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Sound .lvl template?
Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2016 6:02 pm
by thelegend
You know swbf2 has these awful limits. Especially regarding Sound and Animation. At the moment I can't add more sounds to my map because I already load 2 sound.lvl's in total. co3.lvl and pol.lvl. I chose for polis massa because of it's small file size which even helped in the beginning. However I would like to create a sound lvl file from the very beginning where I can use custom effects and streams (without loading unnecessary sounds from polis massa).
Is there any template sound.lvl/source which only loads the most necessary sounds from the stock game without any world files? Best would be to have cw and gcw effects; but without vehicles or turrets. Just the foley's, explosions, impact effects, hums...I really have no idea how to create these .lvl files correctly. Thank you very much if you can help me.
Re: Sound .lvl template?
Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2016 8:14 pm
by Marth8880
Coruscant would probably be the best place to start. If I were you, though, I'd just ditch the stock sound LVLs entirely and start *completely* from scratch.
What I recommend you guys do right now before moving forward with your project is to plan out all of the different sounds your project requires (minus music and streams in general). You should ask yourselves the following questions:
- How many different factions do we plan on having? If more than 2, how many different combinations of factions (A versus B, etc.) will there be?
- Are there any weapons that will share the same fire sound, or will every weapon have its own unique fire sound?
- Is every weapon unique to each faction, or are there weapons that are used by units in 2 or more different factions? (e.g., Rifle A is only used by Faction A, versus Rifle A is used by Faction A and Faction B)
But yeah, questions like that, the goal of which is to determine how you should go about setting up your project's different sound LVLs.
For MEU, there's a "Common" sound LVL which contains things like explosion, foley, tech/biotic, etc. sounds that are used universally by all factions, and as such the LVL is always loaded for every faction combination. Each faction (SSV, GTH, COL, EVG) also has its own unique "Common" sound LVL that contains the same kinds of sounds that are unique to the associated faction. Then, there's a "Weapons" sound LVL which contains weapon fire sounds that are used universally by all factions as well as all of the SSV's (Alliance's) weapon fire sounds. Each faction also has its own unique "Weapons" sound LVL that contains the same kinds of sounds that are unique to the associated faction.
However, what we've pretty quickly come to realize over the years is that now that we have faction combinations that don't include the SSV faction, like EVG versus COL, tons of sound memory is being wasted since neither the EVG nor COL use almost any of the SSV weapon fire sounds, which are loaded in the universal "Weapons" sound LVL. What we *should have* done is have a separate sound LVL for each faction combination (e.g., a LVL for SSV versus GTH, a LVL for SSV versus COL, etc.) – but we didn't do that, because we didn't properly plan it out, even though we already knew that we would have many other factions in the future. So because of our poor planning, we either have to continue to waste tons of sound memory, or spend time and energy repurposing the way many of our sound LVLs are set up and loaded. Thankfully you can have a SND file in a completely different LVL file than the ASFX/SFX files, so it's not like we're gonna have to ditch our SND file that contains all the weapon sound properties, and so on, but still.
Anyway, let me know if you have any questions about this, or need help setting things up. (It'll be much easier to help through Steam or Discord though tbh)
Re: Sound .lvl template?
Posted: Sun Aug 07, 2016 2:53 pm
by thelegend
Thank you very much,
at the moment I am the only one working on these sound .lvls.
There will be two sound.lvl files in total, actually. One for the this map in specific, and the other one which can be applied to all stock maps, since we do not need tons of the files. We also won't replace every sound. For example we will keep the vehicle sounds in-game. I see no reason to replace them.
Anyway here's a list of all sound "chunks" this map needs:
*note: We are currently working on the Clone Wars era, so we won't need any sounds regarding GCW yet.
Common
-Common Sounds like commandposts, hums, explosions, impact effects, foley's
Common - Side Specific
-Common voices, common music streams for heroes, common weapon sounds (like weapon switch, zoom...)
Custom - Side Specific
-Custom Fire and Reload/Overheat sounds
Custom - Map Specific
-Ambient Streams, Music, sound effects for props and other things, turrets
Added Sounds from other stock sound files
-Vehicle Sounds like flyers and tanks
I think all of these sound should really work in a sound .lvl if I didn't need to load any of these stock.lvl files because I mainly needed these common sounds like zoom, foleys and explosions. If these "template" sounds worked I would be able to add any other sounds then.
Marth, I will be very happy if you help me with this. I'd really appreciate your help in setting up a new sound .lvl from scratch. You can add me on Discord: El_Fabricio/the_legend (<full name)