Guild of Writers

Working this morning on my waterfall, I came across an issue. I don't know if it's the plugin or Blender. I'm leaning towards Blender. But here it is.

Apparently if you have a sound file name that is longer than 16 charactors, Blender will give an error on export. Basically it says it can't find the file. Here's what I'm talking about.

I decided to use one of the ingame files. As we all agreed that use of ingame sound files is fine as long as we are not modifying them, and then redistributing them with the Age. So I picked: psnlWaterfall04_Loop.ogg as the one that I liked.

Well, I copied the wav file file over and then put in my emitter, and ALCscripting. Then loaded the Wave in blender.

When I got the error, I tried loading the wav in blender again. Once again I got the error.
Looking at the Audio window, it showed: psnlWaterfall04_L and that's all the little window would show. Looking at the console window, I saw that it was looking for a wave file called psnlWaterfall04_L instead of the whole name.

This of course is going to be a problem in that, now you can't use all the ingame sound files, but also, as was pointed out in another thread, for our own custom made sound files, so we don't accidently overwrite another Age's sound files, we have to put in special names. Well then for this it would be, campbravodtwaterfall.wav clearly too long. So we'll have to use acronyms, but that can get even more confusing.

Just wanted to bring this up.

Good find. BTW, Blender has the same problem with object names.

If anyone really wants to use an ingame file, it is possible to use PepExplorer to fix the file name after exporting.

Yah, but if we change the name.....then we'd have to include the file. And I thought we agreed it's not really a copy right issue for some of the sound effects, as long as we're not redistributing the file.

We got into this discussion over the use of Linking Panels. That using the texture might be a copyright violation. But since we're only pointing to the texture in Python, and we're using an exisiting game file (IE I'm not including it in the packed textures) that things like that were okay.

If I use a sound file, like the waterfall one, that would be okay too, as long as I'm only pointing to it, not re-distributing it. I mean, many sound effects will sound the same, so Cyan doesn't have a copyright on how a waterfall or fountain sounds. But they do own the rights to their file.
If I take the file, rename it, then I have to include it with the Age for download. That would be modifying and redistributing it. And I think we'd get a stern talking to about that. That's what I'm trying to avoid.

Of course the best answer is for me to go record my own darn SFX sounds, but being able to use ingame files helps keep the size of the downloads way down. Even ogg files can added up to a sizable amount if you have a lot of SFX in your Age.

But for now, I'll deal with it. Now excuise me.......I'm off with my digital recorder to the bathroom to try and make some decent sounding water flow............

Just don't ask how I made the sound is all

this was covered HERE

Never assume I have any measurable amount of short-term memory.

andylegate wrote:Yah, but if we change the name.....then we'd have to include the file. And I thought we agreed it's not really a copy right issue for some of the sound effects, as long as we're not redistributing the file.

No actually I mean the opposite. If you want to use an ingame sound file and it has a filename longer than 15 characters, you can still use it by fixing the file name in PrPexplorer.
You can make a temp copy of the Cyan file with a shorter name and delete it after the fix. Granted, it is a cumbersome process.

andylegate wrote:but also, as was pointed out in another thread, for our own custom made sound files, so we don't accidently overwrite another Age's sound files, we have to put in special names. Well then for this it would be, campbravodtwaterfall.wav clearly too long. So we'll have to use acronyms, but that can get even more confusing.

Just wanted to bring this up.

I don't see why that would be confusing. Cyan does it all the time. ahny, clft, dsnt, erca ... and we all know what those stand for. Easy for me to say though: my age is called Prad

btw, fixing strings in PRPExplorer is something I would only advise to the brave of heart.

Paradox wrote:PyPRP needs to read the .wav header information because of the way that Cyan handles plSoundBuffers. The plSoundBuffer contains detailed header information from the .wav file including byte-sizes and encoding.

Is there any reason Blender has to touch the sound file at all? -Are you using Blender to extract the header data maybe (...and Blender not knowing how to extract the very same data from the ogg header)?
If the information in the header is too much or complicated to let the writer input manually in the alcscript, maybe the "file:" field should point to the actual ogg and a new "sound_object:" field be added.

okay now this is getting stupid.

Now the plugin won't export unless the sound name is no longer than 8 characters. I'm trying to test using my door sound, and I decided to use:

clftDoor02_Open.wav

Well, it whined saying it couldn't find clftDoor02_Open.wav

Well that's 15 characters, so I renamed the file to Door02_Open.wav, that's 11 characters.

Still whining......

It finally exported when I shortened the name to dooropen.wav

come on now! What the heck is going on? Back with version 1.2.1 I was exporting with sound file names up to 17 characters long with no problems. What has happened?

I don't know but I can still export my sound files with 13 character names with PyPRP 1.3.x. They don't have any underscores in their names though.

Okay, I just looked at that, and I can too ONLY because they were saved with the blend file when I was using 1.2.1

Any NEW sound file introduced now, and it gives me that error.

not the underscore though. I've got other files that are 6 characters long that it doesn't mind that have underscores.