Questions regarding patches.

[Schu]

I wasn't talking about adding True Patch info, I was talking about adding information and details regarding removed content or leftover code.

Sorry about this, but to be honest, I don't think it would be a good idea. The Wesp groupies would just
come in and change everything to suit their own means and then pat Wesp on the back even more.

As far as I am concerned any left over material still on the disks should be left for the modding
community to play with, not someone claiming to patch the game and then calling it restoration. Only
the original dev team or a member of that team can call anything added to a game a restoration, not
the modding community.

[Prisoner416]

What tools are best to browse audio and other things from the game?

[Tessera]

The best would be the multi-purpose tool that is included within the TPG package:

Turvy's "Quick And Dirty Bloodlines Tools," or "VPK Tool" for short. It will allow you
to extract files from the game's compressed VPK archives, amongst other things.

Be sure to make a backup copy of your game before you start messing with it.

[Prisoner416]

Version 3.9a, yes? I don't plan to change anything, I just want to listen to some of the audio for things that I might have missed or never made it into the game.

I love finding hidden bits of abandoned code.

[Tessera]

There are quite a few audio files that never got used in VTMB. Mostly what are referred to as "float" lines... little bits and snippets of generic NPC dialogue.

I resurrected some of those snippets (about a dozen or so) within my VTMB Mega-Mod, including a few for Jeanette and V.V. that were cut from the default game.

[Prisoner416]

Yes, Wesp added a lot of those back in in his Plus version, but he made a few errors.

For one, triggering them can easily stop a playing dialog so you miss what was said before.

Two, they are very easy to call, and do make the characters too "chatty", making almost all characters prone to talk to themselves at times.

The funniest one was after I told the professor I would save him, and he thanked me, I went close to him and it triggered a float and made him say, "Why are you doing this? HELLLLP! Can anyone hear me?!".

There is one change I really like in Wesp's patch though, and wanted your opinion of it.

When you reunite E and Lily, he's added an option to return Lily's belongings to her.

This doesn't hurt gameplay in itself. In fact, it makes more sense then keeping her stuff forever, which has no value.

It always bugged me that I kept them when she was right there.

[Tessera]

Those float lines were cut from the game by Troika for a reason. This is yet another case of Wesp referring to something idiotic that he did as a "restoration," when in fact those things were never supposed to be there in the first place. Those are not unfinished audio files... they are CUT audio files. Cut from the final version of Bloodlines by design.

I once did an experiment, where I enabled all of the unused float lines for most of the NPC's. And then, when I did a test run through the game, I quickly discovered why Troika had decided to disable most of them:

Because the resulting non-stop NPC chatter utterly ruins the mood of the game. As a roleplaying experience, Bloodlines works best if everything is deep, dark and QUIET most of the time. That's what sets up the atmosphere... the feeling that we are detached and outcast and on our own in the world. The game world is far more spooky and moody in general, if most of the time the people we encounter simply walk right past us without saying a word.

This is why Troika disabled all of that unnecessary float dialogue. So for Wesp to come along with his typical "more is always better" approach was, in my considered opinion, a wretched mistake on his part. One of many such mistakes. But we knew that.

[Prisoner416]

I was familiar with that, but you bypassed my other question.

[Tessera]

...you bypassed my other question.

Not on purpose, I assure you. What was your other question..?

[Ratcatcher]

There is one change I really like in Wesp's patch though, and wanted your opinion of it.

When you reunite E and Lily, he's added an option to return Lily's belongings to her.

This doesn't hurt gameplay in itself. In fact, it makes more sense then keeping her stuff forever, which has no value.

It always bugged me that I kept them when she was right there.

I'm thinking he means this.

[Tessera]

I think it's a mod. And if you like such mods, then I think it's fine.

But it's an arbitrary and unnecessary change, hence it doesn't belong in a patch.

[Prisoner416]

I wish I could just ditch it.

(Note: assume everything I mention refers to the plus version)

I do like the additions he made to the poster quest. Wish that was a available as a mod, since it hardly affects gameplay.

But he has this bad habit of messing around with things... like adding music to the Nosferatu living areas.

It was cool at first, then I realized... this is killing the mood, covering up the whispers, the feeling of... SOLITUDE.

There's a guard in the Empire Hotel Lobby now that will automatically attack Nosferatu.

I've made patches for games before that actually had content deleted, mainly imports that had violent bits disabled.

There's a large difference between reinserting disabled content and adding DELETED content back in that was meant to be removed.


By the way, is there a mod or method to turn down background music in the game, like the Asylum music? It's often hard for me to hear dialog over the music.

[Prisoner416]

... using packfile explorer 3.09 to check out the audio.

Some good deleted stuff in here. Wall_break.wav is... interesting.

(Edit. The amount of sheer unused material in here is amazing, along with some interesting filenames. I'll have to document the better ones.))

[Tessera]

I wish I could just ditch it.

You can -- by re-installing Bloodlines and then installing the TPG, thus utterly removing all traces of Wesp and his loathsome meddling.  

By the way, is there a mod or method to turn down background music in the game, like the Asylum music? It's often hard for me to hear dialog over the music.

It is totally possible, yes... although the method would depend upon which area of the game we are talking about.

In some areas, the volume level of various background sounds (including music in some cases) is controlled via a simple sound scheme file, which can be edited using any standard text editor.

But in other areas, the volume levels of certain sounds and music are controlled directly by entities encoded within the actual map files. For example, you mentioned the music inside the Asylum club. That particular music is loaded as a map entity and is controlled directly from there.

To illustrate what I am referring to, here is what the actual map entity looks like for the Asylum music:

{
"classname" "ambient_generic"
"targetname" "music"
"message" "Music/Licenced/05. Chiasm - Isolated.mp3"
"health" "8"
"preset" "0"
"volstart" "0"
"fadein" "5"
"fadeout" "5"
"pitch" "100"
"pitchstart" "100"
"spinup" "0"
"spindown" "0"
"lfotype" "0"
"lforate" "0"
"lfomodpitch" "0"
"lfomodvol" "0"
"cspinup" "0"
"radius" "1000"
"spawnflags" "1"
"sound_event_level" "2"
"flag_force_looping" "1"
"flag_no_sfx" "1"
"origin" "-921.205 -85.3192 -232"
}


But wait... it gets even more complicated. As we move from place to place inside the Asylum map, the volume level of the club music is faded up or down... depending upon where we are. If we ride the elevator up to the top floor, then the music level fades a bit. And if we then enter Therese's office, it fades even more. And when we take the elevator back downstairs, it rises back up to its default volume level. This fading up and down is likewise controlled directly by special map entities known as "triggers."

Here is an example of one of the Asylum map triggers, which is responsible for restoring the default volume level of the club music:

{
"model" "*35"
"classname" "trigger_multiple"
"wait" "1"
"spawnflags" "1"
"origin" "-1200 508 -233"
"OnStartTouch" "music,Volume,8,0,-1,,"
}

That particular trigger is set up so that it will restore the music volume by ramping it up over the course of 8 seconds ("OnStartTouch" "music,Volume,8,0,-1,,"). I haven't actually gone over to the map to check on its exact location, but at first glance, it looks like a trigger which has been set to fire whenever we are taking the elevator back down to the main hall. Just an educated guess.

It may be possible to create a new sound scheme entry for the Asylum club, which could possibly set a new maximum default level for the main music. I haven't ever bothered to try it, but it seems logical to me that the engine should accept it... if it were coded properly. At present, there is no such entry within the default sound scheme file for the Asylum main hall, which means that Troika wanted that particular music to play at full volume. It is, after all, a modern night club... and in a typical night club, the music is usually quite LOUD.

There is another (and much simpler) way that you could do it, however. You could simply load the audio file in question into an audio editor (eg: Sony SoundForge) and then decrease its overall volume level that way. The only tricky part to doing it that way is that the modified audio file MUST be saved in the exact same format as the original version. Also, it must NOT have any metadata saved within the file header (or else the game engine will crash). The VTMB engine expects nothing except simple, standard MP3 and WAV audio files... either 1 or 2 channels... with absolutely nothing added to their file headers (except for occasional sound looping data where appropriate).

Incidentally, this is in fact why I tell people to -never- play any of VTMB's audio files using Windows Media Player. The reason is because WMP has a nasty tendency to add its own metadata to the file headers of the various files that it opens and plays. It does this without informing the user that it has done so. Why it does something so sinister is a question that only Microsoft can answer.


This has been a rather lengthy reply, but I try to be reasonably complete whenever I am asked about mods. The bottom line is that you can indeed change the volume levels to anything that you wish, but it may involve making numerous map edits in some cases. And unless you are familiar with the way that the Source maps are constructed in Bloodlines, I do not recommend messing around with them. For a non-modder such as yourself, the easiest and best solution would probably be to alter the audio files directly, in an appropriate sound editor. I strongly suggest making backup copies beforehand, just in case you happen to make any mistakes.

(Edit. The amount of sheer unused material in here is amazing, along with some interesting filenames. I'll have to document the better ones.))

It is really no different than the amount of material which ends up on the cutting room floor, during the editing of a typical motion picture. Troika deliberately cut great globs of stuff from the final version of Bloodlines and in most cases, I agree with their reasons for doing so.

Some good deleted stuff in here. Wall_break.wav is... interesting.

It was unused because Troika replaced it later on, with a better sound effect: "smashthrough_wall.wav"  

As I have said -- most of those things were left unused for a reason. But try telling that to Wesp. He simply doesn't get it.  

[Prisoner416]

No, the wall-break sound is an "Oh Yeah!" kool-aid man effect.

There's also some blooper cuts kept in, and some interesting bits, like effects for a "shovel-head" character.

Having trouble finding the ACTUAL dialog in the game though, like the normal conversations with Damsel and others. All I can seem to find is normal floats and music.

[Tessera]

Having trouble finding the ACTUAL dialog in the game though, like the normal conversations with Damsel and others.

VTMB\Vampire\sound\character\dlg

The sub-folders for the various character dialogues are located there.

[Prisoner416]

Having trouble finding the ACTUAL dialog in the game though, like the normal conversations with Damsel and others.

VTMB\Vampire\sound\character\dlg

The sub-folders for the various character dialogues are located there.

Ah, okay, I'm just stupid then, I was looking in the pack files.

[Tessera]

No, not necessarily stupid on your part. In many cases, the VPK files will need to be decompressed, before certain folders and sub-folders are revealed.

My suggestion would be to make copies of all of the VPK's in some neutral location on your hard drive, and then decompress them all if you wish to browse their contents. But whatever you do... do NOT decompress them directly within your VTMB installation. Doing so could possibly overwrite various patch files and make the game un-playable.