Useful Soundshader Keywords

[Ishtvan]

http://www.iddevnet.com/doom3/sounds.php

 

A particularly useful one might be "no_dups" in our soundshader files for stuff like the blackjack swing and the sword swing. This means it will try not to play the same swing sound twice if you are swinging again and again, which should create the illusion of more variation for the player.

 

Also with the "volume" keyword, you can tweak the levels if a recorded .ogg is too low or too high compared to other sounds we have.

[New Horizon]

http://www.iddevnet.com/doom3/sounds.php

 

A particularly useful one might be "no_dups" in our soundshader files for stuff like the blackjack swing and the sword swing. This means it will try not to play the same swing sound twice if you are swinging again and again, which should create the illusion of more variation for the player.

 

Also with the "volume" keyword, you can tweak the levels if a recorded .ogg is too low or too high compared to other sounds we have.

Great finds. We will likely have to tweak the volume of almost every sound, if the original games are any indication. Especially the footsteps.

[pakmannen]

Old hat!

 

Anyway, I tried to add no_dups to some shaders (footsteps, swings, crashes etc) and I think it works. It doesn't work when you play the shader from the soundeditor (editSounds) but it seems to work within the game (I tried it with the sword swing). It's on CVS if you want to check it out.

 

Are the footsteps ingame yet? Are the textures etc updated with the correct surface?

[pakmannen]

Also I noticed something strange in BT's map: there is a sound playing when you frob the door. But that's not one of our sounds and it's not in the sound folder. What is it?

[Ishtvan]

For footsteps on floor surfaces, the surfaces that we added that weren't in D3 aren't going to work yet. It wasn't as easy to add them as I thought it would be. I'm emailing Brian about some solutions for that but it looks like we might have to write our own material file parser similar to what Sparhawk did that parses comments in the material files into new surface types.

[sparhawk]

I don't know if this is possible, but it would be great if we just could add our own keywords. And when the original parser spews an error, instead of immediatlye doing it, he could call a user function that can process it. That's usually the way I write my parsers, so they can easily be extended.

[pakmannen]

For footsteps on floor surfaces, the surfaces that we added that weren't in D3 aren't going to work yet. It wasn't as easy to add them as I thought it would be. I'm emailing Brian about some solutions for that but it looks like we might have to write our own material file parser similar to what Sparhawk did that parses comments in the material files into new surface types.

It doesn't work even if we just replace the existing doom 3 surfaces? Because if it does then I say go for it. Compability with the original levels will probably break sooner or later anyway, right?

[Ishtvan]

I counted and it's not going to work with the number of surfaces we need. We need about 16 new ones, we get 5 from unnamed surfaces 10-15 and then can replace maybe 2-3 (cardboard, plastic ...)

 

So we don't have space for them right now, and even if we did I'd like to get a more expandable way of doing it in case later on we think of some surface that we absolutely must have.

[pakmannen]

I've been getting a little hesitant about all those materials. It will be hard to create sounds for every kind of combination, sword against mud etc etc. I dunno. I suppose it's always best to make it expandable anyway.

[Ishtvan]

We don't need unique sounds for all of them, some can point to the same sounds (like sword against mud = sword against flesh), and they can either stay that way forever or get replaced with unique sounds in a later release.

 

I have other motives for some of the surfaces like different types of armor too, because it might let us tell in detail where an arrow stuck in a guard for example, and only give damage if you fire the arrow where there's a hole in the armor (D3 has damage zones already, but they're not very precise).