Hawk & Badger Railroad Forum

I don't know how you do it, BUT I zoom out a lot to see where there are good markets, or to see where I'm laying new tracks, or just to see where the AI are at.
But I get that wooshing wind sound that just gets into my nerves. I tried just shutting the sound thing, but I didn't like that.
Is there a way to shut that darn sound?
If you give me a good tip I'll make a rich man out of you with a french postcard.

As I play on my laptop I usually just hit the button to turn off the sound so I don't have to hear it. It is a little annoying if you are looking up from the sky for a long period of time. I see there is a PK4 file with the nature sounds in it. Most likely the only way to really make the sound to go away would be to figure out how to open the PK4 file, replace the wind sound file in there with an empty sound file, and then put the PK4 file back together.

oh! that's a good tip!
What's the PK4 file you are talking about?

C:\RT3\Data\Sound\RT3SoundNature.PK4

I would assume there would be a sound file in there for the wind, but I don't have a way to open the PK4 file to check.

Although I'm not too good with hex editors I shall plunge into it.
As for unpacking PK4 files have you tried Nedfumkin's (I think) 'developer-kit/PK4/unpack', I had good results with it.

edit: just tried it and it unpacked a bunch of wav files. The culprit seems to be 'rt3_amb_high_altitude.wav'. And now I don't how to repack it into a PK4.
the developer-kit/PK4/pack makes a lst file. shucks !

I'm retty sure the Coast-toCoast expansion, as part of the shinning, logo, charman picture editor etc. has a file called pack4.exe that will do the trick. I forget exactly how it works, but I think you need a text file listing the names of the files to be packed, i.e. "packlist.txt", and then you just invoke the packer with the command "pack4 packlist.txt outputfilename".

AHHH!
The only pack4.exe files I found are in the 'Developer Kit' mentioned above. Those are the ones you mean?

cheminot wrote:AHHH!
The only pack4.exe files I found are in the 'Developer Kit' mentioned above. Those are the ones you mean?

I'm not sure. The one I'm referring to is found in the \UserSkinningTools\CompanyLogo, \UserSkinningTools\PlayerPortrait, and \UserSkinningTools\TrainSkin folders. I don't know where Ned got them, or whether it is the same file; I suspect so.

Yes, that's them alright. But something is missing because the 'packlist.txt' doesn't work.
The bat file contains <filename> .lst -so it seems to only accept X.lst files
I'm so near... and so far, sigh!

edit: tried to fool around and the best I did was repacking the .wav files WITHOUT the 'rt3_amb_high_altitude.wav', got back a PK4 file and ran RT3... and it hung. darn!

Yes, now that you mention it, you need XXX.lst file as input. I don't think you can just eliminate the high-alt wave file 'cause the program looks for it and needs to load it. What you probably want to do is make a "dummy" wave file with silence, and include that one in your packlist.

Wolv!
I figured as much, now I only have to find out how to make a 'silent' sound. Does it need to be the exact same size?

I would guess that it probably only looks to see if the file is there, not the actual file size.

One way to go about making a silent file would be to open up window's sound recorder. Start recording (and make sure you have no microphone on) and then stop it after a few seconds. Then rename this file rt3_amb_high_altitude.wav and repack it into the pk4.

Or, just for fun, you could copy the moo cow noises file and rename it, so when you zoom up to the stratosphere there are cows from space gently mooing in your ear.

And I know what you mean about that whistling noise. It really drills through the eardrums. One of the game's faults, IMO. I'm sure many people would love a fix for it.

Indeed! So how do you make a 'silent rt3_amb_high_altitude.wav'
How do you edit it
It is one of the most bothersome NOISES, I don't mind all the the other ambient sounds. I find them rather nice in fact.
But that WOOSHING sound, it just gets under my nerves
So back to my question: How to make a 'silent' sound How do you edit it

Did you see Blackhawk's post, 2 posts up from yours?

Well! I did it!
I finally found a way to make the 'silent sound' wav file.
Thanks to the 'Developer Kit', I was able to pack into a PK4 file all the wav files with the new 'RT3SoundNature.PK4'. and it works! no more WOOSHING!!!
It was really simple, but hey! this is my first hack!
to Wolverine, Blackhawk & Hawk for their tips.
merci beaucoup indeed!

Cool. How about posting the file.

I have modified a bunch of annoying sounds out of RRT3, including the high altitude swoosh one. The best way is to use an audio editor like Audacity. It's free. Just open up the original sound and reduce the level to something you can tolerate and save it. You can also just copy a sound that you want for something and rename it to replace one that bothers you.

I thought of doing that, but I don't know how to include the file in the post

Besides, after playing for a couple hours with different maps with no WOOSHING, NOW I get a lot of static or whatever (replacing the wooshing).

Since I'm late with a little job, I'm putting this in the back burner, sorry folks...

edit of may 13: OK! I'm back after much Trial & Trouble -mostly Trial- and finally got it right this time.

Now, since I can't find the way to post the PK4 here, maybe someone could....

You can try to post it on the forums by uploading it to your post. When you are posting there is a tab below the button to preview/submit your post that you can click on to upload attachments.
Click on that tab, and then click on choose file, find the modified pk4 file you want to upload and then hit add the file and it should upload to the forum.

Hope this helps. I'll try to be more detailed later but the internet is currently very slow so I can't upload any attachments at the moment.