.map file relation to EoC geography?

Hey Grandpa,

Glad to be here again. Internet is up and running. Now, as for the sound mod...I think you misunderstood my idea about sounds based on faction feelings. My meaning was that the sound never changes. The players' 'perception' of the sound changes based on whether he knows that 'sound'/faction are gunning for him. The sound never changes. So if the player is wanted by the Leung empire, after a time he will come to fear the sound of an approaching leung ship or what not, knowing that it means he will be attacked. The sound itself will be neutral. It is merely the players association of the sound with danger that makes the sound threatening.
That leads me into another issue you raised. What about factions that are using similar ship designs, or ships produced from the corporation. Should they have identical sounds? I would argue no, reasoning that any faction or group, and particularly a large faction, would heavily modify or customize their ships in some way. This would be what is responisble for each factions' ships having unique and hopefully recoqnizable signatures.
However, to keep sounds recognizable I think it would be good to keep a limited set of differentiated ship sounds. If we had 40 factions, all with unique ship or station sounds, the player would never have time to become familiarized with any of them. So, we should probably limit a subset of faction specific sounds to the major factions only.
And yes, Grandpa, we both need to catch up on the sound mod. I still have to figure out where i left off, and hopefully get my install up and running properly again.

Wow, this was/is confusing! Seems you are talking of 2 separate things.
Excuse me for butting in, in the first place, but just to clarify what I was talking about: I didn't mean ship sounds in general:

The sound of a ship is defined by it's setup scene. Creating and allocating a new sound for each new ship you make is more or less a common and standard procedure. You can do it very easily by modifying the sound.ini thats called by the setup scene (in the avatar folder) where you find something like:

AddNullObject <node template=ini||audio|sfx|player_thrusters

Theoretically if you wanted a different patcom sound for each faction you would need a different (faction specific) ship.ini pointing to a different avatar setup scene for each patcom in each faction. That would make for a lot of ship ini files (and complicate the traffic creation scripts).

You might be able to change a ships sound dynamically (faction dependent) with pog if it is possible to grab and manipulate the object properties of the sound.ini such as the URL, volume, pitch_bend ect.
Note however, that the patcom, for example, has 3 different sound node templates in the setup scene and the sound .ini files themselves either have multiple URLs or multiple channels.
I would be most interested to hear about anyones experience trying to change those sounds dynamically.

I was talking about regional 3 dimensional sounds that are location specific.

Obviously it is possible to call the URL of any sound you wish to hear, at any time (Like for example when you get within 350 km of a station) and instantanously play it (at full volume) with the simple pog command:
Stream.Play( int slot, string url, bool fade, bool loop );


However, a "Stream.Play" sound is not 3D! It doesn't fade in or fade out with distance or change pitch in relation to your speed or position. It is either there at full volume or not! (it, also, doesn't get culled).
To get a realistic 3D sound effect in a specific region you'll need to use a SFX technique at least simular to what I described about a year ago in the mod I mentioned.

None the less, I was just trying to be helpful and I think Gtrout understood what I meant.







Iwar2 Multiplayer Fan Site

Yes, things are a bit confusing. Let me explain a few of the missing bits, because these ideas might be useful to everyone.

There are a bunch of ways to play sound in the game. The music system uses Stream.Play. It works great for music, or drumrolls. But like MajorTom points out, it does not have a 3D effect. And it is limited to just a few channels.

Cambragol wanted to build a sound scape. That needed lots of sounds, and they all needed to mix. And we wanted a 3D effect. So we scrapped the music system, and instead designed some Sims that had the proper sound in the Avatar - just like a ship. (this is the essential core of MajorTom's mod. Thanks for posting it!). 3D Sounds are limited to 200km. But planets are thousands of kilometers away. So I wrote some POG to move the sounds as the player moves. It gives the impression that you are getting closer to a planet as you fly closer.

The ship sounds would just be changing the sounds in the ship Avatars (by editing the file, not dynamically through pog).

I have a question for the Model people - If I have 10 ships that have the exact same textures and model, but different sim INI and avatar, do you think the game will load it once, or load it 10 times? Any idea how to test which is true? It would be helpful to know how we are stressing the resource load by making 10 duplicate tugs, but with different sounds in the Avatar. (I finally get it Cambragol - good idea! A rebel player would learn to hate the sound of TIE fighters, an Imperial player would learn to love it).

For voice events, the iComms.Shout() command works well. It can be prioritized low, so it does not overrun mission critical dialog. And you can attach it to a specific speaker, and it will adjust volume with range and show the speaking ship in the HUD. This could also work for radio chatter.

Another option for radio chatter: Use a sim object with a looping sound item in its avatar. These sim objects can be created based on faction, station type, or whatever, and attached to the object that is speaking. Then they become part of the 3D soundscape. This might work well for "environmental" chatter, where you want the player to hear the sound, but not have things flashing on the HUD all the time. And they can be set to play softly. Then the player can fly over and hear a freighter pilot chattering with the station, but if the player is far away, or in the middle of combat, he won't be bothered. I am trending this way for environmental chatter, and maybe even most events. This leaves the Comm channel open for player orders or mission specific dialog, or menue driven dialog.

-Gtrout

[Edit]I like the idea of a sound for the LDSI field. I have an idea for how I can put the sound at the barrier edge, and the player can "hear" crossing the barrier.

I have a question for the Model people - If I have 10 ships that have the exact same textures and model, but different sim INI and avatar, do you think the game will load it once, or load it 10 times? Any idea how to test which is true?

Went through a lot of that when working Epic rebalance.

Not specifically tested, but I believe a differing ini file means a different ship to the engine. The reason? The ini file is the center... the heart... of the ship entity. It is the ini file which tells the engine which avatar to load, and which collision hull, etc. Therefore, differently named ini files would represent different ship types.

Take the Epic stuff: A Leung Dreadnaught and an Emerald Dreadnaught might have the same subsims, avatar, and collision hull... they might be identical in every way but the ini file name. But the engine will see them as two different ship types.

Ahh, thanks for clearng that up Gtrout.

Cool idea to move the sound sim along with the player.I assume you tried setting the sound sim specifically to not cullable?

Originally posted by GrandpaTrout


Another option for radio chatter: Use a sim object with a looping sound item in its avatar.

Have you already tried this option explicity? I remember some "complications" with looped sounds back when I did the original sound sim mod. They may however have been due to the codec or other parameters of the sound sources I was using.


Iwar2 Multiplayer Fan Site

But the engine will see them as two different ship types.

I am dredding that this is true. Iwar had so few ship types that ultra efficient texture and model storage was not as critical. I cannot find a debug option that lets me see how memory is used - so I don't know if the same textures used by two different ships is only being stored once, or twice. Hmmm. I need to preload a really huge (memory wise) ship. Then measure the memory used. Then preload 9 other renamed copies. If the memory increases - then we know it is true.

This would mean that unique sounds for each faction (or even a few factions) must be attached at run time by POG. A seperate sound object attached to the ship. And the same with any chatter items. Otherwise the ship textures are going to overwhelm storage.

IIRC I did the planet sounds as loops. And I did need to mess around with them to get them to work. Let me double check that.

-Gtrout