There are 11292 Sentences in Homeworld. Many are just slight variations of the same thought. The sentences are made up of phrases buried in the large VCE file. Each sentence can be from 1 to 7 phrases combined to make a full sentence. This is in order to drop the overall size of the VCE file by taking a common phrases, such as "Carrier under attack" and breaking out the "under attack" part as a common phrase and "Carrier" as another phrase. That way, in order to have many sentences saying each different ship type is under attack, they would only need a vce phrase entry for each ship name and a single phrase "under attack".

Usually, only 1 or 2 phrases are combined into a sentence, but the original homeworld does have one that uses all 7. Even though Cataclysm support isn't finished in this version, it should be noted that Cataclysm only allows up to 2 phrases per sentence. NOTE: The tool makes each sentence only 1 phrase each. This was for design simplicity and in case some non-English languages don't break up as easily.

Each phrase in the VCE can theoretically have an associated subtitle which is displayed as text when that phrase is played. It may not be a good idea to have each phrase, or very commonly spoken phrases showing text, as that would slow down game play. There is a strict subtitle mode which is explained later.

Sentence Prep

The file named BYPHRASE_NEW.HTML lists the sentence number and shows which phrases in the original VCE make up that sentence, a description and also the subtitle (if any). Disregard the last column, bitrate, because it won't matter with this program. Yes, some are blank and some say 2 entries, but only refer to one. This isn't a mistake.

This tool doesn't allow changing just a few sentences. It is built for entire speech replacement. This is because of changes in how the LUTs are built and the sentences and phrases are ordered. It would have been far more complicated to just append, because of how some information is hidden in the LUTs. Also, because of a hardcoded dependency on a certain bitrate for certain phrase in the exe, this tool had to completely rebuild all files.

In order to make a new sentence to replace one listed in the phrase html file, record the sound with the following properties:
44khz, mono, 16 bit, uncompressed pcm WAV
Then, save the file as the sentence number with the wav extension. Example, I want to replace the sentence: "Multiple impacts confirmed." which is sentence #11136, with something else, then I would record it with the listed properties as an UNCOMPRESSED PCM WAV file, and save it with the filename 11136.WAV . And if I wanted a subtitle to be displayed when this is played, I would type it in as a text file and save as 11136.TXT.

All WAVs must be in the same directory. All TXT file must be in a common directory. TXT and WAV files don't have to be in the same directory though. Also, make sure you have no leading 0's in the filename. Example: 136.wav (right), not 00136.wav (wrong).

If you don't plan to replace all 11292 sentences (and who would, really?), then, any missing sentence numbers will just play a blank sound with no subtitle. Be careful, as it may be that in some single player missions, that some triggers fire after a sentence is played (tutorial?) Just test it.