Why soundfiles in the main pak?!

(patchouli) #1

This is Quakey in general, but WTF are the sound samples doing in pak0?

AFAICT it doesn’t provide any benefit for being “pure”. If someone wanted to edit the footstep sound to be a louder, sharper tic-tic sound that helped him turn to face em faster, so what? That’s exactly what the sound is there for in the first place.

Please, someone give me an example where being able to edit/replace existig sounds is bad or wrong or cheating. I can’t come up with one, and I assume there must be a good one because having them included seems just asinine. I can however think of a two really good reasons to externalize them from the sv_pure catchall:

Internationalization. Just becuase I don’t speak English doesn’t mean I can’t understand when V/3/3 says the word for Move! in my native language. We could have language pack wavs from anyone that wanted to record them. This would help non-English speaking player understand the game so much better. (It would also enable fixing inconsistencies like axis speaking German only when the dev guys thought the kids could understand - auf weinerzein? yea I’ve heard that before it means like bye or somethin’? )

Lower the vsay chat volumes. OK that’s the reason for this rant. I’m so sick of the damn chat sounds but turning them off disables the icons and I doubt we’re getting a client side patch anytime soon, and if we did I’m sure this isn’t on the list anyway. The fact that I can extract sound/chat/*, re-gain them 0.2 and repack them in under 10 seconds does nothing for me when I join a server and sv_pure tells me very politely to go screw myself.

Then of course the silly or realistic customizations. Take out medic.wav and replace it with a realistic death scream, or maybe a squishy wet-sounding fart. Without having to distribute them to servers. Maybe you don’t want to. Maybe you want the death sound to be your ex-girlfriend’s voice saying “but I love you!” and no one else on that server would. :slight_smile:

I’m not saying all sounds, just chat. But either way. I could go download old CBS radio broadcasts from the war and have command posts play a loop of that instead of that beep-beep stuff. And I would.

Are there any tricks hacks etc to get around this? I’m against gameplay hacks whole-heartedly but if you can tell me how to get away with this… shh. say no more.

(coda) #2

due to the nature of pure servers, even if you could change the pak file - and you can, you know, unless the modded files are also present on the server with the same checksum, you will get kicked for ‘unpure client’. this is why things like custom models for quake3 etc, never took off - despite of the fact that some of them were quite good.

replacing things is nothing new, it started in quake1 - thin shaft, better and louder, sounds, nicer fonts, etc. but bottom line is, this affects the game and can be used to gain an unfair advantage. also, consider that even you mean to use it for ‘internationalism’ (whatever you mean by that, sounds commie), others will exploit such features.

(Jahuu) #3

Ways to exploit:

1.Make silenced weapons sound like explosions (or anything very loud)
2.Make the dynamite ticking more louder

(Dingo19) #4

You answered your own question, sort of:

Sound is as important a visuals. There are some sounds like footfalls, that if they were louder than intended could be considered and unfair advantage.

If you can’t change it, then it shouldn’t be changed.

(patchouli) #5

Ok, for the sake of argument I’ll say no gameplay sounds. You are probably wrong, just because you make a silenced weapon sound into an explosion sound doesn’t mean the game engine sound code will treat it any different; if you’re gamespace 50’ away you won’t hear it no matter what it sounds like or what amount of gain you used on the file itself.

But fine, I’ll accept there could be a way to get around so to make an advantage. So why not the chat sounds? That’s all that’s really important. Sounds relating to voice language. Notifications. The chat sounds, the announcer sounds. (By internationalization I mean - do you know how to say “I need Ammo!” in Japanese? No? They might not know in English.)

Hmm. Could you remove the sound/chat/* and have them in different pk3s? Ahh no, I guess not. Even in different files how would the client be told to play sounds/thai/allied/10a.wav instead of the english one? And sv_pure would make you download every single one it had. Ow.

Ah well, nevermind. It was never considered by the Quake guys so therefore it will be pretty damn hard to hack it in. Err, out.

sucks. deal. :disgust:

(weasel) #6

The game treats all sounds the same way. They’re at full volume at the source and get quieter as you get further away. If you make it louder, it will be heard further away. Go ahead and turn pure server off and try it yourself.

(Rippin Kitten) #7

If you were running say a Danish server and you wanted all the voices to be in that language, just record them in a seperate pk3 file and throw them up on the server. All clients who connect should download that file through the game engine and everyone can play with that modification. The server can maintain a “pure” status (every client that plays there will use the same sounds) while still giving customization options for those that want them.

RK