Hi Matt Sherman,

Well, as luck would have it . . . I've recently had the same problem you've encountered. I'd been away from the game for about a year, and had completely removed it from my hard drive. A few weeks ago I decided to reinstall and upgrade to GWX 2.1. everything worked and looked great, except no ship explosion sounds -- very strange.

I finally determined the problem to be my sound card settings. I have a SBLive! 24-bit card, and here is what I did to fix it:

-->Go to your "Start" menu and open "Control Panel"

--> open "Sounds and Audio Devices"

--> Under the "Volume" tab go down to "Speaker Settings" and click on the "Advanced" button

--> In the new window select the "Performance" tab

--> click on the "Restore Defaults" button (very important)

--> Under the "Audio Playback" section, if hardware acceleration is set to "Full" then move the "Hardware acceleration" slider one notch to the left, to "Standard acceleration"

--> Click "Apply", "OK", etc. to close all the windows and restart your computer.

Start SHIII and hopefully you will have all your sounds back. If it is working fine, you might want to try setting your sound card's hardware acceleration back to "Full acceleration", and try SHII again. If it is still working to your satisfaction, then leave it at the "Full" setting -- otherwise set it back to "Standard acceleration."

Hope this works for you.

Muser

no bang, just flash
 

thanks to all who offered up suggestions, but still no boom. Running Cmdr's Edition, tried eliminating all mods, checked time compression settings, adjusted sound properties in control panel. Still stumped. It is quite frustrating to watch a big freighter blow into pieces in silence. The big bang is one of the best parts of the game:down:

Hopefully you get proper kabooms, soon. :D