WC4 Audio Pack

wc4_audio_pack.zip
Creator	AD
Download	Download
Filesize	125000 kB

Description

This is the majority of the audio from the PC version. I'll start with what's missing: The majority of the sound effects and ship flyby sounds are missing. I thought I had included the inflight music, but it looks like there's only half of it. But the majority of the comm audio should be in this pack.

I didn't try and categorize all the nearly 6,000 files. I left it separated by disk. I did do a quick runthrough of the first disk, so all the named files in the root directory of the zip should be duplicates of disk one. I've made a preliminary attempt at naming them. So what you will find in the disk folders are a bunch of sequential wav files... It's not as much of a mess as it would first seem. You can pretty much ignore the last four digits of the 12 digit file-names. The first eight are the ones that count. The files are named after the extracted IFF files that they came from (@HCl's awesome but ancient treman doesn't preserve the original internal IFF naming unfortunately). So the program I batch converted these in preserved the IFF file number and appended a four digit sequential numbering on the entire batch.

Why this is important? Basically if the first 8 numbers match they are from the same batch... Usually the game will group one wingman's replies into one IFF so a batch of 20 files with the same first 8 numbers will probably be someone like Maniac's replies to comm commands.

Now about duplication: Yes... There's a lot here. But it wasn't practical (at least short term) to get rid of them all. Quite a few of the comm audio replies are repeated between disks (but not all) and in a few cases are repeated even within the same disk. (one trick is to put them all in the same folder and sort by time length and file size. Pretty much all duplicates will be side by side but it will be time consuming to get rid of the extras)

There are two versions of wingmen replies based on their morale. In some cases there's quite a few enemy taunts, but the game seems to pick from only half a dozen really common ones for whatever reason depending on who you're flying against. There's a handful of taunts that are supposed to be for pirates if I'm not mistaken, but you only really have 3 missions where you fly against pirates.

There's also full comms for all the non-FMV wingmen you can fly with on both the Lexington *and* the Intrepid. I can't say I normally picked them to fly with. What's more, any of the early Lexington pilots all have friendly and enemy comm dialogue. There's quite a few different versions of the dialogue for friendly ships you need to escort, but I don't remember actually seeing much variation in game (though some of the lines, like damage reports, rely on you actually asking for the damage report).

For sure though, I've never heard at least half of these comms before (or just never paid close enough attention?). I was a bit amazed at the sheer variety of audio clips in the game. It's kind of funny that you often end up hearing the same half a dozen replies anyway.

I also find a number of the "second wing" comm lines interesting since it's fairly obvious the team had planned on a much more robust and fleshed out system for the secondary objectives that you would have had to step in and help complete from time to time, but it doesn't seem like the system got fully fleshed out in the final game. For me these clips are the most interesting as most of the pilots have options for being on the second wing.