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The combined effect should be that if you're at, say... the max distance from a Cap Ship firing its Gigantic Guns of Doom... you won't even *hear* it firing... and perhaps the first sound you hear, as you pass 2000 meters and it starts shooting... is a very scary WOOOSH as the "plasma shells" streak past your ship. If I can get this working right, it should really improve the atmospheric qualities of FL's sound I'll let y'all see some code samples if you're interested in them when I have tested the concepts out, if you're wanting to add this feature to your mods

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Haha! Sounds like a great idea - never thought of this because always figured on the "its space, no-one can hear anything" - but to be honest, who cares! If it works, then that would be great Anychance you could also do a small vid? Like a capture - so people can see the shots streaking towards/past - and then hear it as well? (i know, mayb tough to do with sounds - dunno, never really used the software).

Brilliant! Always full of great ideas, dunno how you think them all up.

Sounds great, I'd certainly be interested in what you are planning. Can/will it be done as an individual script so that it can be added to existing mods.

Buck Rogers
Server Admin
Colours Elite UK
www.colourselite.co.uk

The thing is... sound is a very important part of the human experience of playing a game. FL isn't even remotely a simulator- if it was, then you'd never hear anything other than internal noises (which, let's be real here... would get old really fast).

So we're talking about a movie-like experience. And sound is a super-big part of that experience, obviously. I dunno about you guys, but that's probably the biggest difference between watching a movie at the theater and watching it at home. Even when I visit my parents' house and play a movie on their ridiculously expensive surround-sound rig (they even have huge speaker cabinets in the floor and point sources on the ceiling) it's not nearly as good as being in a theater with all the volume knobs "set at eleven"

As for scripting it... ah... well... erm... maybe, but probably not. The XML Toolkit Mod, to be perfectly honest, already includes a fairly extensively hacked-up set of sound INIs and FX changes- and this next version's going to include quite a few more (among other things, I've figured out how to make FX visible over greater distances, which looks REALLY COOL with things like Thrusters and Flashes). I haven't really discussed the previous work there very much, because it's mainly obvious stuff, like boosting the radii for a lot of the bigger ships (so that when players are in Turret Mode and flying Liberty Cruisers, for example, they can still hear the roaring of their drives), and re-mastered sounds for Cruise (personally, I find the default Cruise Engine loops to be entirely too loud and annoying, so I made them much more gentle on the eardrums) and other re-mastered or scratch-built sounds. In the next version, for example, I tweaked the amount of time it takes to enter Cruise (via script), so I also recorded longer Cruise Charging sounds, so that there wouldn't be an irritating silence at the tail end of that process.

Sooooo... while I would be happy to demonstrate how this could be done with just XML by using simple Replace operations, I doubt I'll do it that way. I have gone out've my way not to add new sounds in the Toolkit, but I have played around with sound a lot, and, like the changes I made to the AI, the ShipDealers / Mbases / THNs / Etc., these are deep changes that involve a lot've interconnecting INIs, and I usually feel more comfortable doing such things by directly altering the INIs themselves. For a very large set of changes like these, it's usually more efficient, from a developer's perspective, and unlike the "tagging" that I put onto the Weapons to make them a lot easier to manipulate via XML scripts, I think I'll just document this fairly thoroughly so that people actually have a chance to see what I've been doing here... and why. The weapons, Thrusters and other "tagged" things were done especially for game developers who wanted an easier way to play with the game-balance of FL (and, one would assume, didn't like my reworked ramps), but with things like Sound... we're talking frills here, not essentials. One could remove all of that code from the Toolkit without doing any real harm, if one thinks that my improvements aren't better than FL's stock solutions

To add to what's already been said, that is a great idea. Once you've got a working mod, maybe we could add a thread in the tutorial forum on how to do that; although, given how you tend to document, I'm sure I could probably figure out how it works by looking at your mod. I've got surround on my computer setup here, so I love any doppler-effect wooshing sound.

I have become one with my computer. It is a feeling of ecstasy...the perfect blend of logic and emotion. I have reached...Nerdvana!

Well, I have built some code and tested it. IT WORKS There are a few small kinks to work out, but they're pretty minor, all things considered. The biggest kink is going to be how to deal with shot-sounds vs. "whoosh"...

Now I "just" need to come up with some suitable sounds. It's a little harder than you'd think- whatever it is has to loop perfectly, and sound right. I was going for a high-pitched hissing sound for lasers, but thus far what I have sounds too machinelike and repetitive. And there's this conflict between the sound as played and the sound of the Flash, which means that one tends to bleed into the other. Gonna think about it awhile... I may just kill the one_shot sounds entirely... that'd be an interesting way of going about it...

Here's the code. Super, super-simple:

Audio/Sounds.ini

[Sound
nickname = laser_shotpass1
file = audio\sounds\weapons\laser_shotpass1.wav
attenuation = -7
range = 25, 1000
crv_pitch = 15
pitch_bendable = true

FX/Effects.ini

[Effect
nickname = li_laser_01_proj
effect_type = EFT_WEAPON_PROJ
vis_beam = li_laser_01_beam
snd_effect = laser_shotpass1

...and that's all there is to it. Note that laser_shotpass1.wav is a file I just made as a test case... now I've just gotta come up with some very nicely looping crunchy sounds that will work well for this...

I think you should record a scream - a real blood curdling one, and apply it to the nomads shot effects.

That way, whenever you are being attacked and playing late at night... you'll **** your pants!

lol good idea chips. (Lets hear me scream like a little girl.)
Anyway Argh that is really simple and I already knew how to do it in the frist place and forgot about the whole idea. Thanks for reminding me about it.
@ chips, I've been to uh....WTS France and they have those shadow ships and when you fly near them they sound like a hawk, it was really freaky to me at frist becuase I thought I would get owned by them lol. So that nomad thing sounds really interesting....thanks for the idea.

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Anyway Argh that is really simple and I already knew how to do it in the frist place and forgot about the whole idea.

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You dont need to scream you sounded like a spoilt little girl right there ROFLMAO

+++ out of cheese error - redo from start +++

Where was I screaming? WAS IT ALL IN CAPS?
Yea, I don't really think saying, "I already knew how to do it." makes me sounds like a girl screming. I just forgot about the whole idea from the past when making new weapons and wanted to try to make custom sounds, but got piled in a few other things. Plus I was also thanksing him for posting this, becuase if he hadn't I would of never thought of the idea til way later.
PLus you qoute the worng thing. (One line up. )

Edited by - Question Asker2044 on 9/14/2005 12:38:31 PM

Maybe you might want to check out the Tutorial parabolix posted back on 11/27/04 **Tutorial** Making multi HpFire weapons that aren't silent

That's more-or-less where this idea came from originally- this is just a sub-application of the concept of tieing snd_effects to called FX of various kinds. There are bazillions of possible uses for this concept, ranging from attaching snd_effects to continuousfire and rh_continuoussmoke FX, to making the corpses of ships give off sound effects while tumbling (or whatever their death_fuse calls for) to... my CD-player concept and other stuff

And that tutorial, if I recall correctly, came from Accushot taking pity on me when I was trying to get multi-barrel weapons to make sounds for WOS months ago- he'd figured it out for Epsilon Mod and was kind enough to share

@ Argh
I have 30 years of synthesizer experience and 20 years of sound editing (old man ). If you want some help with new sounds e-mail me.

yuck scripts, I hate working with those things.
It's pretty easy to make new sounds and Argh is right there is mllions of differnt sounds you can make, hard part is to think of one and the hardest part is to get it to what you want it to sound like.
My fav. sound would be when nomad torps hit something near you and you hear that SSSSRRRREEEEECCCCCCCHHHHHHHHHH sound lmao. That would be a cool sound to have for a gun, but then again I think it would get annoying to hear that sound over and over again.

Edit: Those Mult. HPguns looks interesting also.

Edited by - Question Asker2044 on 9/20/2005 2:05:06 PM