Critical HELP -> Changing dialogue times Created 3 years ago2021-04-03 13:09:31 UTC by Endrew5632

Hi, i hope everyone is doing well in these...Troubled times..

I'm developing a mod now for quite some time, to localize Half-Life to my language, and i got someone in my team who said that he can adjust the times in all dialogues, moving or delaying entities as needed

I don't know how that works exactly since he is the one that was going to do it, i only know that it was adjusted through the .bsp files

Now i'm investing in a better microphone etc, really diving deep into the project, and this guy is just giving up and is not answering me anymore, like don't even want to explain how he was going to do it

I have some prints "kind of" explaining what should be altered to change the gman dialogue times, but i have no ideia on how to do any other ones, like the hazard course(which is what we will begin recording) or the test chamber scene which should have a lot of entities...

Can someone give a little hand?
I was left in a sh*tty situation

BSPEdit lets you to modify entity data inside .bsp files. If it's difficult to find which entities you need to change then it may be useful to decompile the maps, so you can look for the right entities in Hammer or J.A.C.K.

So the best case scenario would be to get help from a mapper, you say?

If you can find someone who knows how to do this, then sure, that would be easiest.

If not, then you could learn how to do it yourself using the tools I mentioned. For example, if you decompile the first tutorial level, t0a0.bsp, and open up the resulting .map file in J.A.C.K., then you'll find a trigger_once in the middle of the first room. This triggers a multi_manager named intromm. When you look at the properties of that entity (press the SmartEdit button so you can see the raw keyvalues) then you'll see that it triggers multiple other entities, each at a specific time:

targetname   intromm -- the name of this multi_manager
intro        .5      -- someone at Valve forgot to remove this, because there's no entity with the name 'intro'
td1          15      -- the door to the HEV suit room
td1l         14.5    -- the light above the door to the HEV suit room
holo1light   0       -- the hologram light
sent_intro   0       -- the scripted_sentence entity for the hologram welcome speech (sentence: !HOLO_WELCOME)
sent_button  14.5    -- the scripted_sentence  for the hologram speech about buttons (sentence: !HOLO_BUTTON)
butlight     15.1    -- the light above the button in front of the hologram
butsprite    15.2    -- the twinkling sprite that shows up above the button

J.A.C.K. can display arrows between entities that trigger each other, but unfortunately that doesn't work for multi_managers. Fortunately J.A.C.K. does have a way to search for entities with specific names: in the menu, go to Map -> Entity report, then in the Filter area of that window, enable 'by key/value', enter 'targetname' as key and the name of the entity you're looking for as value.

In this case, we can see that the first scripted_sentence is triggered immediately, with another shorter speech triggered after 14.5 seconds, along with a door and some lights and sprites. If your translated speech has a different duration, then you'll have to modify all those 14/15 second delays. In BSPEdit, search for multi_manager entities until you find the one with the same targetname (in this case that's the first multi_manager). Here's what it looks like in BSPEdit:

{
"origin" "-1328 -1484 -4"
"butsprite" "15.2"
"butlight" "15.1"
"sent_button" "14.5"
"sent_intro" "0"
"holo1light" "0"
"td1l" "14.5"
"td1" "15"
"intro" ".5"
"targetname" "intromm"
"classname" "multi_manager"
}

The key/value order is different, but that doesn't matter. Now change the 14/15 second delays to something suitable and save the map. Just be sure not to remove or add any double-quotes, otherwise Half-Life won't be able to read these entities anymore.

Thank you, this helped a lot