Building the soundscape

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Ze Inspector

L1: Registered
Mar 14, 2008
42
0
Hey all, my first real post here. I'm liking this site a lot. Seems like there is some real know-how hear an a friendly bunch.

That said, I'm wondering if anyone can direct me to a tutorial or resource on how to build soundscapes into your map. I'm not looking for anything special, just basic stock sounds to fill out those quiet moments in my map. I've been going trial and error messing with env_soundscape, env_soundscape_proxy, ambient_generic etc. etc. And reading the valve developer wiki but I'm not really getting anywhere.

Any tips?
 

Shmitz

Old Hat
aa
Nov 12, 2007
1,128
746
Best thing you can do is extract Valve's soundscapes and look at how they set things up and what sounds they use. Second best thing you can do is just spend some quality time with the sound browser, searching for various raw sounds to put in your soundscape.

When I build a soundscape I get out a sheet of paper and just start writing down the names of sounds I find and potential uses they could have in various places in the map. In searching for specific things like "wind" or "machine", I often find things I can use for an altogether different application.
 

TotalMark

L6: Sharp Member
Feb 13, 2008
331
78
ambient_generic is for when you need a specific sound to play at a specific time. Like if you had a bomb, and when the bomb is triggered it played the sound of the explosion.

Soundscapes are for areas of the map. A soundscape has a corrisponding file in the TF2/scripts directory. Use GCFscape to extract the scripts directory in your TF2Content.GCF.

Here's soundscapes.txt:
Code:
"tf2.respawn_room" // This tells the game what to call this
{
	"dsp"	"1" // This tells the game to guess the echos using our geometry

	"playlooping" //This plays a looping sound
	{  
		"volume"	".6" // 0-1 Where 1 is the loudest
		"pitch"		"100" //100 is normal
		"wave"		"ambient/underground.wav" // the file we want to play
	}

	"playlooping"
	{
		"volume"	".30"
		"pitch"		"100"
		"wave"		"ambient/machine_hum2.wav"
	}
	
	"playlooping"
	{
		"volume"	".75"
		"pitch"		"100"
		"position"	"0" // In the soundscape entity there are positions 0-7 for info_targets, say you wanted this sound to come from a prop, put the target there and pick it for position 0
		"attenuation"	"0.7"	// Not sure what this does yet, maybe modulates the sound?
		"wave"		"ambient/machine_hum.wav"
	}
}

"tf2.general_ambient"
{
	"dsp"	"1"


	"playlooping"
	{
		"volume"	".25"
		"pitch"		"100"
		"wave"		"ambient/outdoors_well.wav"
	}
}
 

TotalMark

L6: Sharp Member
Feb 13, 2008
331
78
Hey, ya know, I just learned it too, and you came to the right place for that cause we help each other here.