[REQ] Calling All SH sound or seabed Modders!

[Lionman]

Originally Posted by 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.

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