Fallout New Vegas

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Xoanon

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pocketsizerules

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About this mod

A Plug-and-Play Radio Station, ready for 30 songs. Songs are randomly chosen from the pool, and no song will play again until each song has been been played once. Get 30 songs, rename them to match what the mod expects, and drop them in a folder.

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Xoanon's Build Your Own 'No Repeat Day' Radio Station Mod

Hello everyone!

I've made a few radio stations for Fallout 3 and New Vegas for my own personal use, and I made them with additional scripting that prevents songs from repeating every few songs. In Fallout 3 and New Vegas, the scripting around the radio stations lets songs repeat pretty often. Songs are picked randomly, but the code only checks if the song has played in the last three or four songs. So a song could play, then three more songs, then that first song could play again. In my radio stations, no song can play twice until every other song has played once. So if you've got , say, 30 songs? Each one will play once before any song plays a second time.

I can't exactly hand out my Fallout 3 or New Vegas radio stations as-is, as they're for my own personal use only and use copyrighted songs. But what I can do, and what I'm doing here, is build a version of my New Vegas no-repeat station with instructions how you can plug in your own songs. There's space for 30 songs. If an average song is 3 to 5 minutes, that's 1 1/2 to 2 hours or more of no-repeat music. That's more than a full day in New Vegas (normal timescale, 2 real life minutes is one game hour, so 48 real life minutes is a New Vegas game day).

How to Put Your Own Songs into the Mod
Get MP3s of 30 songs you like. Rename them Song01.mp3, Song02.mp3,
Song03.mp3, etc., up to Song30.mp3. Convert them with Audacity or a similar program to 16-bit, 44100Khz WAV files. It's better to make them Mono than Stereo. It seems that in some situations, Stereo files play one channel, then the other, repeating the song twice basically.

Drop them into the New Vegas Data subfolder called Data\Sound\Songs\XoanonBuildYourOwn. Fire up the game.
Check your Pip-Boy for Xoanon Custom radio. leave the "Flipper" WAVs as
is. It plays to let you know when the station 'resets', and sounds like
several seconds of white noise.

EDIT: Some users are having trouble with some MP3s skipping after just a short time playing. So I'm making a revised version that will expect 16-bit, 44100Hz WAV files instead.

If you want this radio station to appear in radios in the Wasteland, you'll need to make OGG files as
well and do some GECK work of your own, So you'll have to read some
details below, and it's good to understand how things work for a Radio
Station mod...



How it works under the hood

There's a bunch of good radio station building tutorials around, like this one (https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/274194-tutorial-how-to-create-a-new-radio-station/) but I'm going to go summarize as much of it here as I can to help new radio station modders understand how everything works under the hood.

First thing a radio station in a mod requires is a "Talking Activator" or TA.
TAs are listed under "Actors" in the GECK Object Menu.
I've made one already in this mod, with the ID "XoanonBuildYourOwnRadioTA".
The "Name" field for this TA, which is how the radio station will appear in your Pip-Boy, is "Xoanon's No Repeat Radio". If you want to change it to another name, you'll have to edit the Talking Activator in the New Vegas GECK. Search for 'xoanon' in the Talking Activators entry in the GECK, open it, and change the name but NOT the ID to whatever you'd like. (Note for Fallout Who Vegas TARDIS addon users - you also need to change the Name not the ID of an ACTIVATOR item called fwvTCradioXoanonCustom to change the name on the TARDIS console.)

I've already placed the TA in the world map, and set it to broadcast Everywhere, not on a radius. I'm not going to worry about teaching you to modify that, but I can at least tell you how to find the world REF record of the TA. Just right-click the TA record in the Object Window adn choose Use Info. You'll see a record for "Used in these cells", and you can click it to load it. It'll load the world REF record in its location hidden under the floot in Vault 11.

The world REF record for the TA is "XoanonRadioTAREF".

And the Quest is where we set up the 'radio' records for the station. So I've set up a quest called XoanonBuildYourOwnRadioStationQuest. That's where all the Radio entries are placed.
And that quest has a script attached to it. The script looks like this:

    short Track1played
    short Track2played
    short Track3played
    ... (a bunch more entries)
    short Track30played
    short TotalPlayed

It's just a bunch of variables ('short' type in this case), 1 to 30 and one called "Total Played". These are used in the code on each Radio entry in the quest to do all the fancy randomization and the 'reset' once all 30 are played.

In the Radio tab of the XoanonBuildYourOwnRadioStationQuest is a single Topic entry called RadioHello. That's how the radio station starts, and that's where all the entries are.

There are 31 entries under RadioHello. The first 30 are the songs, and the last is the Flipper. The Flipper is the topic that resets everything to be able to randomize and play through again.
Each dialogue entry (Song 1, Song 2, etc.) is attached to a Sound File in the GECK, and each is set to Random and Run Immediately. The Flipper's also set to Random End, since it's the last in the random choice set. Each of the entries has a Result Script (End) as well. The ones for the songs basically say "When you have played this song, mark it as played, and increment the Number of Songs Player Counter [TotalPlayed] by 1". The Flipper only plays when TotalPlayed is 30, because we have 30 songs here. And it resets the "played" flags on every single song, so that every song can be randomized again.


If You want to Mod the Station to Work on In-Game Radios and Jukeboxes...

Each Radio topic, Song or Flipper, is connected to an already-created Sound file in the Audio entries in the GECK. They're called BuildYourOwnRadioStation01 to 30, and Flipper. I've made matching files in the folder Data\Sound\songs\XoanonBuildYourOwn. They're Song01.wav, Song02.wav, etc, and XoanonFlipper.wav. Each of them is tied to the Sound entries in the GECK. On top of that, there's 31 OGG files. Each of them is Song01_mono.ogg, Song02_mono.ogg, etc., and XoanonFlipper_mono.ogg. OGG files are used by the game to play the Radio songs on in-world Radio devices. They have to be mono, and they have to be named [name of the matching wav]_mono.ogg. And these all have to be in the folder I put them, which is under Sound\songs.

If you're going to make your new Custom Radio Station work on some device in-game, you'll have to build a new mod that loads both the basic FalloutNV files and the radio station mod as a parent. That kind of stuff I'll leave you to do yourself. But what I can tell you is that this is where the OGGs come in. You'll have to use Audacity or some similar program to turn your stereo WAVs into mono OGGs. Open up your stereo WAV in Audacity, use Tracks > Stereo Track to Mono, then File > Export Audio and select OGG format. Whatever the filename ends up being, make sure you put _mono.ogg at the end rather than just .ogg. It has to have that in the filename to work properly. So Song01.wav will play its matching Song01_mono.ogg on a in-game Radio or Jukebox.