Starsiege Quickchat Generator (SQCGen)

Tired of editting Starsiege's quickchats by hand? SQCGen can help.

What are Quickchats?

Quickchats are the sound effects, mostly voices, you can send to other players by pressing Ctrl-F1 through Ctrl-F9. The "bindings" for the keys are defined in quickchat.cs. For instance the following lines:

function QuickChat1()
{
  Say( "TargetTeam", 1, "Excellent.", "M1_DM_excellent.WAV" );
}

bind the message "Excellent" to Ctrl-F1. To change the bindings you must exit Starsiege, alter scripts\quickchat.cs (using Notepad or Wordpad for instance), and then restart the game.

What Does SQCGen Do?

With SQCGen you can collect and edit your bindings in much smaller and simpler files (with extension .txt) instead of mucking with quickchat.cs. When you drag and drop these smaller files onto SQCGen.exe it scans the contents for the first 9 uncommented Say statements, wraps them with the proper syntactic sugar, and overwrites scripts\quickchat.cs. Double-clicking on a .txt file loads it up in Wordpad for editting. With SQCGen you can have many different quickchat files and switching between them is easy.

AllQuickchats.txt contains a list of all the quickchats shipped with Starsiege. This includes roughly 50 undocumented sounds in addition to the 300 or so documented in the game's original quickchat.cs. Each line in AllQuickchats.txt is a valid Say statement ready for copying and pasting.

SQCGen includes a few sample .txt files. For instance the game's default set of quickchats is described by MaleDM.txt:

Say("TargetTeam",1,"Excellent.","M1_DM_excellent.WAV");
Say("Target",1,"Honorless dog!","M1_DM_honorlessdog.WAV");
Say("TargetTeam",1,"I'm going to burn you!","M1_DM_imgoingto.WAV");
Say("TargetTeam",1,"See how you like this.","M1_DM_seehowy.WAV");
Say("TargetTeam",1,"You panic easily.","M1_DM_youpanic.WAV");
Say("TargetTeam",1,"You're going down!","M1_DM_yourgoing.WAV");
Say("Target",1,"You're insane--and dead!","M1_DM_yourinsane.WAV");
Say("Team",1,"Vape 'em!","M1_TDM_vapem.WAV");
Say("TargetTeam",1,"That shows very poor discipline.","M1_DM_thatshows.WAV");

See AllQuickchats.txt or the original quickchat.cs for more information about Say statements.

Installation

This program is intended for use under Windows 95/98/NT.

Locate the folder where Starsiege is installed (C:\Dynamix\Starsiege by default) and unzip sqcgen.zip into a new folder called SQCGen (eg. C:\Dynamix\Starsiege\SQCGen). Note that this folder MUST be in the Starsiege folder for SQCGen to work. SQCGen overwrites scripts\quickchat.cs, so make sure you rename your original quickchat.cs file before doing anything else. From Explorer drag the icon for Cybrid.txt over the SQCGen.exe program icon and drop it. A black window will briefly appear and then go away. quickchat.cs should now contain a set of Cybrid bindings. Start the game and verify that it worked. OK? Now you're ready to create and edit your own .txt files. Go get 'em tiger. Have fun.

You may want to create a shortcut to the SQCGen folder on your desktop. That way you can quickly select or edit your quickchats. When creating a new set of quickchats I fire up one Wordpad window with AllQuickchats.txt, scan for the messages I want, select them, copy them, and then paste them into another Wordpad window in the order I want them. Once I've finished I save the set to disk and print it out for reference.

Troubleshooting

If you can edit text files and use a mouse you should be able to figure out SQCGen Einstein. If you don't get the sounds you expect check the syntax of your .txt file. Try using one of the sample .txt files that came with SQCGen.

The files you drag and drop on SQCGen must be plain text.

If it encounters a problem SQCGen.exe will leave its black window open briefly to display an error message. Read it.

Caveats

Dynamix produced a great game in Starsiege, but they had nothing to do with SQCGen. Any errors here are my fault, not theirs.

In general the quality of the undocumented sounds is poor and I had to type in the text for them myself; I could only guess what was being said in some cases, and couldn't even understand a few others. Don't sue me if I misinterpreted anything.

Contact

Pincushion

Last modified: Thu April 1 08:20:41 PST 1999