#jokermance mod

[hatboyproject]

The first visual updates for the post-Thessia conversation! The Romancing Joker version of this conversation is the longest one between them in the game now, at least on the Bridge, anyway. I’ve only done lip-sync animations for the custom lines up until where the video ends. There’s like... 30 more lines of dialogue in the tree past this point, and this is the first pass of these lip animations which were all done today! I saw the animations actually play for the first time when I recorded this. Not bad for a first pass I think, but wow I need to address Joker’s angry face because it does very ugly things to his mouth. (This aside from the fact that the game’s vanilla textures give my poor boy black rotted-ass looking teeth. If they don’t fix that in the Legendary Edition I will be furious.) I think Joker’s synth lines are working pretty well, here. I managed to get him to be pretty emotional sounding for the most part. I just have to do something about those expressions. L O R D T  boy please do not snarl at me like that

[hatboyproject]

Where to Find and Extract ME1 Audio From (Because it’s Different than ME2 & ME3)

ME1 is an organisational nightmare and also a repository of excellent lines to use for my nefarious purposes. It took me hours to sort out what I was doing here today so hopefully these notes will make your process a little easier if you’re trying to do something similar. ME2 & ME3 store their English audio in LOC_INT files, which are found in the same directory as .PCC files, known as Package FIles. Package Files contain scene data and asset usage instructions and whatever, LOC_INTs contain conversation flow and references to associated sound assets. With ME2 & ME3, sound assets themselves are stored in AFC files, and are named according to the conversation they are from. ME1 also has LOC_INTs, however in ME1′s case, only certain scene-specific sound effects are stored there. Things like different footfalls, mechanical beeps, asari meld effect noises, things like that. Actual voice assets will be referenced in these files and will show up in Soundplorer, but will show up as having no associated audio data. If you are looking for actual spoken lines, you will need to look in a different directory entirely, as they are stored in a different file format. The directory you want is: Mass Effect\BioGame\CookedPC\Packages\ISACT The files you want are .ISB files. You will want to load these up in Soundplorer. Unfortunately there are a few pitfalls with this, which I will explain:

The above is the Soundplorer view of the line where Joker says, “Pfft, Captain always sounds like that when he’s talkin’ to me.” Note how all the lines’ filenames have a number near the end, this is the line’s unique reference number. If you make a dump of all the spoken dialogue lines in Mass Effect (and if you’re screwing around with this kind of stuff, you should) you will see in your spreadsheet the numerical designator for the line, its subtitle, what file it’s stored in and basically how to find it. Joy. However the problem is that Soundplorer organises these files in the order the game sees them, which does not always correspond to the way humans see them. This means the numerical designators are all out of order. There is no way to organise the data numerically, nor is there a search function. You may be navigating ISBs hundreds of entries long, and the entries in the spreadsheet do not correspond one to one with the list in Soundplorer. If you do not know where you are in the conversation, you will need to manually find the number for your line. Yeah. So, this is why I spent four hours sourcing ME1 audio today for Joker and Shepard. The good news is I have a lot of stuff to work with that really helps the tone of what I’m trying to go for. The bad news is it will take a lot of work to implement, because animation data from ME1 is completely untranslatable to 2 and 3 so I will need to completely bullshit my way through phonemes for these lines. C O O L