Changing Engine and Horn/Whistle sounds: A Guide.

[AMD 103]

I'm sure many users sometimes want a locomotive to use a different horn or engine sounds, for whatever reason. I figured this out because I wanted the horn the AMD-103 had in RT2 instead of the weird one it originally had in RT3.

Well, I've figured out how to do it, through trial and error, and comparing engine sounds between locomotives. And yes, this does work. My AMD-103 has a much nicer sounding horn now, like it should've been.

It goes without saying: Please back up your .lco files before trying this.

1. Open your favorite Hex Editor of choice, mine being HxD.

2. Make sure it is set to 16 Columun, Hex offeset base, with Windows ANSI encoding.

3. On the last row, in the 03 offset, defines the engine sound used. The 07 offset defines the whistle/horn sound used. Change these values to what you want your locomotive to sound like.

4. Save changes, load game, and enjoy.

I'll attach a list of which values correspond to which sounds later. I'll be matching each value with the wav file that is contained in the RT3SoundTrains.PK4 file.

There are 9 engine sounds total to be chosen, 3 Diesel, 4 steam, 2 electric.

There are 10 whistle/horns, 2 electric, 4 diesel, 2 big steam (Low-pitched whistles), and 2 little steam(High-pitched whistles).

The game does not care about what locomotive type it is, it just calls the sound files listed. So you can give a diesel or electric a whistle, and a steamer a horn.

[Gumboots]

Yup. Sometime I must figure out how to add more noises. I know somebody had a go at it ages ago, but IIRC it wasn't as easy as you might think.

(Although I prefer setting my editor to 12 columns and decimal offsets, but that's just personal preference. 12 columns is handy for modelling work, because vertices come in lumps of 12: four bytes each for the X, Y and Z axes.)

[AMD 103]

Something tells me that it'll have to involve unpacking/repacking the RT3SoundTrains.PK4 file, because that's the only source the game seems to pull from. There's a extra hornsound installed with the 1.06 patch, but it's never used in game as far as I know.

I'll figure out if there's any sort of order to these tomorrow, with the steam sounds being in one block, the electircs being in another block, and the diesels being in another.

I just wanted to get this out tonight so I wouldn't forget how to do it in the morning, and I hadn't "fixed" the hornsound on the AMD-103 after having to do a re-install. (It's a long story, and no, it did not involve a screwup with the content files.)

[AMD 103]

Okay, now the guide to what goes with that, this is for 16 column mode.

In the 3s Column - Engine sounds.

00 - rt3_chug_steam_01.wav
01 - rt3_chug_steam_02.wav
02 - rt3_chug_steam_03.wav
03 - rt3_chug_steam_04.wav
04 - rt3_chug_electric_01.wav
05 - rt3_chug_electric_02.wav
06 - rt3_chug_diesel_01.wav
07 - rt3_chug_diesel_02.wav
08 - rt3_chug_diesel_03.wav

In the 7s Column - Horn/whistle sounds.

00 - rt3_whistle_small_steam_01.wav
01 - rt3_whistle_small_steam_02.wav
02 - rt3_whistle_big_steam_01.wav
03 - rt3_whistle_big_steam_02.wav
04 - rt3_whistle_diesel_01.wav
05 - rt3_whistle_diesel_02.wav
06 - rt3_whistle_diesel_03.wav
07 - rt3_whistle_diesel_04.wav
08 - rt3_whistle_electric_01.wav
09 - rt3_whistle_electric_02.wav

Because these are numbered numerically in ordered blocks, I think it might be possilbe to put bigger values in the 7s column or 3s column to define more hornsounds with a expanded RT3SoundTrains.PK4.

Just a thought.

[AMD 103]

Okay, something interesting happened.

When I went above 08, in the 3s column, the game didn't crash or throw any sort of error. It just defaulted to 00, which goes to rt3_chug_steam_01.wav. So my AMD-103 made choofer sounds. And it didn't matter how high I raised it, it just went back to the steamer sound.

But when I set the 7s column to 0A (10 in Hexadecimal), it called the loose rt3_whistle_twotone.wav file placed by 1.06 in the PopTopExtraContent folder.

When I set it to 0B (11 in Hexadecimal) or above, it defaults to 00, the tiny steam whistle sound.

Is this something coded into the 1.06 patch, or can we add engine sounds and horn sounds at will by starting with either rt3_chug_ or rt3_whistle_ ? Thoughts?

[Gumboots]

I think they did some voodoo to get 1.06 to accept an extra sound. I vaguely recall something about it being tricky to get one more in.

With 1.05 you're stuck with the same number of sounds, but I (also vaguely) think someone experimented with loading non-standard .wav's and they found it was a bit fussy about exact formatting of the files. Or that may have been the ear-piercing high-altitude wind whistle, because I think someone experimented with replacing that too.

Anyway, as I remember it you had to get an exact match in format and file size to the original, or the game spat its dummy. Which is helpful.