Inbound Tram: Using The Half-Life Voice-Over for Black Mesa

General Development Black Mesa
#1

Hi!

I always like all of the voice work in Half-Life. In fact, not just in Half-Life
but in all the games set in the Half-Life universe.

Naturally I was deeply disappointed when, running Black Mesa for the first
time, I found that the original voice-over for the inbound tram ride had been
replaced. It is not that the new voice-over is bad, but rather the the original
was both so good, and honestly, I simply missed it.

So I fixed the problem.

These files are much smaller than the Black Mesa files which they replace.

I did not do any noise reduction or other processing on the files because,
even though they were somewhat noisy, I did not think it was worth the
effort.

This worked perfectly on my machine. It should do the same on yours, but
obviously I can’t make any promises…

Half-Life 1 Inbound Tram Voice-Over

#2

Have you seen this soundpack for Half-Life? It improves the sound quality of the sounds in Half-life and the tram voice over is one of them. In my opinion the quality increase helps alot.
https://www.moddb.com/games/half-life/addons/half-life

#3

The reason they replaced it is because Valve told them they could not use any of Half-Life’s original assets.

#4

I don’t remember Valve saying that, I thought they just told them to remove Source from the title?

#5

Coldroll; no I had not seen that. But I downloaded it and listened to the tram ride voice-over wavs very carefully and I can not detect any difference whatsoever between the original file and the saxon pack files.

So I opened up the original and the saxon pack c0a0_tr_dest.wav files simultaneously in my wave editor and here are the differences:

  1. the original file seems to be a bit louder, although the loudness is only apparent by the size of the waveforms, or by looking at the statistics for each wav; it is not apparent when listening to the files.

  2. the original wav was resampled from 22.05khz, 8-bit mono to 22.05khz, 16-bit mono, with no other processing apparent (other than the previously mentioned slight gain reduction). The maximum sample value for the original wav is -0.068dB while the maximum sample value for the corresponding saxon pack wav has been slightly lowered to -1.065dB. Otherwise the files seem absolutely identical.

(Of course I am using the term “resample” to indicate here, not merely a conversion of the sample rate, but also a change of the bit depth.)

No compression, equalization, enhancement/excitement (i.e. BBE or Aphex) or processing of any other kind seems to have been used. And the gain reduction seems so slight as to be an accidental artifact of the change of bit depth, and not an intended result.

Obviously, it is not possible to add quality of any sort by merely resampling or converting a sound file from one bit depth to another: once something has been recorded, fidelity can not be improved, really. Although, as you probably know, a bad audio file is sometimes a pig that you can put lipstick on (by using eq, reverb, time delay). But that has not been done in this case.

Aside from bit depth, (and file size too, with each of the 16-bit files being exactly twice the size of the 8-bit files) and the slight change in volume, the files, for the tram ride voice over, at least, are identical.

The drawback of the saxon pack, is that the wavs are not a drop-in replacement for the Black Mesa wavs: they still need to be renamed and “recut” as explained in the notes in the “Inbound_tram” pack.

#6

I remember an e-mail about it.
Copyright infrigement or something about it so they had to do their stuff from scratch.

#7

It’s a simple matter of not being allowed to redistribute files of games they don’t own. They wanted to reduce the number of games it relied on to a minimum, and eventually to none.

#8

:weep :s ob:choke :cry: gutted:

#9

I thought the new VO was amazing, Catz!

#10

That’s life people will criticize you on everything and anything. I thought the voice was pretty good but I like the original vo because it’s the original.

#11

I thought all of the voice acting was great and I wouldn’t replace it.

#12

Catz, your VO was absolutely amazing, I loved much more than the original, but, different people have different tastes.

#13

Any time you submit some artistic or skilled effort for public consumption, it’s inevitable that somebody won’t like it. No artist in the history of mankind has enjoyed universal acclaim, so cheer up Catz. The majority opinion seems to be favorable. :slight_smile:

^ This. Changing the native properties of a 22/8/mono file to 22/16/stereo won’t change the perceived quality one bit. The opposite works though - changing stereo to mono eliminates the stereo soundfield, 16 bit to 8 bit will show a noticeable decrease in sound quality, etc. You can only go down from the quality of the native file, not up. Therefore, the only way to genuinely improve the original HL audio* would be to get your hands on source files (assuming they still exist), which presumably would have been recorded at something like 44.1/16 or 32/stereo (although voice audio is usually recorded in mono because a single point of origin for a sound - e.g. a lone speaker - doesn’t need a diverse soundfield), even back in 1998.

*Actually there would be one other way to improve it, which would be to reduce/eliminate noise if there were any. This wouldn’t help fidelity though. Likewise with frequency sweeps, although too much of that simply deadens what’s left.

#14

Nothing needed fixing! Catz was great!

#15

I love your voice recordings so much in BM that it wouldn’t be BM without it!!! Never ever would I install this horrible mod to remove the wonderful voice talent work done here…

#16

don’t worry, the vast majority (myself included) loves your incredible voice over, I got so used to it that by the time Half Life is available for mobile phones I’d consider replacing the sounds with BM sounds (including music and voices).

Guys, if you wanna hear an awesome voice and the reason for the “Run Think Shoot Live Source” phrase, please watch this.

#17

I thought the new VO was great; I definitely prefer it to the old one.

Speaking of which, has anyone seenthis?

#18

Thank you for the warm regards everyone. To be honest, I am not offended all that much. Different strokes for different folks. I am just glad I met the expectations of most of the fanbase.

And thank you for the props Sersoft! Pedro and I spent a lot of time on that and I am glad it has for the most part been well received. I was a bit shocked tho that it reached over 115K hits. =)

#19

The only thing I didn’t like and it’s a VERY small marginal thing, that doesn’t actually phase me. Is that the voice over in HL was clearer, lacking the mechanical overtone. Cats voice work was amazing, I just didn’t like the buzzing in my comms.

Though on another note, what happened to the military voice announcer? I heard it once and that’s about it.

#20

Lines were apparently recorded but due to a goof in the code they don’t play. Scouring the bm directory comes up with nothing but the files used for the military takeover and the missile launch.

Rumor has it that this will be fixed, along with a few other bugs, for the Steam release.

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.