How Voices Work¶

Everything about voice packs in SLO VE comes down to two questions, answered in this order every time a line plays:

Slot resolution — which voice pack does this actor use?
Category resolution — which folder inside that pack does this category map to?

SLO VE never names a file. It asks AudioUtil for a category ("play NearOrgasmNoises on this actor") and AudioUtil resolves the slot, resolves the folder, and shuffle-picks a wav. Understanding these two chains is the whole game when working with packs.

Slots — the core idea¶

A slot is one voice: an id, a sex, and somewhere to get audio from. Nothing about an actor is baked into a pack; the pack just sits in a folder, and the routing tables decide who speaks it.

SLO VE's preset ships these slots:

Slot	Sex	Who uses it	Where its audio comes from
`F0`	female	default for all unrouted females	SexLab's own `vFemaleMoan01` set, mapped per category by intensity
`F0B`	female	backfill for `F2`/`F3`	SexLab's own `vFemaleMoan03` set
`F1`	female	the player (reserved — no NPC ever gets it)	scans `Sound\fx\IVDT\F1`, backfills from `F0`
`F2`	female	a follower/partner you route to it	scans `Sound\fx\IVDT\F2`, backfills from `F0B`
`F3`	female	a second follower/partner	scans `Sound\fx\IVDT\F3`, backfills from `F0B`
`F1gag`	female	any female wearing a gag device	scans `Sound\fx\IVDT\F1gag` (one muffled pool)
`M1`–`M8`	male	males, by voicetype / race	bundled packs in `Sound\fx\IVDT\M1`…`M8`
`C1`–`C10`	all	creatures, by race	explicit file lists straight out of the vanilla BSAs
`SFX0`	all	body SFX (not a voice)	folders under `Sound\fx\SloveSFX`

F1 is the player's slot, always

pc_female_slot = "F1" in AudioUtil.toml reserves it: the player always resolves to F1, and no NPC ever does. That is why a pack dropped into F1 becomes the player's voice with zero configuration. Playing a male character? Set pc_male_slot = "M1" (or any male slot) in the same file.

On-disk layout¶

A voice pack is a folder of category folders full of .wav files:

Data\Sound\fx\IVDT\F1\
    Greet Familiar\        01.wav  02.wav  03.wav …
    Foreplay Soft\         01.wav  02.wav …
    Near Orgasm Noises\    …
    Orgasm\                …

The folder names are category names, matched case- and space-insensitively (see Normalisation). The file names inside are irrelevant — any .wav in the folder is a candidate.

Loose PCM WAVs only

Folder scans cannot see inside BSA archives. A packed pack (.bsa) will never be found by a slot's path scan. To play BSA audio you must list the files explicitly — see explicit file lists.
Lipsync requires a loose PCM wav. Compressed formats still play, but the mouth stays shut; AudioUtil reads the waveform's amplitude envelope to drive the phonemes.

1. Slot resolution — which pack an actor gets¶

Checked top to bottom, first hit wins:

#	Source	Notes
1	`pc_female_slot` / `pc_male_slot`	Player only. The PC always lands here; no NPC ever does.
2	`[npc_overrides]`	Explicit per-NPC pin: `'Plugin.esp\\|FormID' = "Slot"`. Beats everything below.
3	`[voicetype_remap]` → `[voicetype_map]`	Rename a voicetype you have no pack for to one you do (one hop), then map it to a slot.
4	`[race_map]`	Substring match against the race editor id, longest hint wins. Creatures land here.
5	`default_female_slot` / `default_male_slot`	Last resort, by sex. Unrouted females → `F0`.

Then one final check: if the actor wears a gag device and their slot names a gag_slot, resolution switches there — see The gag slot.

GetSlotForActor(actor) returns exactly what this chain produces. Check it live:

cgf "SLOVE_Test.DumpState"            ; prints the player's slot

Spreading NPCs across several slots¶

A [voicetype_map] or [race_map] value may be a list instead of one slot:

[voicetype_map]
MaleBandit = ["M3", "M4"]     # bandits spread across two packs

Actors sharing that voicetype are distributed deterministically by form id — the same NPC always gets the same slot, every scene, load-order independent. This is how you auto-map many NPCs across your installed packs without pinning each one. See auto-mapping female NPCs.

2. Category resolution — which folder plays¶

Once the slot is known, the requested category resolves inside that slot, in this order:

exact folder in the slot
  → [category_aliases.female] / [category_aliases.male]   (rename: script name → on-disk folder)
  → [male_only_remap]                                      (male slots only)
  → [category_fallbacks.female] / [category_fallbacks.male] (substitute, one hop)
  → the slot's `fallback` slot                             (retry the whole chain there, max 4 hops)
  → the [sfx] table                                        (last resort, same name)

If nothing resolves, the line simply doesn't play (and AudioUtil logs it).

This chain is why a partial pack still works. Drop a pack with 20 of the 71 female categories into F1: those 20 play from the pack, and the other 51 fall through fallback = "F0" to SexLab's stock moans — per category, not all-or-nothing.

See the Category Reference for every category name, its expected folder, and what it falls back to.

3. How a slot gets its audio¶

Three mechanisms, freely mixed within one slot:

1. A scanned folder tree¶

[[slot]]
id = "F1"
sex = "female"
path = 'Sound\fx\IVDT\F1'      # holds <Category>\*.wav subfolders
fallback = "F0"

The normal case for a voice pack. Loose files only.

2. Per-category folder references¶

A [slot.categories] string value points one category at one folder. Sound\... is a full Data-relative path; anything else is relative to the slot's own path.

[[slot]]
id = "F0"
sex = "female"
[slot.categories]
Satisfied     = 'Sound\fx\SexLab\vFemaleMoan01\mild'
ForeplaySoft  = 'Sound\fx\SexLab\vFemaleMoan01\mild'   # several categories may share one pool

This is how the stock F0/F0B slots map 50+ categories onto SexLab's three intensity folders without copying a single file. Loose files only.

3. Explicit file lists (BSA-capable)¶

A [slot.categories] array value lists exact files. No folders on disk are needed and the paths may live inside a BSA — the engine's resource loader resolves them where a folder scan cannot.

[[slot]]
id = "C1"
sex = "all"
[slot.categories]
Orgasm = [
  'Sound\FX\NPC\Werewolf\Growl\NPC_Werewolf_Growl_01.wav',
  'Sound\FX\NPC\Werewolf\Growl\NPC_Werewolf_Growl_02.wav',
]

This is how creature slots play vanilla sounds with nothing installed.

Explicit categories (2 and 3) win over a same-named folder found by the path scan.

Shuffle bags — why lines don't repeat¶

Each (slot, category) pair has its own shuffle bag: files are dealt out in random order and none repeats until the bag is empty and refills. A five-file category plays all five before any repeats, so a small pack still sounds varied instead of hammering the same clip.

Normalisation¶

Every name — slot id, category, folder, group, voicetype, race hint — is lowercased with all non-alphanumerics stripped before matching. So these are all the same key:

"About To Cum"  ==  "AboutToCum"  ==  "about_to_cum"  ==  "abouttocum"

You never have to match spacing or case between a pack's folder names, the TOML, and the engine.

Groups and channels¶

Every voice line plays into a group (a live volume bus) and optionally a channel (an exclusivity lane — a new line on an occupied channel replaces the old one).

Voice groups: pc_low, pc_high, partner_low, partner_high — startup levels in [groups], runtime levels from voice.pcvolume / voice.partnervolume.
SFX groups: sfx (startup level from sfx.volume), oneshot.
SFX channels: sfx_main_<position> and sfx_contact_<position> — each actor's continuous stream and their one-shots never cut each other off.

voice_no_interrupt = true (default) means a speaker whose channel is still playing skips the new line rather than cutting the old one short. Different speakers still overlap freely.

Diagnosing resolution¶

Three console commands answer nearly every "why is she silent" question:

cgf "SLOVE_Test.DumpState"                          ; config flags + the player's resolved slot
cgf "SLOVE_Test.AuditVoicePack" "F1"                ; every category a slot resolves, and what's MISSING
cgf "SLOVE_Test.SampleCategory" "F1" "Orgasm"       ; play one clip from a slot/category right now
cgf "AudioUtil.ReloadConfig"                        ; re-read the TOMLs and rescan folders, live

AuditVoicePack loops the full category list for that sex (71 female / 15 male) against the slot after aliases and fallbacks, so a healthy pack reports 71/71 categories resolve even if the pack itself only ships 20 folders.