Mods not working?

[nutty]

I installed a mod for the original voices in Campaign and I went ahead and made my own mod that swaps the music back to the old tracks instead of the remade ones. However, the voice swaps in Campaign sort of work, but some dialogue is still the terrible redone takes. My music mod doesn't work whatsoever. The directory structure matches what the sound.bar file would be using, so I'm not sure why the game is falling back to using its music instead.

The only possible thing I can suspect right now is maybe the sample rate of the audio? But that wouldn't make much sense either because it's lower quality than what the remade tracks have.

I did publish my music mod, it should show up in the mods list if someone else wants to help figure this out (it has the walkman monkey as the thumbnail). Right now, though, it just feels like mod support is not exactly functional quite yet... even though the game comes out in a few days.

[Leon]

I installed your mod, but it doest not seem to work for me either.

[captaindusk]

I can't seem to get any mod to work, including your soundtrack mod, which I am most interested in.

[Zef]

Where are you getting your mods from in the first place?

Nexus?

[nutty]

Originally posted by Zef:

Where are you getting your mods from in the first place?

Nexus?

There's a bar at the top of the screen on the Main Menu. To the right of "Learn" should be a menu called "Mods."

Also, thanks to those who tried out my mod too. I wish it worked. I wonder if there's a more aggressive way to mod the game? I know the "Sound.bar" file can be viewed and extracted with AOE III Resource Manager (since it appears they're using the same engine for Retold). I haven't been able to figure out how to make a new .bar file. I'm beginning to wonder if that's how sounds and music should be modded... but that would surely cause conflicts if everyone else started having their own Sound.bar file to download. What a headache.

[Eaglemut]

Yeah definitely do NOT attempt to create a new bar file, that is not the way to go.

[nutty]

Originally posted by Eaglemut:

Yeah definitely do NOT attempt to create a new bar file, that is not the way to go.

Just found this out the hard way. Was worth a shot. Doing this causes the game to not play any sounds or music at all and then crashes when you try to play a match.

The game also uses .xml files (as compressed XMB) to point to various resources, including the music. Changing the directory for each file in "playlist.xml" does nothing; the game continues to use its own music.

I fold for now. I would unpublish the mod, seeing as how it doesn't work, but there's a bug right now where doing so causes other users to not be able to remove it. Trying to remove an unpublished mod throws up "Internal Server Error," meaning you'll have to manually remove it. I'd rather spare people that headache until they sort things out. Maybe they'll sort out mods working in general...

[[₪Rndlfr₪] Gorton]

Originally posted by nutty:

Originally posted by Eaglemut:

Yeah definitely do NOT attempt to create a new bar file, that is not the way to go.

Just found this out the hard way. Was worth a shot. Doing this causes the game to not play any sounds or music at all and then crashes when you try to play a match.

The game also uses .xml files (as compressed XMB) to point to various resources, including the music. Changing the directory for each file in "playlist.xml" does nothing; the game continues to use its own music.

I fold for now. I would unpublish the mod, seeing as how it doesn't work, but there's a bug right now where doing so causes other users to not be able to remove it. Trying to remove an unpublished mod throws up "Internal Server Error," meaning you'll have to manually remove it. I'd rather spare people that headache until they sort things out. Maybe they'll sort out mods working in general...

I thought I was going mad, seeing everyone give your mod 5* reviews and no one seeming to have any problems, while it wasn't working.
Thanks for stating it doesn't work.

Someone on reddit suggested maybe the file names or file structure could be slightly wrong - I downloaded another sound related mod which does work

https://www.ageofempires.com/mods/details/286753/

Can you share how you found the file structure? I'm not familiar with modding for any of the new versions of the games.

[Zheppon]

other mods like the unlimited unit cap is not working too for some reason

[nutty]

Originally posted by ₪Rndlfr₪ Gorton:

Can you share how you found the file structure? I'm not familiar with modding for any of the new versions of the games.

There's a tool called AOE III DE Resource Manager that allows you to open .bar files for AOE III DE, but also happens to let you view/extract .bar files used by AOM Retold. I'm assuming this has to do with Retold using a modified engine of the one used for AOE III DE.

Here's a link to a forum post where you can download the tool:
[v.0.5] Resource Manager - Viewing, comparing, creating and extracting files from Age of Empires III .BAR archive [forums.ageofempires.com]

I'll take a look at the mod you linked and see if it's doing something different with the directories.

I feel bad people rated my mod 5 stars and assumed it works. Maybe they haven't played the game in a really long time and nostalgia has them thinking the redone music is the original? Not sure.

UPDATE: I took a look at the directory of that unit mod and it's not doing anything different from my music mod and the other legacy campaign voices mod I have installed (which seems to have issues when playing certain Athena lines in the prologue, but everything else seems fine - I haven't had much time to play through the campaign yet). I'm starting to wonder if they prevent some files from being modified?

[Dorsal Axe]

I played around with the files a bit, and I was able to get playlist.xml and the culture jingles to work. None of the other music works at all though. The files only seem to work if they're set as a culture jingle, which is very strange.

[nutty]

Originally posted by Pootisanus:

I played around with the files a bit, and I was able to get playlist.xml and the culture jingles to work. None of the other music works at all though. The files only seem to work if they're set as a culture jingle, which is very strange.

You know, I thought I was experiencing placebo and trying to cope with none of the music working, but that sounds like how it's gone for me. Even without any XML changes, the culture jingles all seem to work, but nothing beyond that. Something has to be not working correctly with the game at the moment.

[Dorsal Axe]

Yeah, I'm at a loss as to what's going on. It doesn't appear to be an issue with the file format or anything. Maybe it's worth asking the devs on the official forums for guidance?

Also, just a heads up that the "A Matt Named Kittens" file included in the mod seems to be a duplicate of "A Cat Named Mittens".

[nutty]

Originally posted by Pootisanus:

Yeah, I'm at a loss as to what's going on. It doesn't appear to be an issue with the file format or anything. Maybe it's worth asking the devs on the official forums for guidance?

Wouldn't hurt at this point. I'll put up a thread on the forums there, too.

Originally posted by Pootisanus:

Also, just a heads up that the "A Matt Named Kittens" file included in the mod seems to be a duplicate of "A Cat Named Mittens".

I did that so the original Main Menu track ("A Cat Named Mittens") is playing regardless of whatever the game feels like using. "A Matt Named Kittens" isn't present in Extended Edition or the original game. However, it would have been more prudent for me to replace "A Matt Named Kittens" with the Titans expansion menu music. For whatever reason, Extended Edition and the original release don't have that or the Atlantean culture theme, "Hotlantis" in its music directory. Rather than poke around endlessly trying to find original copies of tracks for a mod that is broken at the moment, I pulled "Hotlantis" off YouTube and went with having two copies of the same menu music.

UPDATE: Taking a quick peek at the modding section of the forums shows that the AOE III DE Resource Manager was updated to work with AOM Retold specifically. I'll see if a .bar created with this version of the tool works with the game.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MiUzxQO8g-LkaeneV-VlZtsAugs3Ssq9/view

UPDATE 2:
Hard modding the Sound.bar file works now!
With v0.7.0 of AOE III DE Resource Manager, you can create a new .bar and replace the existing one in game\sound\music. I extracted sound.bar, replaced the music with the old music, and created a new sound.bar (select the extracted sound directory, have game version set to AOE III DE, and name it sound).

This still isn't an ideal solution for a game with workshop modding support... but it's something. I did try making a mod where the entire Sound.bar is the target, but nothing happened.

[nutty]

I've put up a post in the "Report a Bug" section for this issue on the Age of Empires forums:
Modding music does not work - Age of Mythology: Retold / Report a Bug - Age of Empires Forum[forums.ageofempires.com]

[Tyndareus]

Guessing they fixed this? The menu music doesn't seem to replace, assuming thats an accidental item built with the game itself. But everything in game seems to have.

Could have been fixed by the devs or could be that I changed the names of the "loose" music in the top folder to match their packed alternate with underscores... Perhaps if it fails to load 1 it aborts.