In AoE2:HD, you could browse to sounds and hear them.
In DE, I don’t see a way to do this for most or all sounds that I want to mod.
HD
…\resources\en\sound\taunt
…\resources_common\drs\sounds
DE
The above directories don’t exist.
Yet, when you mod DE audio, you have to point to the above paths, pretending that they exist. Makes no sense, but it works
I ask because I’m trying to mod the annoyingly loud battle alarm/horn sounds in DE. I’ve done most of them and they work, but there are a couple files that still escape my reach. Either StepS’s spreadsheet is missing them, has the wrong naming, or it’s just not working on my end. (Same for the chat doorbell sounds. I’ve modded all of them and named them as the spredsheet says to, but I still hear doorbells instead of my modded sound.)
Since I can’t navigate through DE’s audio like I could with HD and listen to DE’s sound files, I have no clue what files still need replacing. How was StepS able to make the spreadsheet? I see no way for the common user to
Hi, this is explained near the bottom of the guide, see the Exporting and Converting/playing sections. The foobar plugin allows you to directly listen to sound/music files.
However, as they use a different ID space from playable Events, they alone would not be enough to create mods.
The spreadsheet has multiple sheets (tabs). It seems you wanted to mod chat_received.wem and under_attack.wem, both of which are listed in the “UI Sounds” tab of the spreadsheet with descriptions. They are also duplicated in the “In-Game Play Events” tab, with the PLAY_ prefix as utilized by the game.
You could also use the “Original Sounds” mod for a template.
We cannot mod sounds that are in the PCKs & BNKs, but we should mainly use them to listen to them, to know what sounds they are, in order to reverse-engineer the sound filenames and locations using your spreadsheet so we can mod them?
For example, listen to “193960.wem” in Base.pck to know what it sounds like, and then see its corresponding file name in the Unit Sounds or UI Sounds tabs in case we want to mod it?
I guess I’m not seeing any other benefit to the “in-Game Play Events” tab, except for my thought above.
Or are we supposed to somehow replace the files in the PCKs/BNKs somehow in addition to the files we mod in the Unit Sounds and UI Sounds tabs?
I see several files I may need to somehow update in the PLAY_ tab, if that’s the case. At least these, for example:
I was hoping to lower the volume of the water sound for water maps, but it appears I won’t be able to(?) since it’s probably a looping sound and per the Steam guide you can’t change looping sounds, right?
“Looped sounds (burning fire) are currently not supported with this. The loop will not be preserved and the sound will play just once. This is a known issue.”
I already modded all the following sounds yesterday, as well as taunts. Chat notifications, chat receiveds, battle alarms, etc. Yet, I still sometimes hear vanilla (loud and lengthy) alarms, and always DE’s doorbell sounds for chats rather than HD’s sound.
I am following the same approach/structure as Original_Sounds mod. I assume filenames aren’t case-sensitive? Sometimes the spreadsheet shows lower-case, but Original_Sounds mod shows upper-case. (E.g., tribute/Tribute, notification/Notification, respectively)
I’ve modified every annoying and loud battle alarm, monk, etc. sound file I can find/see based on the excel spreadsheet and comparisons to Original Sounds mod, but I still hear the default battle alert sounds mixed in with my modded sounds when I play. Maybe are hidden files somewhere.
DE’s battle alert lasts like 1.5 seconds, which can easily become 3-5 seconds when they layer on top of each other and play in succession. That’s way too long, imo. It really could be shortened to 0.25 or 0.50 seconds max and have the same impact but be less annoying. Same with the monk sounds. My mod aims to do this, along with other tweaks (quieter, diff sound, etc.), but it’s sad when straggler files are hidden somewhere and I can’t find them – or the game doesn’t 100% respect my mod.
I also cannot seem to change the chat doorbell sound. Want it changed because, again, it last too long (over 1 second) and makes it harder to hear custom taunts mid-game; and is just not my favorite sound to hear. The ‘Original_Sounds’ mod changes it, but not my own mod, despite doing the exact same thing and even copying/pasting that mod’s chat sounds to mine since my own attempts failed.
I still feel it’d be nice for devs to give us some options for battle alert sound, its volume, and its frequency of occurrence. (Monk sounds, too, while at it.) It’s hard to watch the T90 TTL tournament stuff with all the battle alerts, or even listen to my own games.
I once surmised it’d take official devs this long. Wonder how accurate this is:
30 to 60 mins to make 10 sounds on any modern day synth keyboard
30 mins to upload the new sounds and add a sound chooser in menu screen
15 mins to add a volume slider and code so that it affects battlehorn/alarm, specifically
10 minutes for any additional reasonable volume sliders desired (monk conversions, etc.)
60 minutes to craft a script to allow players to customize the repetition frequency for battlehorn/alarm and to implement slider in menu
