Secrets told me she fixed the bug. I will get in contact with her and see if she can send me the file necessary. Will report back.

Her fix didn't work.

Which file were you specificly referring to? Maybe i can poke around and look at why the pickchar.mp3 isn't working.

Also, i've noticed that when I create a .emt file for a zone, no more ambient sounds play like (forest wildlife sounds, swamp wildlife sounds, rain, etc.) Is it possible to reference the files that play those sounds the same way I would reference the mp3's?

If music was playing in some clients but not others, I was guessing that there was an issue with the sound emitter settings for the character selection/creation zone file (clz.eqg) for the broken client(s), but there don't appear to be any emitter files for clz, so that doesn't appear to be the issue.

I don't know what the issue you're reporting is, exactly. All three clients appear to play eqtheme.mp3 during character selection and creation. Verified by renaming elddar.mp3 to eqtheme.mp3 and firing up the client. pickchar.xmi appears to be completely ignored. Not referenced anywhere. May be an orphan file from old versions of the client, and is no longer used.

All ambient sounds get disabled? It would be really irritating to learn that the .emt file completely replaces the built-in sound effects for a zone instead of complementing them with new ones. What zones are you seeing that in?

Looks like eqtheme.mp3 is hard-coded, too, as is deaththeme.mp3, combattheme2.mp3, combattheme1.mp3, opener4.xmi, and gl.xmi. Not sure when the last two play.

http://i.imgur.com/KOWo8Ua.png

So you should just be able to overwrite those files? Or are you saying the mp3's are actually part of the client?

Yeah, overwrite the files and you've got custom death, combat, and character picker music.

The eqtheme.mp3 plays just fine, but the pickchar.mp3 (character selection theme) doesn't play. However, when you delete the eqtheme.mp3, the XMI files take over and play the classic MIDI sounds for both the main theme (eqtheme.mp3) AND character selection (pickchar.xmi). I'm looking to get the new theme I made for character selection (pickchar.mp3) to work. I just don't understand why the old themes work together, but not the mp3 themes.

I've been testing in Greater Faydark. So far, I've gotten all of the themes to play at their correct points within the zone. All sound effects work (bags opening/closing, footsteps, mob sound effects, battle noises) except for the ambient noises like rain, forest wildlife, etc. When I zone into Felwithe, however, all of the MIDI tracks play, ambient sounds play, everything's normal.

The only bandaid I can think of to fix the atmospheric/ambients sounds within the zone is to add another mp3 into the sounds folder, and make the emt file trigger it within the entire zone. However, temporary atmosphere effects like rain won't be triggered.

I'm onto something. The old ambient sounds were stored in ZoneNick_sounds.eff, referencing the sound files listed in ZoneNick_soundbank.eff.

It looks like ZoneNick.emt is simply a plain text version of the combination of these two files. If ZoneNick.emt is found, the game ignores the old ZoneNick_soundbank.eff and ZoneNick_sounds.eff.

My next step is to reverse engineer ZoneNick_sounds.eff and make a quick little program that'll create any ZoneNick.emt from ZoneNick_sounds.eff.

It looks like at least Lavastorm and Nektulos are zones that have both the old .eff files and the new .emt file, so that should be very helpful in reverse engineering the _sounds.eff file format.

Gonna be a fun project when I get home from work today.

Excellent news!!!

I've got the file format partially figured out. X/Y/Z/Radius of sounds is good, some static sounds are good, some time-of-day-limited sounds I'm figuring out.

It's a complicated little file format with the fields not being named and described.

I've got it. I've finally actually got it.

There are three sound types in a ZoneNick_sounds.eff file.

Type 0 - Different sounds for day and night, from ZoneNick_sndbnk.eff
Type 1 - Background Music (with a pointer to which tune from ZoneNick.xmi to play)
Type 2 - Same sound any time of day, from ZoneNick_sndbnk.eff

I also figured out the fields in the .emt files to match up with the different sound types above. Everything. A straight up direct conversion from .eff files to a .emt file should be completely possible.

This will be awesome for anyone who wants to customize their zones' sound effects and background music.

We'll see if I can get it done before I have to turn in for the night.

There are a few more side cases. Type 3 sounds are randomized, but I haven't quite figured it out yet, and some sounds show a radius of 0, but they still play within a certain radius. Gonna have to do some more h4xxing.

Good news all around! If there's anything I can do, let me know. About to start testing the fade in/out's of the themes. Hopefully one of those numbers controls that parameter.