Collection of adjusted sounds by Anton

[Ujtudor]

Hi, anyone who's on the Discord may recognise me as Anton.

A year and a half ago I was remastering/editing most of the impact sounds from The Dark Mod, and the other day I compiled these edited files into a nice little mod that can hopefully be used by those that like them, or as suggested by users in the Discord, added to the base game if deemed good enough!

I did not document every part of every edit I made as I was working very fast, but broadly speaking:
The volumes are normalised to a similar level across the board.
Silences have been trimmed, especially silences at the beginning of sounds, which was a problem with a good number of the sounds.
Equalisation to sounds to make them sound more of a piece with one another.
Minor bass impacts have been added to the attack of sounds where this seemed congruent with what they represent in game.
Pitches of ringing on resonant objects have been made more consistent.
Overly long sounds have had adjustments to become shorter where this did not interfere with their qualities otherwise.
Sounds that appeared especially dry were given some slight baked in reverberation to better fit with the rest of the sounds regularly heard, such as footsteps.
 

I did add original samples to a few sounds, in particular there is a snap on my edited Broadhead breaking sounds that was not there originally, this is a sample I recorded personally.
I am sure I have not used any material that was not my own or under Creative Commons 0 licence.
I made adjustments to some NPC sounds, specifically combat sounds and body drops.
I also made adjustments to player footsteps that I thought sounded too similar, to make them more distinct.

 

Please bear with me not being able to document these changes individually as there are just about 500 sounds that I have edited, it was more than a year ago, and the vast majority of changes are very subtle.

Link to download:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1w2sAj_7992lMzDoUt7GzkFT3DBMygPkD?usp=sharing

The zip contains the same files, but in a compressed format for those with slow internet.

I hope you try it out and enjoy!
 

[OrbWeaver]

I haven't yet checked out the sounds themselves, but it's always good to see people making these kinds of improvements. Polished sounds are one of the things which can really affect the perceived quality of the game.

If these were to be added to the base mod (which is a decision for the team as a whole), it would be important to commit the original uncompressed versions (WAV, FLAC etc) as well, not just compressed .ogg files. It might become necessary at some point to make further edits (e.g. for consistency with newly-added sounds), or create new variant sounds using these as a base, but doing this with compressed .ogg files introduces additional compression artifacts and generation loss with each edit.

[Ujtudor]

As these edits were done for personal use based on the pre-existing ogg files as they were included in The Dark Mod to begin with, I never exported in any other formats besides Ogg.

However, on accident I have been using Quality level 10, which if you know anything about Vorbis, is way, way overkill for a 44khz sample, they should be virtually lossless


If this is a deal breaker, then I am happy just keeping this as a mod.

[OrbWeaver]

Oh, you mean you loaded each Ogg, edited it then saved it out directly as another Ogg? In that case it would not be reasonable to expect you to recreate each edit manually and save it out as a WAV, so Oggs will have to do. And yes, quality level 10 is perceptually lossless so it's probably OK in practice (I think the originals might have used this quality setting as well).