Together for Audio

ATTENTION SOLDIERS! For this Dev Diary I’ll talk about something you might not be that used to have in Hearts of Iron franchise: Voice Over! For this expansion I wanted to do something more with the audio and trying out something completely new for our history based games. So I wanted to have your units reply back in their native tongue whenever you select them and giving them order and there should also by different Voice Over lines when you select units during combat, if you now are playing as a country which we support Voice Over for now. Here is a short overview on which languages we have recorded:

• German

• French

• Italian

• British

• American

• Spanish

• Russian

• Simplified Chinese

• Japanese - Bonus -

• Danish

• Finnish

• Norwegian

• Swedish

Of course since our office is in Scandinavia we wanted also let some of the our Dev's from the Hearts of Iron 4 team record their own voices for our Nordic languages. I’ll let you guys try to figure out who has provided with voices once you have the expansion. ;) I have attached a small youtube video which will give you a sense on how the German, Russian and Japanese VO sounds and triggers in the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Dq1hjuGATs There will be 4 different “states” that the Voice Over will be triggered in;

• “Idle”

• “Combat”

• “Combat Winning”

• “Retreat”

VO lines tied to the “Idle” state will be triggered when the unit is not engaged in combat, “Combat” VO lines when your units are in combat while the “Combat Winning” will be triggered when your units are winning. “Retreat” is triggered when your units are retreating from combat if they are defeated. I want to talk about another topic and that is mods! With the new Voice Over system and script it is easy to mod your own Voice Over for the current languages and for other countries.. The easiest way to mod in your own audio files is simply just changing the .wav files to your own .wav files with the same name or just change the path in the .asset file. Below I’ll go more in depth in how you can script in your own Voice Over for those who might be interested: Modding: First thing you need to find is which “landcodes” we’re using in the game and you can locate these “landcodes” in this folder: \Hearts of Iron IV\history\countries These landcodes are important if you would like to mod in Voice Over for other countries than those we support at release of the expansion. Then later on you will need to open up the audio asset file which you will find in the dlc folder and it will be called “vo.asset”. After that you will mod the audio script like below: Here is how the German “soundeffect” may look like:

soundeffect = { name = "GER_infantry_positive_combat" sounds = { sound = de_Positive_001 } max_audible = 1 max_audible_behaviour = fail volume = 0.45 volume_random_offset = { 0.0 -0.15 } playbackrate_random_offset = { 0.0 -0.15} } But if you replace “GER_” in the “soundeffect” instead to “HOL_” it should look like this: soundeffect = { name = "HOL_infantry_positive_combat" sounds = { sound = de_Positive_001 } max_audible = 1 max_audible_behaviour = fail volume = 0.45 volume_random_offset = { 0.0 -0.15 } playbackrate_random_offset = { 0.0 -0.15} } Now the German Voice Over will be triggered for Holland units when they are in combat instead for German units. You will apply the same method for the other type of Voice Lines which are scripted: _infantry_idle _infantry_neutral_combat _infantry_positive_combat _infantry_retreat

Just script in the right landcodes and script in audio assets and I think you will be able to create really cool audio mods. Music: (handing over to Andreas Waldetoft here...) I have already done some British music for vanilla Hearts of Iron 4 score, but I wanted to expand on that and have an even more appropriate mood when playing as commonwealth countries. From fire ridden London, to tanks helping the British to victory in El Alamein. Together for Victory will come with 3 brand new themed tracks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRxK66AzfwQ To make managing and playing your music easier we