Originally posted here: www.planetavp.com/modmaker/
Created by: William "modmaker" Bostjan
Mirrored here for archival purposes
Adding Sound FX
- Ambient Sound
- Events
- Music accents
Adding the bells and whistles. Literally. You can easily add sound objects to your level to increase the interest and interaction in your level. Nothing strikes the fear into the hearts of players like metal scraping on a grate and the sounds of terrified screams in the distance. Sound is a simple inclusion and not too taxing on the system at run time. The Sound Design that Red Riot placed in his MAP JUNGLE is a fine example realitism. He used a series of random triggers and alot of smarts.
Theres nothing as much fun then a nice alien attack sound just behind a door when a player passes by it. Easily done with a sound trigger.
First maps, are usually thrown away. (Well actually they are shelved, cause game makers never throw ing industry, you want the best possible releases associated with your name. And if you don't think that matters, and you don't give a damn about the quality of your product, rest assured no one else will.
Keep the radius realistic
Sound design is not complicated but it does require some thought. As with lights give sound a sense of a source to help make it believable. If a fan is running, placing the soundFX object makes sense. And realize that there are two types of sounds, EVENT SOUNDS which are short and action specific, and AMBIENT SOUNDS which are designed to loop and create an atmosphere. They are treated the same by the object but are very different in how they are used. There are flags on the object to deal with these differences.
