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I have been trying for ages to get environment sounds into my map with no success until recently. Unfortunately, although I have been able to get environment sounds, it has broken all the unit weopon sounds that were there.

To begin with I added the R2 sounds for fighters to my dc sfx file, but this broke other vehicle sounds. Then I realized that R2 sounds only occur in space maps, and found that adding: ,to my cw conquest lua (BNEc_con), added these sounds, aswell as environment sounds such as the steam from the carbon chamber.

This unfortunately broke most unit weopon sounds like the jet pack, lightsaber and several regular fire sounds.

In the end I took out the environment sounds as there not as important as unit sounds.

I suppose it is possible to get all these sounds working together, as I'm sure there are mods out there that have them?

It is possible, it's just a lot of tedious crosschecking and try-and-retry. If you have any sound duplicated (in a .snd file, not the .sfx/.asfx), then you'll end up making that sound not work for both/the first (not sure) instance(s) of that sound. The long and short of it is that you'll have to go through and add only exactly what you need, maybe down to the individual sounds (you'll need to likely make your own .snd files to make sure there's no overlap).

It's almost always a bad idea to use stock sounds alone when you're trying to "fix" sounds for a modmap, as those only have certain sounds preset.

Ok, thanks. It's definitely a long complicated process then.

I suppose adding stock sounds alone would only have worked for mods if Pandemic had added them for both space and land maps.

Jendo7 wrote:I suppose adding stock sounds alone would only have worked for mods if Pandemic had added them for both space and land maps.

Maybe. The problem is that space maps can't use completely different sounds from land maps (they have to share things like unit sounds, unit weapon sounds, some envfx sounds, etc.), and so they'd have to be inefficient and reload the same sounds under different names. What they did is the most efficient way of doing it, although it certainly would be easier for modders if they'd loaded everything from one giant, comprehensive sound.lvl file.

Maveritchell wrote:

Jendo7 wrote:I suppose adding stock sounds alone would only have worked for mods if Pandemic had added them for both space and land maps.

Maybe. The problem is that space maps can't use completely different sounds from land maps (they have to share things like unit sounds, unit weapon sounds, some envfx sounds, etc.), and so they'd have to be inefficient and reload the same sounds under different names. What they did is the most efficient way of doing it, although it certainly would be easier for modders if they'd loaded everything from one giant, comprehensive sound.lvl file.

yeah, you wonder why they didn't

impspy wrote:

Maveritchell wrote:

Jendo7 wrote:I suppose adding stock sounds alone would only have worked for mods if Pandemic had added them for both space and land maps.

Maybe. The problem is that space maps can't use completely different sounds from land maps (they have to share things like unit sounds, unit weapon sounds, some envfx sounds, etc.), and so they'd have to be inefficient and reload the same sounds under different names. What they did is the most efficient way of doing it, although it certainly would be easier for modders if they'd loaded everything from one giant, comprehensive sound.lvl file.

yeah, you wonder why they didn't

No, I don't really wonder - like I said above, they did it because it's the most efficient the way they did it. It didn't make it easy to combine sounds, but they didn't have to make it easy because they knew what they're doing (and so can anyone here, with some practice).

Another example I tried which worked to a degree, was to use the steampipe sounds from Hoth for the carbon chamber, referencing Hoth's sound section in my lua, but this in turn broke Boba Fett's gun sounds, who doesn't appear in the Hoth level.

So according to what you said, it is possible to use stock sounds alone, you just have to be referencing the exact same sounds from a shipped level as your mod map uses. No more, no less, otherwise it will reference the same sound twice, which will stop other sounds from working.

So if I understand correctly, as most mod maps use several sounds from different levels, it's not really possible, without making your own .snd files.

Jendo7 wrote:So if I understand correctly, as most mod maps use several sounds from different levels, it's not really possible, without making your own .snd files.

That's the gist of it. It's worth it to just go ahead and learn to put together your own sound .lvl files anyway, because once it becomes easy, it makes your map a lot more polished. Sound is very important, but unfortunately our sound tools have a bit of a learning curve and that turns most people off.

Maveritchell wrote:

impspy wrote:

Maveritchell wrote:

Jendo7 wrote:I suppose adding stock sounds alone would only have worked for mods if Pandemic had added them for both space and land maps.

Maybe. The problem is that space maps can't use completely different sounds from land maps (they have to share things like unit sounds, unit weapon sounds, some envfx sounds, etc.), and so they'd have to be inefficient and reload the same sounds under different names. What they did is the most efficient way of doing it, although it certainly would be easier for modders if they'd loaded everything from one giant, comprehensive sound.lvl file.

yeah, you wonder why they didn't

No, I don't really wonder - like I said above, they did it because it's the most efficient the way they did it. It didn't make it easy to combine sounds, but they didn't have to make it easy because they knew what they're doing (and so can anyone here, with some practice).

I meant I wondered why they didn't they ship us a giant sound lvl in the modtools( if some one made that it would be worth a king's ransom ; just think, all era's, all sounds.) . I don't see how a bunch of small lvl's composed of mostly the same sounds are more efficiant, apart from saving memory.

impspy wrote:I meant I wondered why they didn't they ship us a giant sound lvl in the modtools( if some one made that it would be worth a king's ransom ; just think, all era's, all sounds.) . I don't see how a bunch of small lvl's composed of mostly the same sounds are more efficiant, apart from saving memory.

You answered your own question. Games run a lot of individual resources at the same time and the fewer of these that get loaded in at once, the better. How many times have you heard someone complain about loading times in a game? At least once, I would imagine - reducing things like this (data loaded at the beginning of the level) reduces loading time; this is always going to be something important.

Yes, they could have made one large sound .lvl with everything in it and distributed it. They could also have made a bunch of new models, or given us more tools - but the point is that the Modtools aren't supposed to be something extra they do work on - they're just giving us what they have. The modtools give them basically zero profit, and so there's no reason for them to do extra work.