I’m working on some sound replacer mods at the moment, but I have no idea on how to edit the new .WEM format that AoE2:DE uses. From my understanding, the sound effects that AoE2:DE uses is located in the “SFX.bnk” file, which is a bulk file from the Wwise program that contains a bunch of audio files. But from also my understanding, all of the audio files are in numbers and the numbers need to be exact. I’m not familiar with Wwise, but unless I’m missing something, the free Wwise program only allows you to create .WEM files and not actually directly edit current .WEM files or open the .BNK files and whatever 3rd party program I can find that can extract the files out of the .BNK file, seems to extract the .WEM’s in incorrect “ID’s”, or the numbered file name. None of the .WEM files in the open I can find, doesn’t seem to match any of the Sound Effects I want to replace either, according to the AGE Editor.
Anyone more familiar with .WEM’s have any clue on what to do?
I only got it to work partially, I could not convert some of the wem files packed in the bnk file.
To convert wem files you need to download the following tools
keep in mind that when you repack the bnk that the filename of the audio files have to be the same
be sure to make a backup of all audio files first
install python 3.2 or higher
http://yirkha.fud.cz/progs/foobar2000/revorb.exe
puu.sh/xcDcD/2ecc9d7c1d.zip for extracting / recompiling bnk files
https://www.audiokinetic.com/ download wwise launcher and install wwise
extract the ww2ogg to C:\ww2ogg
place the revorb.exe in C:\ww2ogg
place the two python scripts from puu.sh/xcDcD/2ecc9d7c1d.zip in C:\ww2ogg
extracting wem files from a bnk
- py BNKcompilerWCmd.py filename ./inputfolder ./outputfolder extract
this will extract all wem files and also create a hirc file
convert the files to ogg
- ww2ogg filename.wem --pcb packed_codebooks_aoTuV_603.bin
clean the ogg file with revorb
- revorb.exe filename.ogg filename_fixed.ogg
to batch convert wem files to ogg copy the following code into a .bat file and execute the bat file
for %%f in (*.wem) do "ww2ogg.exe" %%f --pcb "packed_codebooks_aoTuV_603.bin"
pause
for %%f in (*.ogg) do revorb.exe %%f
pause
convert ogg files to wav
- ffmpeg -i filename.ogg outputfile.wav
batch convert ogg to wav
for %%a in (*.ogg) do (
ffmpeg -i "%%a" "%%~na.wav")
PAUSE
edit the wav files
Now you can import all wav file into a new/empty wwise project
after importing click project -> convert all audio files
the new wem files are now store in “Documents\WwiseProjects{Project Name}.cache\Windows\SFX”
remember to rename the sound files to their original name to replace the old files
always take a backup of the original files beforehand
now you can repack your wem files with the monkeyman bnk compiler
place all wem files belonging to one bnk file in a subfolder
- python BNKcompilerWCmd.py outfilename ./folder ./folder recompile
to recompile the bnk file
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I used a slightly different method but the wem files created by Wwise won’t play in the game. For example, I wanted to replace the new “Shamburger” with the old one from AoK but having converted the mp3 to wav then to wem in Wwise and then placing the file in the Wwise directory after renaming it with the same file name as it is in AoE2DE (253623142.wem), the track simply doesn’t play and it skips over to a different track at the start of the match.
Hi @Mmac2797, In case you still need help with modding the sound files in the game please see this guide from StepS, one of the Forgotten Empires developers.
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Any program to play WEM files? Wwise does not work. Says only WOPRJ files supported.