Looking for Soundtrack Files with Tags, etc.

[PangaeaACDC]

Yes. Yes! YES!!! 

 

 

Thank you soooooooooo much for putting me on the right track by mentioning the file names Finally found a way to do it, the game doesn't crash, and best of all, the laughing man is sitting silent and sulking in a corner. Woot!!

 

Thanks also goes to DerPopo from here, although he'll never see this post of course. That link contains the last but vital step.

 

[Edit: Not sure if there is an easy and fast way to search through the content of large amounts of files in Windows, but in Linux this can be done with the grep command in terminal. I navigated to the PillarsOfEternity_Data folder and ran this command

grep -r "drunk_people" *

It takes a little while as there are some pretty big files to search through, but you will get a list of the files that contains this phrase within all files and sub-folders. So when I initially searched for "laughter", there were a fair  few instances of "laughter" and "slaughter" from conversation files. [/Edit]

 

Here is the recipe for doing this. Hope it helps somebody else:

 

1. Download and extract Unity Asset Bundle Extractor (UABE)
2. Open the asset file that you need, which in this case is sharedassets2.assets
3. View -> Search by name -> Enter *drunk_people* and hit F3 until you find the sound files you want to remove from the game. "amb_os_drunk_people_04" is the worst by some distance, but I also removed ...02, ...05 and ...06.
4. DO NOT remove them by hitting the "Remove" button at the bottom of the screen. This crashed the game on my end (in hindsight, it *might* work if you only do it from sharedassets2.assets, because I did it in all 4 assets files, and that messed up their sizes when I saved them).
5. Instead, click "Export Dump", which saves the file as a .txt file.
6. Open the file in Notepad or whatever, and change "int size" to 0. The line will then state e.g. "0 int size = 0". Before the edit, the parameter will be as big as the size of the array (which presumably contains the actual sounds). Save the .txt file.
7. Click "Import Dump" in UABE and import the edited .txt file. I think you need to have the right 'line' selected in UABE, for instance where "amb_os_drunk_people_04" is listed, so the import goes to the right spot (but I'm not sure about this, the program may simply import the .txt to the right spot anyway, based on the parameters).
8. Click "OK" at the bottom of the UABE screen, and you should get a popup box asking you to save (or simply choose "Save" from the File menu). You need to pick a different name, as the program can't overwrite the file itself. Make it simple, and for instance save it to (in this case) sharedassets2_.assets (with the underscore, or some other character of your choosing)
9. Swap the filenames around, by giving the original file a different name (and back it up, just in case), and giving your saved .assets file the name of the original file, in this case sharedassets2.assets (remove the underscore from before).
10. The sound file should now in effect be removed from the game.

This should work for all sound files. As mentioned I removed 4 files, and after hanging around the Copperlane inn for a few minutes, no laughing jackass could be heard, and that usually happens within about 3 seconds (on a good day). I therefore think this workaround actually works

 

As you can see from the attached image, if you hit "View Data" in UABE, the array in the file appears to be gone, with no items listed, and the size at 0. Previously there was a massive list of array items, which was in the range of 15-30,000 for these relatively small sound files.

 

I'm so happy this succeeded, because now I can enjoy wandering around the inns and brothels and so forth without wanting to throw the computer out the window, or needing to mute the sound while in there (because I kinda need the computer).

 

(Of course I hope there won't be some type of knock-on effect, like the computer catching Ebola and the population in northern Europe dying off as a result of this move. No guarantees )

Edited November 24, 2016 by PangaeaACDC

[Justin Bell]

Yes. Yes! YES!!! 

 

 

Thank you soooooooooo much for putting me on the right track by mentioning the file names Finally found a way to do it, the game doesn't crash, and best of all, the laughing man is sitting silent and sulking in a corner. Woot!!

 

               

 

WOW!  You have done the impossible!  That's impressive stuff PangaeaACDC!  Nice work!!!!!  Glad I could be of service