Need Help Editing Dialogue Text in Original Campaign Cinematics

[Nemesisx8]

Hello! I'm currently working on editing some Warcraft III campaign maps, specifically to reuse the original cinematic "talking" animations. However, I've encountered an issue:


I've searched through all the variables and triggers, but I can't find how to replace the original dialogue text displayed during cinematics.


Could someone please guide me on how or where I can edit these original cinematic dialogues?


Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[PurgeandFire]

It is slightly more complicated compared to pre-reforged. In patch 1.26, all the cinematic text was done through normal "Cinematic - Transmission" triggers. But in reforged onward, they switched to a dialogue system to support the HD facial animations. According to this tutorial (https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/how-to-warcraft-3-reforged-animated-portraits.325536/), the Blizzard devs use an internal "Dialogue Editor" that isn't shipped with the world editor. That's why all the text is kinda hidden away internally and not super easy to edit.

Fortunately, if you just want to edit that text, it isn't too hard. I recommend testing this process with one dialogue first just to get the hang of it:

1. Open the world editor and open up the campaign map you want to edit.
2. Go to File -> Save As and change the file type to either "Warcraft III Scenario Folder" or "Warcraft III Scenario Folder - Expansion" (either one is fine) and then save it somewhere on your computer.
   
   
   
   Saving the map as a "folder" is a new feature introduced in reforged--it lets you edit the map's internal files really easily, which will be useful here since we'll need to edit the map's strings file (war3map.wts) in order to modify the cinematic text. Prior to reforged, we had to use an MPQ editor to edit any of the map's internal files.
3. Once you've saved the map, be sure to close the editor before making any edits. This will make sure that any of the edits you make to the war3map.wts file isn't blown away the next time you save (due to the editor caching these files in-memory). Using the Windows file explorer, find the folder you just saved and then look for the "war3map.wts" file within it. You can right-click it and "Open With" and choose "Notepad" (or any text editor).
   
   
4. From here, you'll see a bunch of string entries. You can search for the cinematic text you want to change and change it however you'd like. In the example below, STRING 20 is used as the speaker's name in the dialogue, followed by the actual transmission text as STRING 21 (note: they aren't always back-to-back like this, so sometimes you might have to jump around the file to make the necessary edits).
   

   STRING 20
   {
   Uther the Lightbringer
   }
   
   STRING 21
   {
   Welcome, Prince Arthas. The men and I are honored by your presence.
   }

   Let's change STRING 21:
   

   STRING 21
   {
   Welcome, Chef Arthas. The spaghetti is just about a-ready.
   }

   Save the war3map.wts file using your text editor, then open up the editor again. Open up that same map folder using "File -> Open Map", and then test it out. If all went well, you should have the new text displayed!
   
   

---

There are other ways to do it too (e.g. you can use JASS or Lua to "override" which speaker name and text is associated with a particular sound), but the method above is the simplest. If you have a hard time finding the exact string to change, you can try searching within the conversation.json file in the map's folder. That file is generated each time you save the map using whatever data Blizz stored using their internal dialogue editor tool:

            {
                "conversationOrder": 0,
                "speakerModel": "units\\human\\Uther\\Uther.mdl",
                "speakerNameId": 20,
                "speakerUnitID": "Huth",
                "soundFile": "Sound\\Dialogue\\HumanCampaign\\Human01\\H01Uther01.flac",
                "dialogueId": 21,
                "animationLabel": "H01Uther01",
                "animationGroupLabel": "Map-Uther",
                "animationSetFilepath": "Sound/Dialogue/FaceAnimation/Human01/FacialAnimation/Uther.animset",
                "animationSetFilepathMapRelative": false
            }

From here, you can see that the speaker name ID is stored in string "20" and the dialogue itself is stored in string "21".

If you want to add more dialogue, I recommend using the normal "Cinematic - Transmission" triggers unless you need the localization/facial animation support. If you do need those, I recommend giving this a read: https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/how-to-warcraft-3-reforged-animated-portraits.325536/

And if you have any more q's feel free to ask!

 

[MINITRON]

One thing I found out is that if you want to use "Cinematic - Transmission" triggers in reforged campain maps, you first need to delete all the imports in the Asset Manager. Otherwise your text will not be displayed.