See for example.

Edited December 4, 2020 by Jarno Mikkola

[temnix]

My Animate Dead raises the corpse of any creature that was formerly flesh and blood with zombie statistics, and that is a limitation I put in myself. Anybody will be raised, so switching animations is not an option. This is not a question about converting specific select creatures.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Well, like I said, this will work completely in the original Bioware's BG2(SoA & ToB), but not completely flawlessly in Infinity Animation moded game, nor in the EE games, as both of those come with some animations included with the .ini sounds rather than just .cre sounds.

Just incase you don't remember or know the history, the EE games added the Infinity Animations, G3 BG2Fixpack and One Pixel Production(1PP) mods into the game, along with a better than the modded Widescreen mod -contents in to the BG2 engine, along with a whole bunch I don't know what from assumed full day job people, and then used that to create the BG1EE, BG2EE, etc. All of which has takes a few steps further on one side or the other.