Plate Mail Impact Sound

[Ishtvan]

I thought I started a request thread about plate mail sword impact sounds. Was this moved somewhere? If someone could tell me where it went, I just want to find it so I can see if there were any responses. It was late at night, so maybe I hallucinated the whole thing.

[Springheel]

Recently? I don't remember seeing anything. There's a tracker entry from a while back though.

[Ishtvan]

Okay, maybe I only posted in my imagination. what I wanted to say was melee is currently confusing because plate mail has the same sound as flesh. But I didn't want to give it the metal "clang" sound because that's already overused and annoying. So anothrt metal with flesh under it "clunk" sound would be good. Also, for extra credit: a sound for sword hitting chain mail over flesh.

[Springheel]

melee is currently confusing because plate mail has the same sound as flesh. But I didn't want to give it the metal "clang" sound because that's already overused

 

Still, in the meantime, wouldn't an overused clang be better than sounding like flesh?

[Ishtvan]

I don't know... it literally hurts my ears when testing. And it's the same as the parry sound, so you wouldn't be able to tell if you attacked well enough to get thru the parry but hit chain mail, or just hit the parry. That would be even more confusing to me than knowing that you hit but not hearing the difference between flesh & plate. I can look thru the D3 sounds again for a good placeholder, although I didn't find one last time.

[Tels]

I don't know... it literally hurts my ears when testing. And it's the same as the parry sound, so you wouldn't be able to tell if you attacked well enough to get thru the parry but hit chain mail, or just hit the parry. That would be even more confusing to me than knowing that you hit but not hearing the difference between flesh & plate. I can look thru the D3 sounds again for a good placeholder, although I didn't find one last time.

 

Is it possible to modify the sound in a sound shader on the fly, just like with material shaders, e.g. can you make it sound more dull etc. (beyond volume control I mean).

[Ishtvan]

You mean pitch it up or down dynamically? I don't think so. You can only change the same properties as those in the soundshader def, and I believe that's all listed here:

struct soundShaderParms_t {
float					minDistance;
float					maxDistance;
float					volume;					// in dB, unfortunately.  Negative values get quieter
float					shakes;
int						soundShaderFlags;		// SSF_* bit flags
int						soundClass;				// for global fading of sounds
};

 

Nothing to do with the pitch. We would probably need the sound engine source if we wanted to add that. So for now I just want a "clunk" sound.

[Ishtvan]

Think I found a D3 placeholder that will do for now. Will start going about putting it ingame now.

[Ishtvan]

Okay it's ingame. For some reason the melee code or script or base class moveable code or something is still playing the flesh hit sound in addition to the plate mail sound. Haven't been able to find out why yet, but at least the plate mail sound plays.

 

EDIT: Aha, the extra sound playing is in idEntity::AddDamageEffect:

void idEntity::AddDamageEffect( const trace_t &collision, const idVec3 &velocity, const char *damageDefName ) {
const char *sound, *decal, *key;
idStr surfName;

const idDeclEntityDef *def = gameLocal.FindEntityDef( damageDefName, false );
if ( def == NULL ) {
	return;
}

g_Global.GetSurfName( collision.c.material, surfName );

// start impact sound based on material type
key = va( "snd_%s", surfName.c_str() );
sound = spawnArgs.GetString( key );
if ( *sound == '\0' ) {
	sound = def->dict.GetString( key );
}
if ( *sound != '\0' ) {
	StartSoundShader( declManager->FindSound( sound ), SND_CHANNEL_BODY, 0, false, NULL );
}
// ...

 

My first instinct is to remove this extra sound playing, but we'd have to make sure that nothing relies on it, like arrows hitting flesh. Classic "fake" D3 melee attacks may also rely on it, and we still want some monsters to use those. Monsters with unblockable attacks still use fake melee since it doesn't make sense to do all the physics tweaking it takes to model their claws, etc. Maybe I can just add an optional argument to this AddDamageEffect function that suppresses the sound.

[Ishtvan]

Well that took a long time, I had to clean up some old D3 code that was playing a second, unnecessary sound somewhere else in the code. Rewriting this also fixed the zombie flesh sound issue, so you should no longer need the "fleshy" spawnarg to do that.

 

Anyway, placeholder plate-mail sound is in place. It actually sounds okay to me, maybe a tad too hollow for something with flesh behind it, but not bad. What do people think, is this D3 sound okay or should we keep this in the request lists record our own?