Finale sounds

A Finalé sound file is a short sound file that is played in Fallout 3 after Combat has ended. Generally, this piece of the song often sounds similar to the current (combat) song's ending. This article will cover how to make your own with a free tool named Audacity, and how to make sure the game engine will correctly handle this file upon your wishes.

Understanding the Finalé parts

In order to know what this article is about, you need to find out first-hand.

Finding Bethesda's pre-set ones

If you ever have manually installed mods for Fallout 3 (without using the package manager of [[1]]'s [Mod Manager]), you should know that there's a folder known as Data in your Fallout 3 folder - where you installed Fallout 3. Inside, there are several folders. Find the one named Music. This is where Fallout 3 keeps all its songs and such that you hear during gameplay. Refer to the Music page for extra information regarding that.

Inside Music, look for a folder named Battle. You'll find files such as Battle_01.mp3. Play them with your favorite music player. You should recognize them. Yes, they are songs you hear during combat.

Now amongst the files, there should be a folder too named Finale. Go inside it. You will find files with the exact same names, but significantly less size. Play the the file with the same name you played before. You'll now hear it's actually the end of the song you hear now. The engine uses these files to indicate combat has ended by playing them.

Understanding the connection

What happens after combat is that, the moment the game sees combat has stopped, it will look in the Finale folder for the same name of the song it was playing during combat. Hypothetically, if it fails to do so, it will randomly select another one to play. Normally this is never the case. But if you, as described in the Music article, place your favorite songs in the Battle folder, this will happen more frequently.

Making your own

In order to make your own parts, you'll need the right tools and need to place everything right. In this article, the usage of Audacity will be explained for this.

Finding and preparing Audacity

[[2]] is a free tool that allows you to edit sound files. You will need to be able to save your sound files as an .mp3, but upon first-run, Audacity might ask you to locate a file on your system named lame_enc.dll in order to be able to save mp3 files. Since this file isn't present with the download, you will need to Google it and find a website to download it. (you only need to do this once)