[REQ] Calling All SH sound or seabed Modders!

[Lionman]

I repeat here my post from another thread, slightly edited, in it's correct place. -

The more cool ambiant sounds triggered by changing events in the boat that you can introduce, the more convincing and authentic the environment becomes. Sound is SO important for us all. A great muscian friend (the late Simon Jeffes, leader of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra) once said to me "You can put any visual junk with a really great music sound track and people will watch it as long as the music grips them but even the greatest movie with a rubbish sound track will lose the audience in minutes." He was right. I lived and worked at sea for almost 20 years and for me nothing convinces or brings on the nostalgia, like those ambient sounds. Muttered comments, random clanks, low volume machinery sounds, footsteps, running up and down ladders sounds, laughter, swearing, low radio sounds, faint music, snoring, distant shouted orders, muffled arguments. So . . . . . . .

[REQ] 1

I am no modder but if I was I would make a MOD that triggered appropriate groups of randomised sounds in given action situations. So in really heavy weather you'd start to hear the odd crash of things falling over or off tables (cutlery, breaking plates tools etc.) even (shock horror) triggered by an especially heavy roll, with curses, (even though real sailors swear a LOT, it needn't be too heavy - the occasional "OH ****!" or "Damn it to hell!" would do) groans, muffled sounds of crewmen being sick, angry muffled comments or arguments, increased creaking and groaning of the ship etc. In calm, sunny, surfaced passages, fragments of happy whistling, song, laughter, muffled card game sounds etc. (Crew sunbathing on deck? LOL) Approaching port - loud laughter, radio music, animated conversation, lewd anticipatory comments etc. In action - anxious muttered comments, cries of shock after impacts, swearing, sharp comments from officers, urgent requests for coffee for the watch etc. In the extreme stages of prolonged depth charging - perhaps even crew muttering prayers, the sounds of damage control parties hurrying through the boat calling orders, even crew members crying in fear. The MOST evocative and moving sound of all is that of crewmen singing collectively in celebration, triumph or even to stave off fear and rally spirits! Imagine the lump in the throat hearing your crew lustily singing in unison in a distant compartment in celebration or anticipation of going home or celebration of defeating the enmy after a long battle! This was definitely used by the German U boat crews to boost morale, so maybe sometimes yanks did it too, especially at Christmas?

The skies the limit really. The larger the sound sets, the longer the interval before repeats of specific effects, and accordingly the more convincing and immersive the results. Like the scenery tiles of ground detail in flight simulators but in sound with a temporal randomiser and perhaps designed so that area-specific or time-specific "new packs" might be added in as developed and required. Can I suggest this as a project for one of you marvellous MOD creating guys?

[REQ] 2

Talking of "realism" MODs, am I correct in saying that I heard a rumour of a "sharks MOD" for the SH IV underwater environment? I ask because, as an ex-pro diver, the ONLY aspect of the subsea virtual world of SH III and SH IV which has always been totally false is the complete absence of fish. Random fish shoals or random size, occasionally moving in concert, as they do, shouldn't be too impossible a thing to model, surely? The same code in 4 different sizes could give a good impression of most of what's down there, as well as the same shoal at different distances, plus the occasional random shark or even the odd whale of course! Frankly I wish the ocean floor was far more "kelpy" in shallow waters too, as it is almost universally in the real world, along with the myriad coral reefs that the Pacific is certainly riddled with, giving some great opportunities for subtle colour effects in shallow waters.

Deep in the hypothalamus, in the unimaginably ancient core lizard brain of our species, we KNOW the elemental ocean as we know no other medium, so there are plenty of "deep" psychological buttons for you modders to press, if you catch my drift . .

[leovampire]

Number one the game has a time limit on how long a sound can be in game before it create's a problem 15 second's max for none looping sound's for a start.

And it is not an easy task adding new sound's to the game that it was never designed for. Have to be tied into something like an event and then added to the sound controler for the game and so on and so forth.

There are some guy's that do awsome work with the sound effect's for the game but you can only go so far with what the game allow's.

[Chock]

That'd be great, but there are certain limitations within the software that can curtail things, I seem to recall that SH has problems with sound files longer than fifteen seconds (it will actually play them, but sometimes it glitches and loops them if you pass the fifteen second limit), and to make things easier, many sound mods switch one for another as they can use a trigger which is already in the sim. I did this for example with one of the damage creaks in SH3, the one which plays when you get really deep, I changed it so that now it is a mournful whale song, faintly heard through the hull. Trust me, when you are diving deep to avoid a hammering from depth charges and that spooky wail kicks in, it's really atmospheric, and since there are two other damage creaks still in the game, plus all the glass breaks etc, you don't lose too much in doing this one.

In its simplest form, if you want to try it yourself, it is very easy to do, you simply rename whatever .wav file you have with the same name as one in the sim and swap it over in the sound folder of SH, this is the same for SH3 and SH4, both sims use a lot of the same sounds. You can knock up a suitable sound in any old cheapo sound editing program such as Goldwave or whatever.

Give it a try yourself, it's quite good fun, you might find a whole new appreciation for actors if you do some voices yourself!

:D Chock

[mrbeast]

What files control the sea gulls in game they just appear when needed ie near land and fly around your boat. Could you perhaps create new gulls, skin them as fish and get them to swim around the sub, underwater? There must be a trigger in the game that governs the gulls if you could find out what it was then you could scatter them over the sea and have fish spawn and swin around your sub a various times, perhaps when you were in shallow water or shoals.

Does anyone know if this would be possible at all?

[Lionman]

Number one the game has a time limit on how long a sound can be in game before it create's a problem 15 second's max for none looping sound's for a start.

And it is not an easy task adding new sound's to the game that it was never designed for. Have to be tied into something like an event and then added to the sound controler for the game and so on and so forth.

There are some guy's that do awsome work with the sound effect's for the game but you can only go so far with what the game allow's.
Many thanks for your enlightening reply.

As I mentioned I am certainly no Modder, not through laziness or lack of motivation, but through an excess of enthusiasm and involvement in far too many realms of simulation! (Subsims [SH III & SH IV], civilian flight sims [FS9 2004 & FSX], WW1 [Red Baron 3D], WW2 [whole IL2 series] and modern jet air combat sims [F4 Allied Force & LOMAC], FPS WW2 [MoH, CoD, RO, Airborne] and modern weapons [ARMA, COD4, SoF] military sims, racing sims [GTR 2, CRC, GPL] plus many other social realms with a creative graphics or writing focus!) My problem now as a retired person living alone with an uber-rig, is getting my chores done and remembering to ever leave the building! But luckily for my health I now live in a town by the sea where time spent outdoors is a joy, whatever the time of year.

Your pedigree as a Modder is impecable (ROW is awesome) and so I thank you for your rapid response, even though the realisation of these acoustic limitations in the SH series is a major dissapointment, due to the plethora of reasons for the importance of sound that I have already outlined. However we can clearly only operate within the perameters of the possible and given these inherent limitations, it would seem they have already done rather well.

However, having had some minor involement back in the day in the theatrical realm myself IMO the actor's crew voices in SH IV are not nearly American enough, wasting the opportunity of introducing some immersive realism through a few heavy US accents, perhaps from the deep south, Brooklyn and the midwest etc. I guess part of the reason they avoided that, is that the limited range of standard crew voices would sound contrived in very different boats and periods of the war, so they have made them "neutral" enough to merge into a generic acoustic quality. Also, perhaps, as in our British Navy (the "Senior Service" as we call it) American Annapolis educated Navy men are expected to "speak rather well and in a civilised manner" - so I guess these comments apply only to the lower decks!

At least they have massively improved the crew avatars in SH IV - as personally I found the SH III avatars so wooden and badly drawn that they reduced immersion for me. Check the avatars in all the current FPS ground combat sims (Crysis, SoF, GRAW 2, ARMA, COD4) and you will see awesome and convincingly real faces, eyes that follow you as you move around the avatar and even sweat in close ups! (Crysis) Given the massive freight of environmental detail that infantry combat FPS sims have to carry, I see no reason why this level of detail and care couldn't be used in SH too. I realise however that FSX would be a better comparsion as the maps in the FPS games are tiny compared with the world of SH and hence able to carry far higher levels of detail, while in FSX generic techniques have to be used to get the job done. I was still really dissapointed that full free movement throughout the boat as in an FPS couldn't be implemented along with RPG style interactive responses from crew members as one came close to them. Are the technical reasons for these limitations the same? Perhaps I am just being a typically over-demanding and never-satisfied gamer! LOL

The bottom line is that we ALL really want "The Hollodeck" from Star Trek and will keep on pressing the producers until we get it.

Personally I look forward to the affordable return of the "wrap-around-3D visor" with built-in "surround-sound earphones" to enable the gamer to be literally "Inside" the virtuality, so that natural head movements operate as they do in the real world, while the virtuality remains fixed around one. Yet all the variants of that system that I have tried have had unacceptably crude low-res graphics or accessed virtual worlds of quiet easthetic and functional incredible banality, while "better" versions of that technology remain prohibitively expensive.

For me the nadir of virtuality is found in the ghastly virtual realms of "Second Life" or "Worlds" and their immitators, where the environments are incredibly primitive, visually crass and poorly done, having remained like that for some years now too. I am a social and political liberal but in the realm of easthetics and creativity, a fascist snob and supremacist! Currently I "make do" with Track IR Pro 4, Buttkicker, eDimensional wired 3D glasses and 7.1 surround sound. So realms like "Second Life " just "don't make it" on any level for me. YUK! DOH!

It has certainly been a long long road since my first 32K BBC B back in 1982! LOL

[Lionman]

That'd be great, but there are certain limitations within the software that can curtail things, I seem to recall that SH has problems with sound files longer than fifteen seconds (it will actually play them, but sometimes it glitches and loops them if you pass the fifteen second limit), and to make things easier, many sound mods switch one for another as they can use a trigger which is already in the sim. I did this for example with one of the damage creaks in SH3, the one which plays when you get really deep, I changed it so that now it is a mournful whale song, faintly heard through the hull. Trust me, when you are diving deep to avoid a hammering from depth charges and that spooky wail kicks in, it's really atmospheric, and since there are two other damage creaks still in the game, plus all the glass breaks etc, you don't lose too much in doing this one.

In its simplest form, if you want to try it yourself, it is very easy to do, you simply rename whatever .wav file you have with the same name as one in the sim and swap it over in the sound folder of SH, this is the same for SH3 and SH4, both sims use a lot of the same sounds. You can knock up a suitable sound in any old cheapo sound editing program such as Goldwave or whatever.

Give it a try yourself, it's quite good fun, you might find a whole new appreciation for actors if you do some voices yourself!

:D Chock

May be I should have a go!

[Lionman]

What files control the sea gulls in game they just appear when needed ie near land and fly around your boat. Could you perhaps create new gulls, skin them as fish and get them to swim around the sub, underwater? There must be a trigger in the game that governs the gulls if you could find out what it was then you could scatter them over the sea and have fish spawn and swin around your sub a various times, perhaps when you were in shallow water or shoals.

Does anyone know if this would be possible at all?

This sounds a brilliant idea and was precisely the kind of solution I meant. How about it you MOD wizards? Is this a feasibility using a tweaked variant of existing SH IV code?

[Chock]

May be I should have a go!

Reckon so. Anyone who has watched my Hunt for Red Hot Coders film will know that my acting abilities aren't up to it:rotfl:

I know what you mean with 3D stuff and VR. I've got a set of those edimensional glasses, and Track-IR too, and while the 3D glasses is an astonishing effect, it's not in the least bit practical for playing a sim, as for one thing, you cannot see the keyboard to press the buttons! so they are gathering dust. Track-IR I use all the time in sims though, that's great, although not so hot for FPS games (ARMA supports it, and it is a bit wierd to say the least, although it does let you run around whilst looking about, which is quite freaky).

I must admit when you get in the DC-3 cockpit in Flight Simulator, is does look like the throttle quadrant and control yoke are actually items some distance away from you with the edimensional glasses (albeit looking a little like a pop-up book), but there is no feeling of depth of field when looking 'through' the window at the terrain. A multiple monitor set up with a fresnel lens does achieve that effect though, but of course that aint much use for a sub sim.

We are a long way from the 'holodeck' although perhaps not so far as we think, I do know LG reckon they are less than ten years away from producing a holographic TV. Mmmm, that'll be cheap...

:D Chock

[Lionman]

May be I should have a go!
Reckon so. Anyone who has watched my Hunt for Red Hot Coders film will know that my acting abilities aren't up to it:rotfl:

I know what you mean with 3D stuff and VR. I've got a set of those edimensional glasses, and Track-IR too, and while the 3D glasses is an astonishing effect, it's not in the least bit practical for playing a sim, as for one thing, you cannot see the keyboard to press the buttons! so they are gathering dust. Track-IR I use all the time in sims though, that's great, although not so hot for FPS games (ARMA supports it, and it is a bit wierd to say the least, although it does let you run around whilst looking about, which is quite freaky).

I must admit when you get in the DC-3 cockpit in Flight Simulator, is does look like the throttle quadrant and control yoke are actually items some distance away from you with the edimensional glasses (albeit looking a little like a pop-up book), but there is no feeling of depth of field when looking 'through' the window at the terrain. A multiple monitor set up with a fresnel lens does achieve that effect though, but of course that aint much use for a sub sim.

We are a long way from the 'holodeck' although perhaps not so far as we think, I do know LG reckon they are less than ten years away from producing a holographic TV. Mmmm, that'll be cheap...

:D Chock
I forgot to say Chock, I too greatly admire the Churchill quote you have chosen for your signature. I agree with all that you say - which is why my eDimensional glasses have also been gathering dust since I bought them - the effect is not "volumetric 3D" but more like flat planes arranged behind one another, an effect not even as convincing as Victorian stereoscopy. But however long it takes, we WILL have our Hollodeck one day, because we humans have an inexaustable appetite for adventure. I guess if LG do it it will cost even more than the early giant flat screens.

[Lionman]

Having finally got my Track IR Pro 4 working with Windows Vista Ultimate (Screwup) Edition I shall be trying it with ARMA (which I really like) very soon.