Ok, I looove BF2, and have been playing it religiously for 3 years now. I know this game is getting old, but I just can't get enough of it, and I will continue playing it until BF3 comes out.
After countless hours playing this game (I'm on my 5th account), I simply cannot take certain sounds anymore. Namely, the commander's US "ENEMY INFANTRY SPOTTED" and the MEC "Habada booboola Da!" These sounds are played waaaay too much, are very loud compared to other game sounds, and if I hear them any more I may jump off a highway overpass after lighting my testicles on fire when a semi is passing underneath. Also annoying, but not as bad, is all the radio chatter, especially all the player spotting and missed spotting: "enemy troops!" "enemy infantry" etc.
The issue is that players cannot lower the useless chatter ingame. I honestly see no way lowering these sounds could prove as an advantage in game, so isn't necessarily a "hack." I honestly don't care if it is a hack/frowned upon, I'm going to figure this out and do it.
What I tried was modifying the .OGG files and lowering the DB levels of these tracks. I tried extracting them from the client_files.zip (or whatever it's called) archive, recompressing the OGG files with a very low DB level, then re-adding them to the archive.
The problem is I then get an "you have modified content" message, saying "revert to unmodified BF2 to play online." This is baloney. I love this game, but EA made a huge flaw IMHO in playing all of these sounds constantly and not giving the players an option to lower the volume on them. I tried lowering the audio "voice over" setting, but it had no effect on the radio chatter. I actually don't even know what the "voice over" setting is.
So... does anyone know how to "mod" these sounds without getting yelled at by Punkbuster/BF2? If there is no way to do this, would I contact EA or Punkbuster about trying to get this client_files archive excluded from the Punkbuster size checks? If it's punkbuster that controls the checks for this, then I can see this being a plausible fix, if it's EA that would have to mod something, then I realize it's not likely this could happen.
The problem with this file with all the audio being added to an exclusion list is that it has ALL game sounds in it, and people could take advantage of this by making footsteps or enemy sounds louder, thus being an unfair hack, but if there was a way to allow ONLY the player voice/spotting sounds, then that would be ideal.
I'm not really looking to start a debate on whether this is ethical or not, and am not interested in hearing your opinions if you object to this. I've made up my mind about how I feel on this, and am going to proceed with it regardless of the general opinion of the community. I mainly want to discuss how we could approach making this happen. I simply CANNOT take these repetitive sounds that I've probably heard at least 10,000 times each, and are extremely LOUD. The commander spot clips are very loud compared to other radio chatter, and many servers have commanders that spot spam constantly (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but annoying to the ears.)
Discuss, help, and let's see if we can figure this out, legitly, or non-legitly.
Walt
After countless hours playing this game (I'm on my 5th account), I simply cannot take certain sounds anymore. Namely, the commander's US "ENEMY INFANTRY SPOTTED" and the MEC "Habada booboola Da!" These sounds are played waaaay too much, are very loud compared to other game sounds, and if I hear them any more I may jump off a highway overpass after lighting my testicles on fire when a semi is passing underneath. Also annoying, but not as bad, is all the radio chatter, especially all the player spotting and missed spotting: "enemy troops!" "enemy infantry" etc.
The issue is that players cannot lower the useless chatter ingame. I honestly see no way lowering these sounds could prove as an advantage in game, so isn't necessarily a "hack." I honestly don't care if it is a hack/frowned upon, I'm going to figure this out and do it.
What I tried was modifying the .OGG files and lowering the DB levels of these tracks. I tried extracting them from the client_files.zip (or whatever it's called) archive, recompressing the OGG files with a very low DB level, then re-adding them to the archive.
The problem is I then get an "you have modified content" message, saying "revert to unmodified BF2 to play online." This is baloney. I love this game, but EA made a huge flaw IMHO in playing all of these sounds constantly and not giving the players an option to lower the volume on them. I tried lowering the audio "voice over" setting, but it had no effect on the radio chatter. I actually don't even know what the "voice over" setting is.
So... does anyone know how to "mod" these sounds without getting yelled at by Punkbuster/BF2? If there is no way to do this, would I contact EA or Punkbuster about trying to get this client_files archive excluded from the Punkbuster size checks? If it's punkbuster that controls the checks for this, then I can see this being a plausible fix, if it's EA that would have to mod something, then I realize it's not likely this could happen.
The problem with this file with all the audio being added to an exclusion list is that it has ALL game sounds in it, and people could take advantage of this by making footsteps or enemy sounds louder, thus being an unfair hack, but if there was a way to allow ONLY the player voice/spotting sounds, then that would be ideal.
I'm not really looking to start a debate on whether this is ethical or not, and am not interested in hearing your opinions if you object to this. I've made up my mind about how I feel on this, and am going to proceed with it regardless of the general opinion of the community. I mainly want to discuss how we could approach making this happen. I simply CANNOT take these repetitive sounds that I've probably heard at least 10,000 times each, and are extremely LOUD. The commander spot clips are very loud compared to other radio chatter, and many servers have commanders that spot spam constantly (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but annoying to the ears.)
Discuss, help, and let's see if we can figure this out, legitly, or non-legitly.
Walt