Whoa...hidden commentary names??

DT33 said:

Hey everyone,
Not sure if this has been discussed in the past but I've noticed when assigning commentary names via CM that there are IDs that are skipped over....I mean Audio IDs that are not even showing up in the table but obviously they must have been used at some point in the past (in older FIFAs)! For instance the commentary ID table reads as:

900001
900002
900003
900005
900006
900008
900009
900010
900011
900014

Notice something?

So I was curious to find out for instance if ID 90004 or ID 900012 would give me a commentary name in-game when assigning it to some player - just to test it out. Now of course I first had to add the ID back into the "commentarynames" tables of the DB using DBmaster. So I would just add entries like "90004 with commentarystring "a", 9007 with name "b", etc etc. And with "Commentarystarting" column I would just some low number (but it doesn't seem to matter). See here:

Then I would load the db in CM and assign those IDs/entries to several players of one team, e.g. Zimbabwe (in skoczeks NT patch) -->

I assigned several of such IDs to all Zimbabwe player who do not have a commentary name yet. Then I saved and regenerated and played a match with Zimbabwe using Clive Tyldesley & Andy Townsed as commentators. And guess what??? Commentary names for those IDs/player do get called!! It's just hard to figure out sometimes what exactly the names are....Clive seems to have a strange pronouncation sometimes. Anyway, this is what I have figured out so far what the actual names for the hidden IDs are! -->

(Please note: I've completely gone by sound/pronouncation, so I'm not sure about the spelling and sometimes even the actual sound.)

900012=Langenberg
900013=Ledgeford/Latchford
900027=Candeleer/Candevere
900028=Larsen
900029=Moser
900030=Reimann/Reyman
900031=Risticks/Richtigs?
900032=Shank
900033=Seriski/Zareski/Zarewski/Zureski
900034=Bushek
900036=Beluist?
900037=Turner
900039=Albert
900040=Burgentinios
900042=Hernandes
900043=Dekeper/de Kuiper
900046=Sojo/Soudjo
900049=Bailey/Maly
900050=Baba
900053=Wodges(Lodges)
900056=Brisco
900067=Konstant/Constant
900068=Chrisso
900069=Dellapace/de la Paz?
900076=Dickmann/Diekmann
900077=Eakins
900079=Ellem/Ehlem/Allen?
900081=Ewani
900082=Fergusson
900083=Focas/Foucas
900084=Fonseca
900091=Glumag
900100=Haye/Aye/Hey
900103=Home/Holme




I've only gotten up to 900118 because this is very time consuming (but also a lot of fun/excitment, waiting for "new"/unknown player names to be called out during a test game!), there are many more "missing IDs"! I mean the last audio ID entry that's actually in the DB is 928558! And the last one before that is 928228!. Now I'm not sure if any IDs between 928228 and 928558 will give us commentary names too as I haven't tested this yet but from the beginning of the list (900001-900118), as outlined above, I can already confirm that we have many missing commentary names that work in-game!

Now: This only seems to work with Clive Tyldesley & Andy Townsed!

There's only a few IDs that do not get called by them (900004,900007 etc) . Whereas with the other commentators, there's nothing at all happening. I have tested the IDs out with Martin Tyler & Alan Smith,the German commentators and the Italian commentators. All resulted in complete zilch,nothing,nada! I assume this is because Clive Tyldesley & Andy Townsed have been around much longer in the Fifa series and it seems that those botched IDs got botched because most of the players assigned with those IDs were not in the game anymore. Maybe some really old/outdated players like Fifa early 2000s or later 90s?? I'nm just speculating but would make sense.....however, it seems that not all of these commentary names are "new" and "re-usable" names but actually some names that do exisit in the recent official table - but apparently just got a new ID. For instance Hernandes or Fonseca. But these are just a few. To me it seems that the biggest chunk of those hidden IDs are actually re-usable/re-assignable.! (Newer players with the same surnames or players of teams/lower leagues that were never part of the Fifa series but are in the various patches )

Now can someone or several ones please continue with this work?? I've been busy making stadiums and faces and all kinds of editing and I think it's better if I can focus on that and leave this simpler but time consuming work to others. As it doesn't really require any special skills or know-how. Pretty much anyone could do this. Just use the method I outlined above! And please post your results here! (And of course, make a back-up of your db first!)

It would be really great to finally add more commentary names to the game even though this may only work with Clive Tyldesley & Andy Townsed. (However, who knows what will happen with IDs towards the end of the table?) But to me that's totally fine because at least as far as International matches are concerned (and thus skoczek's NT patch for instance) I mostly use Clive & Andy anyway - because they really are the best for that! They use the country names ("Free kick conced to Ghana" ,"Honduras got themselves a corner", etc), they call out plenty more commentary names to begin with and they actually do have a lot of variety the longer you play and the more diverse the situations are. (With clubs however I do think that Martin Tyler & Alan Smith are better as they have season progress commentary)

Thanks folks!

p.s.: I will do some more testing probalby later today but I really am not planning to spent further time on this as exciting as this is! I'm engaged in boosting the African teams and AFCON 2019 in skoczekz NT patch, for instance I've been converting/doing some Egyptian stadium that were used for the AFCON. So far I've done Al Salam stadium and Ismailia! Not 100% finished yet but things are looking good. I'm also working on tournament dressing and maybe even AFCON specific scoreboards/overlay. And some other stuff, maybe I will even realease my own african patch?? I hope skoczek wouldn't mind. But we'll have to see, hopefully I can find the time to post about this soon with results. Please understand - I'm very focused on spending time and energy on actually creating and editing stuff instead of discussing around here on this forum - so apologies also to all the ones who have been PMing me! I just don't have the time to take care of those at the moment.

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DT33 said:

Hmm, I'm kinda disappointed about the reaction here...I mean thank you for caring and support, VK and skoczek - but I had hoped that there would be much more users interested in this and taking up the ball.! But I guess most people do not want to do work, eh?
Or maybe they just don't care about (improvng the) commentary....at least not when it comes to Clive Tyldesley & Andy Townsed.?

I have not done much more on this except that I also tried some commentary IDs way down the list (like 928228) and that didn't give me any results with either commentary team. But there's a lot of work to be done for the beginning of the list (where the missing IDs do work). So I had an idea.....
instead of checking each missing ID manually in-game why not look up the commentary ID tables from previous Fifas? Like Fifa 11,Fifa 08,Fifa 06.....should save lots of time, yes?

Well, I'm in the process of checking! I have already checked the db from Fifa 11 but oddly enough the commentary ID table is exactly the same as Fifa 14! In other words, the missing IDs are still missing and not listed. So I went further back and checked the dbs for Fifa 06 and 08 but there aren't any commentary tables to be found!! Does anyone know how the player calls were done/assigned in those Fifas?

I download some tools like biggui and soundmaster and extracted audio files with bigui like the hdr_eng.big or stuff like "playercalls03.ast", "playercalls05.abk", "pn35889.dat", etc. What is up with those?? How does one openn/edit .ast or. abk files?? Using hex editor I cannot find anything useful in those files (at least not in terms of commentary ID). Looking at the content of the big files I'm concluding that those Fifas used a different system to call players which probably was just by their regular player IDs.... Does anyone know?

That begs the question though...how come they switched the system to commentary IDs (around Fifa 11?) but left out so many IDs in the table that had calls???? Doesn't make much sense....
So I'm still thinking previous Fifas must have used commentary IDs too. but I could be wrong. If anyone has any insight or could check the dbs/audio files of other previous Fifas it would be greatly appreciated! (I cannot get soundmaster to work on my Fifa 10 btw as it requires an unsupported net framework version - maybe somebody can do some digging with soundmaster? Thanks!)

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Skoczek said:

Well, I already dumped a lot of FIFA dbs. You can check them out

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DT33 said:

? Where?

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Harry BullZak said:

@DT33 From my experience most people do not want to put in the effort to do something like this. Maybe if it was 2013, 14, 15 you may have received a better response.. Now, in 2021 it's a massive job and people do not care as much. Also, I know it's a massive job because I tried to do it a few years ago and gave up. Considering I mostly create current-day mods for Career mode, and the game forces the other commentary team for most games it didn't really make sense to put in days of work on this.

Honestly, I understand your frustration. I've felt this way myself. It's very disappointing to see so many mods that are released that use HBZ mod or FIP as a base yet, none of these people creating them offered help to create the original mod.

Try not to get frustrated with the community. If you want to do this task do it for you and your own curiosity. If people do help then great, but don't let it get to you if they don't. It's a waste of energy. Good luck.

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moschino said:

I think people didn't bother about comentary at all, maybe just a few of us. I'm still surprised how after 8 years of release, no one made a software to edit the audio files. There are software to edit anything but audio files. Why? Because it wasn't much interest in it. I personally tried myself to find hidden commentaries and I hoped I could hear "Pele", "Maradona", "Mbappe", but this was not possible during these 8 years after release and I lost my hope in this. People seem to be obsessed by updated hairstyles, updated tattoos, updated boots, and plenty of teams, year by year but in fact, commentary adds a lot more to the atmosphere and to the play experience... Instead of digging into Fifa 14 database for hidden commentary, there should be a software to add commentaries manually so we can add Rashford, Mbappe, Maradona, etc... but as I said, we're just a few interested in this. You should expect to see more updated boots and get used to the same commentaries without new or old players.

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