Corrupted Cores, where's the speech?
Apologies if this has been asked already, but I've come across another question I can't find a straight answer to. I can put one of the corrupted cores in my map, using npc_personality_core, setting alternate skins and on selecting the red eye (which actually makes the space core's YELLOW eye. wtf Hammer?), but he will not speak. I pick him up and he animates, blinks, looks around, but no speech.
Turrets come with their speech built in. I drop a turret into the map, compile and run, and there's a turret, talking to me. So why don't the personalty cores have built-in speech too?
So maybe, I think, I just need to have the speech coming from a seperate entity that's being called by the core's OnPlayerPickup. So I make an ambient_generic and try to parent it to the... oh, you can't parent an ambient_generic. Okaaaaaaaay, so how do I make the speech sound like it's coming from the core? Especially if, say, the player picks it up and carries it to another room.
And the sound itself... having a hard time getting to it in the sound browser, it seems to be among the MANY sounds that Hammer refuses to play. (Hey Hammer, if you don't know how to play the sound, why is it even on the list?) And in the game, when Chell has the space core, and puts it down, the core immediately starts doing the "hey lady, lady lady lady..." part of his dialogue. Is that some kind of function to skip to a certain part of the file, or are the different lines stored as seperate sounds?
This is so confusing.
There are so many things I need to know, that the wiki doesn't even acknowledge the existence of (yet), and I've been through this forum back and forth, it all blurs together. I'm starting to think having a forum as my main go-to for mapping knowledge is not the best solution, it takes far to long to go through the entire list of threads every time I have a new question. but where else can I go? I wish that IRC was still there, I really need people I can talk to in real time about this stuff. No offense, this site is great, I really do love it, but I need faster and more complete information.
I think they set the _generics's to "Play Everywhere".
And to find the sounds you want, use GFCscape. The sound browser, as with much of the hammer features, crash a lot.
And i think the dropping, would just be a trigger on the ground, that switches what speech sequence to use.
You could use this method to play their voices in game. However I think they used 'actors' and related scripting in order to play the core's speech.
Ok, now I am aware of the existence of GFCscape. I'll look into that right away! Thanks for the tip.
Ok, I've got GFCscape, now another question, what audio player do you guys recommend for playing the .wav's? I tried winamp and winamp wouldn't touch them. I tried VLC, which plays them, but seems to chop off the end of each one. Some of them are barely half of a single word.
I was hoping GFCscape would play them itself, but failing that, what do you guys use?
Gfcscape is strictly for taking files out of Valve's packs.
You could try audacity, which is a free program to accurately measure length of the sound files. You can also record your voice in good quality with it too 
The thing about the wav files for the voices is that they are actually mp3, just with a wav file extension for the game engine's sake. Winamp will play them once they are extracted and renamed. You can quickly rename files in a folder by making a text document, and putting the following into it:
REN *.wav *.mp3
Rename this text document so it's extension is .bat, rather than .txt, then execute it from the same folder as your files.
Doing the above will give you a folder of mp3s to listen to in winamp.
If that seems like too much hassle, you could simply set your wav files to open with windows media player by default, which will recognise the files for what they are despite the file extension. This will also allow you to play them directly from within GCFScape, using the "shell execute" command in the right-click menu.
Very interesting. That is useful to know, though it does seem a bit odd.
Regarding Windows Media Player, I tried using that, but when I try the server-execute from GCFscape, Media Player doesn't react. And GCFscape actually generates a "server execution error", which it never did with the other programs.
I wish VLC didn't have the issue of chopping off the ends of wav files. it works fine with server-execute in all other respects.