OTBjoel

Hello all, I figured I'd introduce myself to this forum. My nickname is OTBjoel and I for a long time, I was the last person left doing mods for Oldtime Baseball/Tony 3 baseball.. At the urging of PortraitMatt (Fulling), he got me modding for High Heat. I've been friends with some of the classics guys on here for a while like AlexTony (HighHeat) and Stecropper (he and I go way back to OTB). Stecropper finally convinced me to join and now here I am. I hope to put out one oldtime/classic themed mod every week. I started with my Oldtime Overlay which hopefully you've enjoyed if you downloaded it. One of the projects I worked on and completed for HH was a total Announcer Play-by-Play conversion of Dave O'Brien to Mel Allen and Ernie Harwell. Mel did the PBP and Ernie did the color commentary. You guys can guess where the audio came from. PortraitMatt wanted to enhance the mod and make Curt Gowdy be the Stadium announcer with echo. The sound files for Oldtime (no longer in print) had the names for many hall of famers and all stars from the past. When I first joined this site, I started looking through the forums and found a thread for a Play-by-Play mod that took Vin Scully and the idea was for him to do the play by play. This was great as growing up in Los Angeles, Vin is my favorite all-time announcer. There was a time when I even considered recording his PBP from the radio and getting it into the game that way but I knew this would be way too time consuming. When his audio become available later, this made the possibility of this project a reality. I would like to resurrect this idea and join it with my initial concept I did for High Heat. The project is called "Legends from the Booth" and will feature a 3-man announcing booth of Vin Scully/Mel Allen/Ernie Harwell. First of all, this project would be an extension of work previously done by Hory, TyWiggins, and Hardcore Legend. To get caught up on the status of where they left off, see the following threads: http://www.mvpmods.com/Forums/viewtopic/t=32767.html http://67.227.134.100/Forums/viewtopic/t=32809.html http://www.eamods.com/ForumsPro/viewtopic/t=1444.html http://eamods.com/ForumsPro/viewtopic/t=2588.html This project appears to have died on the vine so I am taking a crack at resurrecting it. This project is open to everybody but there's needs to be one central Project Manager so I am taking that role. There will be sub projects that I will need lead contributors for and anybody is invited to fill those roles. I will be compiling everybody's contributions and distributing tasks as necessary. Tools to be used: 1) Sound Editor of your choice (I use Creative Wave Studio). 2) Extractor (Russian program written by same guy who did ASF import/export program). ASF Import/Export will not be used because it requires extensive hex editing. Extractor simply requires that the imported file is shorter than the original. This is done by simply resampling the file to be shorter. 3) gfxpak (to extract team name and player name files) 4) Hex Editor of your choice (for editing sound header files if needed) Here are some of the phases of the project: 1) Extract sound data for Mel Allen - done a) Sounds are in .raw format and converted to .wav (3 files - PBP,last names, first names) Need to split the wave file as it is one big file. Although I was able to get the sound, I was not able to get the index structure figured out so the file will need to be split manually. I can send the original raw file to one of this site's talented programmers and see if they can extract it a better way. c) Need to index Mel Allen sounds. FINISHED 8/8 2) Extract sound data for Ernie Harwell - done for the most part but I could stand to get some more - Need the call "He stood there like a house, and watched it go... by. 3) Extract sounds from Vin Scully - done - Lets give credit where credit is due. Hardcore Legend came up with the idea and TyWiggins executed it with his skx2vag program. Much thanks to them. a) Need to index Vin Scully files FINISHED 7/27 4) Import/Replace appropriate sounds in PBP, name-files with help from Indexes. *** Indexes need to be completed first in case project needs to be revisited by others and to avoid errors. When I did this before for High Heat, I did not index well enough and imported many sounds without any record of where it went. My Mel Allen index sadly is very incomplete and needs to be redone. Without the indexes, you would have to go back into the sound database and play the sounds to see what they are. This is very time consuming and frustrating. Let's just get the indexes and we'll be glad for it later. What's done so far? 1) Game intros are complete alternating between Mel Allen and Vin Scully intros. 2) Stadium intros are also complete also alternating between the two. Attached is a sample of the intro of a real game. In progress: a) Sound indexing - Vin Scully COMPLETE!/Mel Allen COMPLETE! Mel last names/full names still to be done. Replace color commentary by Krukow with Ernie Harwell. - It sounds like a lot of people hate Krukow so Ernie will be a welcome change. Many of Ernie's calls are quite a bit shorter. Where an equivalent call cannot be found, it will be replaced by a 'blank'. To be accomplished: a) Completion of sound replacements: i) player names - in progress with help from AlexTony of Team Classics II) team names COMPLETE III) Stadium announcers ?? may not have to do. IV) a) Clear Krukow - COMPLETE preliminary mod posted Replace Krukow with Harwell - in progress, Harwell PBP indexed V) Play by Play of course VI) Stadium Names - COMPLETE! Considerations: Right now, the project will have the Play-by-Play between Mel/Vin interchanged depending on which file the game decides to pick. It would be nice to be able to say... have Mel do the start of the game and then have Vin relieve him in the middle. Well, that's a pipe dream as the game doesn't have the ability to do that. Perhaps, when this is complete we will have two versions of the mod, one that is predominantly Vin Scully and one that is predominantly Mel Allen. I personally don't care if the two get intermixed but I know there will be those of you out there who will feel this is unrealistic and want one announcer doing most of the game. Along this same theme, somebody could write an "Announcer Swapper" program where you can pick the announcer (with the announcers face) and then launch the game from the Announcer swapper program. All it would need to do is swap the appropriate sound files into the game like an Overlay Swapper does. There are just more files and they are a lot bigger. Time Frame: Expect this project to take at least a year to do, maybe longer. It won't be done overnight. One way or another, I plan on seeing this project all the way through to completion but it will get done faster with help and participation from this community. Unlike in previous attempts at this project, there is no quota as to how many people I want to participate. Since I have done this before, I know how much work it will take. I'll be glad to accept anybody's contributions until they burn out. There are no demands as to the amount of shared participation on this project. I will do the stuff that does not get done by others. This mod is intended to encompass all the important players throughout the history of baseball. With that in mind, we will not be spending too much time getting all the modern players into the game. Hopefully all eras can be represented equally and we will have enough names in the sound files to satisfy all the Hall of Famers, Award Winners, and All Stars throughout history. Some calls will not be able to be duplicated. In this case, we will either use 'blank' sounds or simply keep the original. The idea is to get the overall feel of the Legendary announcers. If a Kuiper name call or PBP call sneaks in every now and then, I think it is acceptable. If 95 out of 100 calls are done by either Mel/Vin/Ernie then I think our goal will be accomplished. If you'd like to participate, contact me by PM and let me know what your strengths are with regard to sound modding. Even those that aren't particularly versed in sound modding can still help with indexing the sound files into a spreadsheet. Let's try to keep this thread clean by mostly posting updates to the project. Communicate with me directly by PM. You will need to excuse me if I don't check this thread for a couple of days at a time as I usually mod for 2-3 hours a day and do not always check the forums. You can also send e-mail to joeldeleon@aol.com I am looking for help in the following areas: 1) Sound indexing: as with the indexing done for the original MVP files that was completed by this community in a previous thread by Ty Wiggins, we still need to index the Scully and Allen play-by-play files. The Mel Allen sounds will be be split manually so the sound bites can simply be saved by the name of whatever call it is. Skills: Anybody may contribute. 2) Project Leads a) Need a lead person to handle the pnamedat conversion. We will use the audio index from Total Classics 8. Skills: Experience with sound editing and perhaps hex editing the pnamehdr file. Need a lead to handle the stadium announcer conversion. Curt Gowdy will do as many names as possible from his name database file. You can split/splice as we've done before in Total Audio mods. Where a name is not available from Curt, It's probably ok to leave the original Stadium Announcer. Curt Gowdy files will also need to be split/separated and indexed by name. Reverb effect will need to be added to the name sounds to get the 'Stadium Effect'. Skills: Same as Above I will be giving out assignments based on contributor's expertise and desire to work on certain phases of the project. Oh yeah, I didn't want to scare anybody but there are about 16000 sound bites. At the rate of importing 50 sounds/day, it will be done in about a year. With that said, I think the excitement of continuing to get new sound calls into the game will keep the interest level up so that people will want to keep working on it. I know that's how I got through it when I did the same thing for High Heat and I did that one largely on my own. I will be distributing the sound files appropriately to the volunteers on this project. Sorry if this is long-winded but I wanted to get started on the right foot. Download the attached sound wave to get a "feel" for what it will sound like. Thanks for your interest.