Voice packs and audio cleanup

One very common form of mod for XCOM 2 is the voice pack. Soldiers make ~75 different types of callouts in the game, and you can replace them with custom sound files. For example, when a soldier moves they might say "I’m on the move". You might decide you would rather have a soldier that says "I am Batman". You can create a voice pack that replaces the moving callout with a sound clip of somebody saying "I am Batman".

The typical way

Most files in voice mods are obtained by dumping out the sound files from other video games. This has a few advantages:

  • Such files are usually clean and high quality, with no background noise or other characters speaking.

  • They are broken into nice bit-size pieces that don’t need to be edited.

  • It’s usually obvious what callout in XCOM 2 would be a good match for each line, since a lot of character actions are common to different games.

The hard way (which I did)

VoicePacks

I didn’t want voice packs of a video game character; I wanted my soldiers to sound like the hosts of the hit BBC television show Top Gear. There are very few mods that use clips from movies and television, because:

  • You have listen to whole episodes and clip out the pieces you want.

  • If you care about the quality of the end-product, you have to do significant cleanup for every line. This is especially true for a show like Top Gear, where dialog was recorded with different microphones, in noisy environments, often with people talking over each other.

  • Sometimes it takes a lot of creativity to figure out what XCOM 2 callout matches a given line the best. Top Gear doesn’t contain many rocket launchers or aliens!

While these packs were a lot of work, I was also able to develop and document new techniques to improve the workflow. Other modders later contacted me to let me know that they had used my guides about these techniques to improve their own work.

Tagging

The "old way" of associating callouts with voice files is led by the callout: the modder selects a callout and assigns each desired voice file to that callout. This process is painful and slow, particularly with voice files that do not have obvious matches to specific callouts.

I was able to develop a workflow that was led by the voice file, so the modder could select a voice file and assign all the callouts that were appropriate to it. This resulted in a 10x improvement in efficiency doing the assignment. It required re-enable file tagging in the Unreal Development Kit, and figuring out some of the slightly odd behavior it exhibits when run in local mode.

This process is described in a steam guide.

Audio file cleanup

I learned a great deal about digital audio, and specifically using Audacity to clean up audio files. This included some advanced techniques like modifying the inflection of the speaker’s voice so that the middle of a sentence instead sounds like the end.

I described many of these techniques in a steam guide.

The end result

Ultimately I create 3 main Top Gear voice packs, plus a joke voice pack for The Stig. These can be found in the Steam Workshop. These voice packs contain hundreds of files, with a generally high quality and humorous effect. The Jeremy Clarkson voice pack was particularly successful, having had over 8500 unique subscribers over its lifetime. I’m also proud that my guides have been useful contributions to the XCOM modding community.