mod area and ambient sounds

[jastey]

The search option didn't give the information I was looking for.

I have a faint recall that it was mentioned somewhere that all ambient sounds (as well as animations?) of a mod area should be copied to the override to prevent a CTD.

Experiencing unreliable CTD with my custom area, I wonder if that might be the problem.

Is that true, and what exactly am I supposed to do?

[cmorgan]

I remember this post as well from PPG. I wish there was a reliable metasearch engine for these (G3, PPG, SHS, BWL) forums, but for some reason I cannot get the darned thing to come up with the answers. I believe the post was in the Tutu forums, crosslinked to BG2 modding. From memory, there were two instances; the first was a BG2 modder running into an area crash because the ambient was corrupted, and the fix was to extract the sound from the bif and copy it into override. The crosslink to Tutu was a query about its applicability to the infamous Beregost Crash.

 

I cannot access PPG at work (darned filter), but perhaps that will help your search!

[jastey]

Thank you, cmorgan, I found several relevant references, here are two of them:

http://forums.pocketplane.net/index.php/to....html#msg286373

 

http://forums.pocketplane.net/index.php/to...en.html#msg6541

 

How complicated would be "unbiffing to override"? Is it sufficient to save a copy of the wav extracted e.g. with NI (I never worked with biffs before, at least not knowingly)?

[CamDawg]

The easiest way in the universe to unbiff one file:

 

COPY_EXISTING ~foo.wav~ ~override~

[jastey]

I wasn't aware that's unbiffing. Cool, thanks.

[CamDawg]

Let WeiDU do the work.

 

Basically, COPY_EXISTING will pull a resource from wherever the engine is using it--so if foo is in the override it uses that, otherwise it'll get a copy from the biff for you.

 

To actually decompress an entire biff, you can either use WeiDU at the command line, use TeamBG's old WinBIFF (highly unrecommended), or maybe even Near Infinity--I know it's got some biff manipulation tools. Knowing Avenger, I'm sure DLTCEP can do this (and probably 817 more biff manipulations) in a snap, too.

[devSin]

I think Sim said somewhere that it's an issue when resources exist in a compressed BIFF (if the WED and TIS and other files aren't in the same BIFF and the ambient sounds are in a compressed BIFF or something).

 

Be warned that if the resource exists in a compressed BIFF, a user without a full installation might not be able to install the mod (if you use WeiDU to extract the files at install-time; since all the compressed BIFFs are in the CDn data folders).

[CamDawg]

I remember this post as well from PPG. I wish there was a reliable metasearch engine for these (G3, PPG, SHS, BWL) forums, but for some reason I cannot get the darned thing to come up with the answers.

If you use Google, I believe you can limit the search to domains by appending this to your search:

 

site:(gibberlings3.net OR pocketplane.net OR spellholdstudios.net)

[cmorgan]

Thank you! I keep trying to use the forum search engines, but just don't seem to be ablle to get the correct syntax for limiting specific inquiry. I will use that search parameter and Google, to narrow down those pesky searches of back threads for everything to do with OR(12) and "that problem we talked about where Beregost's area scripts were deciphered but we found errors"