neverwinter nights and baldurs gate

[bearded]

has anyone ever tried to convert these voice packs to ff?  and there are a lot of custom voice packs at never winter vault.

[bearded]

for what it's worth, i did it.  i converted a female gypsy to   .  i use her for aurora.
each nwn voice pack has around 30 wav files with names designating what they are for.

[cmdrkoenig67]

Hey Bearded...I downloaded some VPs from those games a while back, but I never did anything with them.  If I recall correctly, many of the voice samples didn't work in the download I got.  I wasn't sure if I'd have enough usable samples to make good VPs.

Dana

[bearded]

it's odd.  when i went there recently all i could find was voice samples.  the ones i have are from several years ago and are complete packs.  i've got about 10 of them, but no way of contacting the creators.
now, these creators are like us, they made voice packs to be used in the game.  just not our game.  i guess i can't simply release them or even upload them anywhere.
i'll keep trying to figure out how to contact the creators.

[cmdrkoenig67]

Oh...I didn't know these were fan-made...The VPs I have sound very professional.  They did good work.

Dana

[Kommando]

It should be easy enough to make the voice packs.  The thing is to make sure that the wav files are at the same specs as the ones in FF.  A free program like Audacity should convert them easily enough.

[Zetor]

This topic is kinda old, but I'm going to weigh in anyway.  

I converted some 'base' BG2 voicepacks as part of the VoxForce project back in 2002 or so. IIRC I used the 'Infinity Explorer' to extract the wav files from within the data chunks... it also works with other Infinity Engine games (IWD, IWD2, Planescape).
I think the biggest problem with BG1/2 soundsets is that there is not too much of each; basically you have several 'select' sounds, one or two 'attack' sounds, maybe a 'critical' sound, a 'wounded' and 'dead' sound, 'pick pocket', 'trap disarm', and the various generic comments when being above/below ground, happy, unhappy, etc. It's kinda hard to fill out all the possible 'sound slots' (mental blank, hypnosis, rage, etc) from there.

otoh, nwn1/2 (and now, Dragon Age) should be much more varied wrt voicepacks.
For other games with lots of potential, I suggest Wizardry 8 and Jagged Alliance 2 (two great games from a company that has sadly dissolved), and maybe the Silent Storm series... those are all tactical party-based games where having extensive (and distinct!) soundsets for all characters was a de facto requirement, and there is a LOT of them. During the VoxForce project, I only extracted about half of the Wiz8/JA2 voice files, and even that was enough material for over a hundred voicepacks.

As for conversion, Audacity is excellent. I am not sure if it has cross-file volume normalization (you might need it for less professional voicepacks where some voices are much louder than others), but DBPowerAmp used to be able to do that, and probably still can.


take care,

-- Z.

[bearded]

wow, do you still have those you made?

[Zetor]

Yeah, I have 'em. AFAIK I only extracted two from BG2 (Valygar, Mazzy) and three from Planescape (Dakkon, Vhailor, Annah) because in my opinion there were just not enough samples for the others to work with. Sadly my BG2 and PS:T disks aren't readable anymore (neither is my JA2 disk, but I bought a 2nd copy on Steam -- bytes can't get scratched!), so those are all I have. I -think- MFlamer created another voicepack from the bard's voice files as well. Wow, that was a long time ago.

I don't think I can commit to the voicepack 'biz again, but if you want any of the already-finished ones (list is here), I can send them to you, upload them to some sort of storage area, etc...


-- Z.

[cmdrkoenig67]

Hey Zetor,

Most (if not all) of your VPs (that you made from Wizardry 8, etc...) are still at my first two or three Yahoo Groups.

Dana

[bearded]

thank you cmdrkeonig, i'll look there.

[cmdrkoenig67]

Four newly uploaded old VPs with the kind permission of Zetor...

Z_female_astrologist.zip

Z_female_british.zip

Z_male_dark_exorcist.zip

Z_male_quixotic.zip

You can find them at my second FF Yahoo Group below...

http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/cmdrkoenig67freedomforce2/