de5ea35452
Having found that the cue-less cutscene pages bind their audio through the movie
path, I tested the same explanation on the twelve script lines with no cue and
no bank. It fails: matching their caption text against every line in the
cutscene message table gives 0 of 14 hits, so nothing carries their audio by
another route.
They are ordinary story dialogue ('Katana, wait for me in hell'), which makes a
deliberate subtitle-only design unlikely -- but that is a judgement, not a
measurement, and why they are unvoiced is still open. Also noted: D_609 and
D_610 are equally unvoiced and simply are not among the twelve, because the
twelve counts script-called names and nothing calls them.
5.5 KiB
The sound-cue table, and how dialogue binds to a recording
✅ Settled 2026-08-26. dat/tables.pak carries the game's cue index. It
closes the join from a message id to the .slb bank that voices it — the
missing link between the script/caption side and the audio side.
The table
One IDXD object in dat/tables.pak (373 680 bytes, 5 records, 10 937 fields)
holds:
| record | shape | content |
|---|---|---|
SETTINGS |
3 fields | PATH = game:\dat\sound.pak+, PARAM = Pj_Silph.xgs, and a positional BANK_SE |
BANK_SE |
1 positional | Static.slb |
FILES |
5 135 positional | bank paths — jpn\Voice\VOICE_TCAF_592.slb, BGM_001.slb, … |
STAGES |
0 fields | present but empty |
SOUNDS |
5 798 named | cue name → numeric sound id |
SOUNDS is the only record on the disc found so far that is entirely named
fields, and the names are the join key.
Cue families and their id ranges — the id space is partitioned by family, with no overlap:
VOICE n=5044 1500 .. 7331
SE n= 322 1 .. 901
DEMO n= 295 8000 .. 8408
BR n= 101 8500 .. 8600
BGM n= 32 1001 .. 1109
JNGL n= 3 1201 .. 1203
5 797 of the 5 798 values are numeric and all 5 797 are distinct — the ids are unique, so the id is not how banks get shared. One cue's value is non-numeric.
The id is not an index into FILES: ids run to 8 600 and FILES has only
5 135 entries. FILES is reached by name, not by id.
The join: a message id to a recording
MSG_VOICE_D_257 (built-in 64's operand, see isl-message-dialogue-link.md)
-> cue VOICE_D_257 `MSG_` becomes `VOICE_`
-> id 6945 SOUNDS
-> bank jpn\etc\VOICE_D_257.slb FILES, matched on stem
The prefix rule has one wrinkle, and getting it wrong is easy:
MSG_is replaced byVOICE_— it is not simply stripped.- A name that already carries
VOICE_keeps the one it has rather than doubling it:MSG_VOICE_D_257→VOICE_D_257, butMSG_TCAF_592→VOICE_TCAF_592(notTCAF_592).
I got this wrong first. Stripping MSG_ resolved 1 250 of 1 338 script
message names and left 88 unresolved, and the 88 were exactly the four-letter
ship families (ADAN 32, ADPL 27, TCAF 12, ACRO 3, RHIN 2) — which I
was ready to write up as "text-only announcements with no recording". Seeing
jpn\Voice\VOICE_TCAF_592.slb in FILES refuted that: the recordings exist,
my rule was wrong. Under the corrected rule the count is 1 326 of 1 338.
SOUNDS and FILES agree exactly — the same 12 names are absent from both,
and every one of the 5 135 bank files has a cue (zero orphans). 663 cues
have no bank file; those are SE/BGM-family cues living in other banks.
The 12 script lines with no recording
MSG_VOICE_A_273 MSG_VOICE_D_183
MSG_VOICE_D_600 … MSG_VOICE_D_608 MSG_VOICE_D_611
All twelve are in the VOICE family, have caption text, are called from the
stage scripts, and have neither a cue nor a bank. Ten of them form the near
contiguous block D_600–D_611. (D_609 and D_610 are equally unvoiced but
are not among the twelve, because nothing in the stage scripts calls them — the
twelve counts script-called names only.)
They are not the resupply case. When the cue-less cutscene pages turned out to be lines whose audio binds through the movie path rather than a cue (see cutscene-message-table.md), the obvious question was whether these twelve are the same thing. They are not: matching their caption text against every line in the cutscene message table gives 0 of 14 hits. There is no twin carrying the audio by another route.
They are ordinary story dialogue, not stage furniture —
D_602 "Katana, wait for me in hell. I won't be long."
D_611 "Ahahahaha! Father, I've done it!"
A_273 "Emergency! Emergency! We just received orders to evacuate…"
— which makes a deliberate subtitle-only design unlikely, but unlikely is not measured. ❔ Whether these are a late cut, lines added after the recording sessions, or something else is still not settled. What is now settled is that the one available alternative explanation does not apply.
What this does not settle
- The wrong-recording case was already explained, and I overstated it as
open. On first writing this page I said the cue table "does not explain"
the
hokyu_DS_s13A → VOICE_D_452rejection and that the sharing must therefore live deeper. That was careless: voice-bank-leading-region.md settled it earlier — the bank holds one generic line ("Resupply complete. You are cleared for take-off!") reused across four stages, so the binding is right and only the expectation was wrong. What this table adds is narrower and worth stating precisely: the reuse is a movie-slot → bank relation, not a cue-level one, because all 5 797 numeric cue ids are distinct and no two cues name the same bank file. STAGESis empty, and what would have populated it is unknown.SOUNDS' one non-numeric value was not chased down.- Only the English pack and the
jpn\bank paths were examined. Every path inFILESbegins withjpn\, which is consistent with the already-recorded finding that the voice set is Japanese, but the other language packs' tables were not diffed against this one.
Tool
tools/re-capture/sound_cues.py summary | resolve <MSG_id> | demo | unbound