Changing Unit's Sound via UnitMetaData.slk

I've searched the forums, and maybe I'm just dense - no comments on that please :) - but I can't figure out how to make one unit use another unit's sounds without adding stuff to the .w3m.

I'm trying to make the Orc Tauren sound like a Neutral Hostile Wendigo. Both default sounds already used by War 3. Shouldn't be a problem, right? Hmmph....

Of course for starters I opened the Sound module in the WE. I opened up the Orc Tauren's sounds and did a Use Internal Sound on all of them to make them point to the Wendigo's sound variables (the ones that had matches). Didn't work. I then tried the reverse, and opened the Wendigo's sounds and made them point to the Tauren's sound vars. Ok, that makes no sense but still. I'm trying here. No luck. Well, you know what's weird about this though? In the Sound module when I double-clicked on the Taruen's sounds on the left, under Orc->Tauren it played the appropriate Wendigo sounds that I pointed them to. But when I loaded the map the unit went back to default Tauren sounds. Can anyone explain this? I mean, it sounded like it was gonna' do what it was supposed to, but no go.

Time to get serious. I then added the UnitSound field to my UnitMetaData.slk, and the WE allows me to change it to another unit. Nada, zip.

And I've even tried changing a unit's class and ID to the one I want it to sound like to no avail (again, by adding the fields to UnitMetaData). Again, I'm just trying everything I can think of at this point. It DID play the Wendigo's death sound when it got killed though. Everything else was still Tauren though. Weird.

So...can anybody tell me how to make a Tauren sound like a Wendigo? Without adding custom Tauren sounds to the map? Yeah, I did that and it worked but the map went from like 360 Kb to 1.5 Mb. Like people want to sit around and download a 1.5 Mb map. :)

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Links to the info would be most kind as well if this is covered elsewhere.

Take care.

I figured out one way to exchange unit sounds. You have to edit the "unitUi.slk" file. There's a field with the caption "unitsound". Type the unit you want in that field and add the whole file to the map via mpq2k, it's something around 270 kb.

Hope I could help you.

Are you trying to add the slk's to you map?
For some reason you can't do that, you can add them to the war3patch.mpq though and have the game read from that.

But War3 doesn't read the slk's but the txt's so you have to edit them as well.

I tried this, and it didn't work.

I even tried it from scratch. I made a new map in WE, added a Tauren, saved it. Edited my local copy of c:\games\war3\ui\unitui.slk and changed the otau (Tauren) UnitSound field to Wendigo. Then I did this in c:\games\war3\maps:

mpq a test.w3m c:\games\war3\ui\unitui.slk ui\unitui.slk

Nada. Tried this too (uncompressed):

mpq A test.w3m c:\games\war3\ui\unitui.slk ui\unitui.slk

Still nothing. I've got mpq in my path, so it works fine no matter where I'm at. The .w3m's size grew by something like 60 Kb on the first attempt ('a') and the full 270 Kb on the second ('A'), so I know it was sticking the file in there.

Do you have any idea what I may have been doing wrong?

Gee, and I have to start asking myself has anyone actually managed to successfully change a unit's sound in a bnet game?

I'm thinking that all these people who have have just ran that regedit hack that allows War 3 to use local directories, and it's simply accessing the local copy. I myself have not enabled the hack and don't plan to, since I want everything to work over bnet.

Thanks for anything.

I'm getting mighty desparate and annoyed at the whole thing. Heh.

Care.

eh? it doent belong in UI folder in first place =)
it belongs to units folder

still, 230kb is still large compared to unitmetadata.slk , but latter one causes desync

if unitui.slk doesnt cause desync after paly, then we can use that. If you want custom units with custom sounds, then its doable too!
Just add the Id code field for the custom unit in unitui.slk with same data properties of the unit, then that would work =)

*shame*

Yes, I now know that. Heh heh. When I import it into the my map to units\unitui.slk it works great!


If you use mpq a (little a) then it only ends up adding 60 Kb.


Yeah, I was gonna' try that when I got a chance. Instead of using WE's Unit Editor we can just use Excel! Heh heh.

Care.