Hi. Me and my friend are working on a Portal 2 mappack with a story and all. But the problem is our custom scenes and sounds. I put them in the EXACT directory they're supposed to be in (e.g. 'scenes' and 'sounds') but Portal 2 thinks they're missing and don't play. I haven't tried textures out yet, but I have a small hunch they won't be working as well. I have rebuilt the scenes.image, didn't help. I tried this one command that reloads all sounds, it worked JUST for the sounds. But it takes a hell of a time to reload them. There must be an easier way for that. If somebody has the time to help, please do.

If you put all your custom sounds and scenes in a VPK it should work without rebuilding anything. Maybe the scenes.image needs to rebuild and put in the VPK, too. Try that out.

Skotty wrote:
If you put all your custom sounds and scenes in a VPK it should work without rebuilding anything. Maybe the scenes.image needs to rebuild and put in the VPK, too. Try that out.

I put all in a VPK. Didn't work. I'll check and see if the .image is in there though.

Oh the VPK file needs to be in portal 2\portal2\addons.

It works. Thanks

Could either of you provide some additional details about how you got this to work? A while ago I was trying to use VCDs in a VPK but I never really succeeded (this thread details my attempts). I never tried putting a separate scenes.image file in the VPK, though, so presumably that fixes the issue with VCDs not being recognized.

However, does this method still require the audio cache to be rebuilt/updated manually? In my experience, sounds in a VPK don't have their associated cache generated automatically like those embedded in a BSP (it's necessary to do it from the console for the sounds to work), so I must be missing something.

Any further information would be appreciated!

If you put them in a VPK in the addons directory, you don't need to rebuild any cache. Thats the coup.

Odd - sounds in a VPK required the cache to be updated manually the last time I tried getting them to work. I'll have to give it another shot.

EDIT: I've given this another try, but unfortunately the results are still the same as those of my earlier attempts. I made a VPK containing a directory called sound containing a properly-formatted WAV called music_test.wav and placed it in the addons directory. I then started Portal 2, loaded a map, and ran the command snd_playsounds music_test.wav. Initially, this generated the error [Sound] S_StartSound(): Failed to load sound 'music_test.wav'. File is missing from disk/repository. However, after running the command snd_updateaudiocache, running snd_playsounds music_test.wav works and plays the sound.

Am I missing something? Does the sound in the VPK have to be used in a map for the cache to be automatically created? I seem to recall that I tried that a while ago and it didn't work either, but I might be remembering incorrectly. Any help would be appreciated.

Quick update: I tried using an uncached sound stored in a VPK in a map via an ambient_generic but this didn't create a cache entry automatically as I hoped it might.

I've attached my VPK for reference in case anyone wants to double-check the procedure I discussed in the previous post.

You must put this VPK to Steam\steamapps\common\portal 2\portal2\addons.

I did place the VPK in that folder for my tests (both current and previous), but the sound cache wasn't automatically updated to include music_test.wav. After I manually updated the cache via the console, however, the sound played fine, so the game must be recognizing that the VPK is there, just not auto-updating the cache to include the sound file contained within.

Did you have a chance to test the VPK I attached? If so, were you able to play the sound without updating the cache manually?