After describing this method in a PM and someone else asking a question in which having a reference to the same information would be useful, I decided to just make a tutorial covering what I'm talking about. I apologize for being nebulous but this information conveys more of a general approach than how to complete a specific task, though it is specific enough to have an example that demonstrates the power of this method.
This approach will work for any game but I'm going to recreate the a situation I faced while developing my small QoL mod for CoH and how this methodology was the main reason I was able to determine the issue and ended up developing BSCWorks (a Relic BSC Editor and more) to help solve it. So this particular example is of CoH 1 but will quite relevant to CoH 2 as well given their similarities.
If the speech related part of this example confuses you there is a brief overview of how the speech system works in the BSCWorks post I hyperlinked above.
It is impossible to completely detach the example from its specifics so I will explain what is needed but I want to try and keep the focus on the general concept. Anyway, here is the premise:
Part of my QoL mod is fixing a lot of the left over bugs present in the vanilla game (if it matters my mod is based on 2.602 as the steam version brought way too many issues with it so the small group I play CoH 1 with uses the last version from before then). The bug in particular I was trying to squash at the time of this example was that some of the Panzer Grenadier voice lines were just straight up incorrect. The most noticeable of which was that when enemy artillery smoke would drop instead of saying something that would make sense like other factions do (i.e. "Incoming, we have incoming!") they would say things like "Mine field!" or "Get down! Find that shooter!" (sniper death reaction). There is one line I believe that is correct but it is rarely heard.
The issue with trying to solve this bug is that when taking into account the rgd attribute system along with the various file types within the game there are likely hundreds of thousands of ways that files can be referenced for any given purpose and its simply infeasible to look through every file that may be related to the problem based on suspicion alone. This is where Process Monitor from Microsoft can be really powerful as it can show you concretely exactly what is happening as long as you have a loose idea of where to look
Without getting too much into how the speech system works in CoH, from a combination of intuition and what I had figured out about the system so far I was certain at the time the bsc files that should have been getting called when enemy artillery dropped in range of Panzer Grenadiers should have been sound\speech\mp\panzerelite\xs1\events\warning\pb_wrn_artgen_XX_Y.bsc where XX and Y are variables for the variants that differ based on distance and speech volume. pb_xs1_wrn_artgen_li_s.bsc and pb_xs1_wrn_artgen_lt_s.bsc exist in the vanilla files, which are the loud and very loud variations for short distance speech. There are other variations but I figured this made sense since soldiers have to be somewhat close to artillery to say anything and generally say said reactions in an alarming tone given the situation.
The reason I figured these should be the files is that pb is the code for the PE race, xs1 is the code for general PE soldiers, wrn fell under the "warning folder", which seems logical for an artillery event, and I figured art was short for "artillery" and that gen was short for "generated" or something similar. Upon listening to the smfs linked by the above bsc files I heard what were clearly artillery reactions spoken by Panzer Grens that I had never heard before, so, the question was why was the game not using these when they clearly existed.
If you want to follow along you can temporarily alter your own mod to try this or create a test mod specifically for this purpose. I chose the latter for this demonstration.
The first step was to extract all relevant speech from the speech related SGAs since if we don't we will only see references to those huge SGAs in Process Monitor which doesn't help narrow down anything we don't already know. While it wastes some space, the easiest and most sure fire way to do this correctly is to extract the entire Data/sound folder while your mod is loaded in Corsix's Mod Studio so that all sound files in the game are separated out of all sound related SGAs.
Right click on Data\sound and select the highlighted option while your mods main .module file is open to extract all sound files to [CoH DIR]\[YOUR MOD FOLDER]\Data
The second step that is less obvious is to open the main module file for your mod and comment out the following lines by adding two semi-colons like so (there position will differ depending on how your mod is setup):
[data:english:02] folder = CoH\DataSoundEnglish ;;archive.01 = WW2\Archives\WW2SoundSpeechEnglish ;;archive.02 = WW2\Archives\WW2AlliesSpeechEnglish ;;archive.03 = WW2\Archives\WW2AxisSpeechEnglish archive.04 = WW2\Archives\WW2SoundNISEnglish ;;archive.05 = WW2\Archives\OFCoreSpeechEnglish ;;archive.06 = WW2\Archives\OFFullSpeechEnglish
This is because the game will still try and use the copies in the SGAs if you don't. While normally the game prioritizes the files in folders over SGA files for a mod, I think this happens because the files haven't actually been modified and are exact copies so it ignores them and uses the SGAs anyway.
Now after downloading Process Monitor and starting it you will be presenting with a filter menu which is where the real power of the tool resides. If you just hit OK without changing anything you will be flooded with a log of thousands of system operations occurring within fractions of a second that really make you realize it is amazing that modern software works as well as it does. You can add a new filter by setting up its parameters at the top of the window and then clicking "Add".
The checked filters are what I used for this example (ignored the other ones as they were used for other reasons). All of the red (exclusion) filters are there by default except for the second to last one and should be left alone.
Filters needed for this scenario
The Process Name is self-explanatory, Operation -> is -> ReadFile is because we are only interested in file query operations, and Path -> contains -> bsc/smf is because we want to see all BSC and SMF speech files using that code that are loaded into the game and Path -> excludes -> "wrn" is because we only want to see files with the code "wrn" that are used since I was confident at the time that artillery reactions would at least involve that.
Now fire up the game using a shortcut that uses your mod and dev mod. I also used windowed mode (since I'm on my laptop with only one screen) so I can still see Process Monitor. The test setup I went with was a me as PE on a small map with 3 Allied bots and I also added the "Data\scar" folder for CheatMod into my mod since its practically a requirement for quickly setting up test conditions.
Test setup for seeing why the suspected PE Panzer Gren voice files aren't being used
Since soldiers won't react to you bombing yourself we unfortunately need to rely on the RNG of the bots here. As soon as the match starts use CheatMod to turn off fog of war, switch control to each AI player and for the ones that selected "Infantry Doctors" give them a bunch of resources and turn on "Instant Ability recharge" so that they can bomb as often as they want to. Then switch back to yourself, add resources, turn on "Instant Production" and start making tons of Panzer Grenadiers and send them off towards the enemy. I found that this almost always makes the AI start bombing you continuously after 30 seconds to a minute. If no AIs picked the Infantry doctrine or for some reason aren't bombing you, restart the match and try again.
Once you start getting bombed and your soldiers react (they don't always 100% of the time) you will see the operations of the game reading the corresponding speech files pop into Process Monitor. And just like some of the mystery is reviled:
Strange files used for arty reactions for PGs when PE
As you can see above, more variations are used here (i.e. "nt" for normal speech volume instead of only the "lt" and "li" of the two files talked about before) and instead of "wrn_artgen" being used the game is instead loading "wrn_gengen". Playing the game for a bit longer revealed there are several "wrn_gengen" files used. I then listened to all the SMFs that are linked within these BSCs are as expected they turned out to be the same incorrect lines I had been hearing in game (a variety of various other warning lines like sniper fire, mine detection, etc.). After letting this continue long enough, under the right conditions you eventually may hear "Incoming!", the one correct voice line for the situation that the PE infantry have and if you peak over at Process Monitor you will see that it loaded "sound\speech\mp\panzerelite\xs1\events\warning\pb_xs1_wrn_rysgen_lt_s.bsc".
This got the wheels turning. Trying the same experiment as a faction with plenty of working voice lines for artillery (any of the others lol) and looking at the "speech_code" entries for the various artillery commander abilities reveals that for whatever reason the code is indeed "rys" and not "art". I can only assume that at one point it was "art" but was changed for some reason in a patch. Furthermore, looking at the similar codes for units in other factions reveals they have a good few files that use "wrn_rysgen" with varients for multiple speech volumes (nt, lt, li, etc.) and distance (s,m, and l). Obviously it took some thought, but I eventually realized thanks to this that indeed the files used should be "pb_xs1_wrn_rysgen_XX_Y.bsc" instead of "pb_xs1_wrn_artgen_XX_Y.bsc" and since there is only one file using those codes for the PE speaker "xs1" (which itself only has one SMF linked) this is why you RARELY hear that single circumstantially correct voice line "Incoming!" as PE when infantry are near the red smoke. This also mean't that "gen" must be short for "general" (as also indicated by the third code being "gen" since there are no artillery reactions that make use of a 3rd parameter; i.e. there is no specific voice line for the american barracks being bombed) and that the game falls back to "wrn_gengen" if a specific warning event happens but appropriate file isn't present.
You can then use BSCWorks to edit a stock PE speech file to make the several variants of arty reactions that should exist but are missing by having them point to the various SMF files that do exist with the correct dialogue (you can even make use of the "wrn_artgen" SMF files since the game reads the BSC first and relies on that only to point to SMF files so it will still work as long as "rys" is used for the BSCs), i.e. pb_xs1_wrn_rysgen_nt_s, pb_xs1_wrn_rysgen_nt_m, pb_xs1_wrn_rysgen_nt_l, pb_xs1_wrn_rysgen_lt_m, etc. Also, the entries for the "wrn_gengen" files for XS1 PE should be removed from speechmanager.cache since its a collection of various "wrn" related dialogue that will never be situationally accurate. With the errant files rendered unusable due to their removal from the speechmanager cache and the newly created files in place you can fire up the game again and setup the same test scenario as before. This time you can see the game using the correct files now that they exist and the PE infantry reactions will now make sense.
pb_xs1_wrn_rysgen_nt_m.bsc didn't exist before but the game was clearly looking for it as it is now being used. Notice how In the BSC that happened to be loaded I linked SMFs using the speechcode \"art\" instead of \"rys\". This is because the codes only matter for BSCs, for SMFs they are just named similarly for organizational purposes
This is how powerful of a tool Process Monitor can be. Despite the annoying setup process, it allowed me to learn that "rys" is the speech_code for artillery attacks, which incorrect files were being loaded for PE soldiers reacting to artillery, and that other factions do have speech codes other than just ones that use "lt/li" present for artillery reactions from just one filter setup. If you can get used to this tool you will always be able to see which files the game is referencing which can help make game mechanics much more clear and allow you to know if your replacement files are even being loaded if something you expected to work in your mod seems to have no effect. Essentially this tool can let you quickly eliminate a lot of potential culprits for a given issue so you can more efficiently narrow down a bug, or it can reveal how some game mechanics work under the hood. Definitely play around with the filter settings.
I can add some supplementary speech code system information to the Wiki if it helps people understand this example
![Right click on Data\sound and select the highlighted option while your mods main .module file is open to extract all sound files to [CoH DIR]\[YOUR MOD FOLDER]\Data](https://preview.redd.it/2kp7rrefrmw31.png?width=639&format=png&auto=webp&s=e3e669a157e7ae68a6b40c0ffcc48ed26cbb06f7){kind=link}
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