SneaksieDave on 22/3/2005 at 21:30

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View->Sound Propagation Controls. What the heck do we do with that thing? Can any of the development team give a little heads up? I'm not sure where to even start with it, whether it's a debug tool, or a map tweaker. I was wondering if it could be made to fix the problem where sound comes right through closed doors until you lean against them, if it's not a hardcoded defect, and perhaps a mission designer forgot to "Close All Doors and Windows" or "Refresh from DoorSoundSamp Values" or "Relink Doors & WIndows to Portals" (all options on the dialogue). Also - is this a way to extend sound propagation overall? One of the perks about the Dark engine was that you could hear from SO far away - hundreds of feet away. But in T3, footsteps seem to cut out at about 50 feet or so. Can we bump that up somehow with this dialogue?

Whaddo we do with this thing?

Krypt on 24/3/2005 at 02:27

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I never really used the Sound propagation controls very often, if ever. Our sound guys were in charge of most of the sound stuff in the maps, so it wasn't something I had to think about very often. They're mainly there for debugging your sound propagation, like if you want to figure out why you can hear sound through a wall for example. They don't actually "do" anything with the sound settings in your map. However, I was looking at them just now and couldn't get most of the stuff to work at all. I don't know if it got broken since the last time I used it or if I'm just retarded.

The only thing that worked for me was the Draw Sound Portals checkbox, which shows all the sound portals in the flesh view. The sound portals are basically exactly the same as your rendering portals you place in the map. The portals marked with an X are attached to a door, meaning that any sound passing through that portal will be dampened by the amount specified on the door's properties if it is closed.

The buttons at the top are supposed to allow you to set an object to play a sound then set another object as a listener and draw a visual representation of the sound's path of travel. This doesn't actually make the object play a sound in the game, it's just for debugging. I couldn't get it to work though.

I believe a VolMap is a visual representation of a sound's volume, which lets you see how far a sound will travel through a space and shows the volume falloff.

The buttons at the bottom are just to change the state in the map for debugging purposes. Open all doors lets you see how sound travels with everything opened up. The bottom two buttons are things that are handled automatically when the map loads in the game, all they do is refresh the state of the map if you're moving stuff around or changing DoorSoundDamp settings.