How to mod GLaDOS’s voice in Portal 1

modsportalsource-engine

As a pet project, I would like to use the original Portal to introduce people to gaming.

However, I live in Italy and Italians are culturally not very comfortable with subtitles (not to mention the fact that subtitle players need to be fast readers, as Italian is on average longer than the equivalent English).

So I wanted to change GLaDOS's voice with an Italian version.

However, no matter what I do, Portal does not seem to recognize altered audio files. I tried putting them in %STEAMAPPS%\portal\portal\sound\vo\aperture_ai, and a few other variations on that structure, and double-checked that files were named exactly like in the GCF, but the game simply ignores them no matter what I try.

How can I fix this?

Is there a specific format for the WAV files? Is there anywhere I can check out for error messages?

Best Answer

Ha! I did it by cheating: finding an existing sound mod for Portal and examining it :D. Here's how, for posterity:

Apparently, the Source engine does not look for sounds in the directory. It looks for script files instead. Those script files define where to look for stuff.

So I did the following:

  • Opened the main Portal GCF (that's portal content.gcf) file with GCFScape;
  • Extracted GLaDOS's voice script file (that's scripts\npc_sounds_aperture_ai.txt) to the directory where the game engine will look at, which, according to the Valve wiki, is the one where GameInfo.txt is in. So STEAMAPPS\millenomi\portal\portal, so that I have STEAMAPPS\millenomi\portal\portal\scripts\npc_sounds_aperture_ai.txt

Now Portal will look relative to the scripts file for sounds! …not. Apparently, if the file has the same name it's still looked for using the same search path that led Source to pick up the original file instead. Sigh. So, instead, noticing the working mod had file names that were different from the ones in the archive, I changed the script and the filename to a name that wasn't used anywhere else in the game (vo/aperture_ai/00_part1_entry-1__MODIFIED.wav). And BAM!, it worked. :D

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