Localized Audio

Introduction

As is the case with the majority of AAA games released in the last couple of decades, Call of Duty: Black Ops III has full support for localized audio across a wide range of locales. If you wish to utilize localized audio in your pojects, it is very simple and we will demonstrate it below.

Preparing your audio

To start off you will need to ensure you have the required audio for the supported locales. Based off Steam and Launcher, Black Ops III supports the following regions:

Name Shorthand Name
English en
French fr
Italian it
Spanish es
German ge
Portuguese bp
Russian ru
Polish po
Japanese jp
Traditional Chinese tc
Simplified Chinese sc
English Arabic ea

You will require sounds for each region during compile, if you do not have sounds for a particular region, then I recommend falling back to English by and copy and pasting it, but you will still require the folder to exist and contain the sounds for the region.

Next you’ll need to create a new folder in Black Ops III’s directory:

soundloc_assets

This is where localized sounds will reside, in this folder you’ll also need to create a folder for each language using the shorthand name, for each language this would be:

soundloc_assets\en
soundloc_assets\fr
soundloc_assets\it
soundloc_assets\es
soundloc_assets\ge
soundloc_assets\bp
soundloc_assets\ru
soundloc_assets\po
soundloc_assets\jp
soundloc_assets\tc
soundloc_assets\sc
soundloc_assets\ea

You sound alias paths will be relative to soundloc_assets\<locale>, so if your audio is contained in soundloc_assets\<locale>\some_character\scream.wav then your alias file spec should be some_character\scream.wav.

Compiling

Once done you can compile your map/mod and with any luck you’ll have working localized audio. SND_Convert isn’t exactly a shining example of a good tool and may require multiple attempts to compile audio, especially when dealing with large amounts.