Phew, marathon sessions of trial and error with numbers the last couple of nights.

I've gotten the .eff files 100% figured out, including a number of hard-coded values for sound effects and music selections.

I've also gotten the .emt files figured out, aside from a couple of fields that don't seem to do anything no matter what I put in them. Those are just listed as '?'.

Here's the .emt file format. You can paste this line at the top of the file for reference. The semicolon tells the client to skip that line.

To make the music fade, use the 4th and 5th fields. 4th field fades the sound/music in over the course of as many milliseconds as you specify when the character gets in range. 5th field fades the sound/music out over the milliseconds when the character goes out of range. 500/1000 or so seems good for sound effects. 1000/2000 seems nice for music.

xmiIndex is for choosing which MIDI song to play in an xmi music file. gfaydark.xmi has 6 different songs, for example, so you can specify 0-5 for that one for different locations (Kelethin, Crushbone, Felwithe) or different times of day.

Friday's project will be making the converter from .eff to .emt so we can actually customize our zones!

Very very nice! This info is invaluable. Thank you!

Something's off. I'm gonna take another look tonight. There's gotta be a way to specify a cooldown before the sound effect plays again. I must have missed it while messing with parameters and testing behavior.

In the meantime, this should get your pickchar music working:

File: clz.emt

Not at home where I can test it, though. Let me know if it doesn't work.

Testing now.

Didn't work. eqtheme.mp3 still overrid the pickchar.xmi & my pickchar.mp3 file i added to /sounds.

Darn. I'll mess with it some more tonight.

Better not be a hard-coded thing!

Just logged in again. It seems the code DOES work, but my eqtheme.mp3 does not fade out in the pickchar theme comes in during character select. So both play simultaneously.

And if you rename eqtheme.mp3 to stop it from playing over pickchar, you'll lose the background music during the loading screen. Hmph.

Yes, since apparently eqtheme.mp3 is hardcoded. Hmmmmmmm.

Actually, I don't think it is.

I saw during my testing that in the .eff files, there were references to music files -1 through -24. My investigation showed that they were referencing the line numbers in this file:

mp3index.txt

If you wanted to change a built-in music reference without altering the original mp3 file or filename, you could simply change its entry in the .txt file there.

You know... I wonder whether you could simply change eqtheme.mp3 to pickchar.xmi in that file... Hmm...

I'll take a look.

Which .eff file references eqtheme.mp3? I wouldn't have to rename eqtheme,mp3 to pickchar.xmi/mp3 if I can make a new reference to pickchar.mp3 as #25. See what I'm saying?

The .eff files are zone-specific, and there isn't one for the character loading zone. It's probably hard-coded into the client to play mp3index #6 during loading and character selection, so I'd try changing that line in mp3index.txt.

I'll test it out.

No cigar. Changing the eqtheme.mp3 line to pickchar.xmi/mp3 didn't change anything. Still played the eqtheme before and during character selection.