Creating New Words by Mixing Existing Ones tutorial - Mike & Petes Fun Half-Life Sound Pak mod for Half-Life

Before We Begin

When I first started creating new words for Half-Life, I used the method documented by Clan BSP's "Custom Words" tutorial.

It's a great method, and lots of fun to try out, but can be a bit cumbersome. Also, it does appear to have limitations. I ran into trouble with some of my lines, apparently due to the length. It seems that Half-Life has a limit to the total number of items (sounds + modifiers) that can be used to create a line in the game.

Creating new words outside of the game as WAV files has several advantages over just editing the "sentences.txt" file:

1. It's easier, because you get to work with GUI-based editors to cut + mix your sounds
2. It avoids the issues with length noted above
3. The end product is a WAV file that can be reused in future words, shared easily, and also used in promotional materials etc.

Screencast version

If you want to see this process in action, please check out the "screencast" version. It contains almost all the instructions and notes that I present here, so you won't be missing much by working through it vs reading all this text!
(It's not quite a screencast, hence the quotation marks.)

Creating New VOX Words - the "screencast"

Preparations

We will be working with the original VOX sounds, mixing them together using the fabulous & free programme, Audacity.

To start, you need to do the following:

• Download and install Audacity.
  You can grab it from their official website: Audacity.sourceforge.net
• Extract the VOX sounds from your Half-Life installation.
  Use a programme like PakExplorer to open up your “Half-Life\valve\pak0.pak” file and export all the WAV files within the “VOX” subfolder into some location on your hard drive

Choosing the Words

There's two things to do here:

1. Decide on the word(s) that you want to create (e.g. Ben Dover)
2. Find suitable sound files from the existing set of VOX sounds.
   This can be quite tricky, especially since the pronounciation of the words may not be what you expect. I suggest that you listen through every single one of the original sounds at least once to get a feel for it. Then try to pick out the words that contain the sounds/syllables closest to what you need for the new word.

Once you have identified some sounds to use, it's a matter of loading them into Audacity and editing them until they become the word(s) you want.

For example, let’s say we want to create the sound “Ben Dover”. We could take the “B” from “base.wav” and the “on” from “gordon.wav”, while Dover = the “D” from “damage.wav” combined with most of the file “over.wav”. This is actually a great example of putting together a sound from unlikely sources - who would have thought that you'd get an "en" sound from "gordon.wav" just based on reading the filename? (You? OK, well, not me anyway)

Editing the Sounds - the actual steps

1. Open Audacity.
2. Load in the WAV file that makes up the first part of the new word: File - Open
   (By loading it through the Open command, we are also automatically setting up the proper Hertz setting for the project.)
3. Play the sound (SPACEBAR) a couple of times to get a feel for it. Watch the screen to try to see what part you need to capture.
   You can zoom in and out using CTRL-1 and CTRL-3 to get a better view.
4. Ensure the Selection tool is selected by pressing F1
5. Now use the mouse to select the section you think contains the desired sound, then play it again.
   Refine the selection by hovering over the left or right border of the marked area so that the mouse pointer becomes a hand, then click and drag the border to adjust.
6. Once you’re happy with the selection, crop it: Edit - Trim
7. For any additional parts to make up this new word, do the following steps 8-11:
8. Mute the part that you just finished working on by clicking on the “Mute” button in its track settings
9. Load the next WAV file into this project: Project - Import Audio
10. Click the mouse at the beginning of the new track
11. Repeat steps 4-6 to get the desired bit out of this track
12. Now, unmute all the tracks by clicking on the “Mute” buttons again
13. Change to the Time Shift tool by pressing F5
14. Adjust the position of all the tracks to fit the new word together.
    Do this by clicking and dragging each track into place, then playing the sound to see if you got it right. Rinse and repeat.
15. Once everything sounds right, it’s time to generate the final WAV file from this: File - Export as WAV
    Pick a name that makes sense… generally speaking it would be the word that you just created

Conclusion

That’s it! Now that you have your new words, you can use them in other, larger WAV files or edit the “sentences.txt” file of Half-Life to make use of them!

(Note: in all honesty, I haven't had time to actually test that, but it should be doable. If not, you can replace an unused sound without harm, assuming there are unused sounds.)