I've smoothed player movement on a detailed wooden staircase by 'clipping' it all, which now produces default footstep sounds. I would like to keep the wooden sounds but I seem to be unable to. I've tried editing the 'toolsclip' VMT file and set its "surfaceprop" parameter to "wood" (from "default_silent", which means that there is/was support for surface type?), but it doesn't seem to take any effect. I've thought of using an unrendered wooden func_brush entity, an idea I then scrapped right away because it may affect the map's performance and filesize, as well as blocking projectiles and bullets. Is there anything I can do? Though it's not a "serious" problem, I would really like to retain proper footstep sounds.
I use invisible func_brushes. Works for me. I use them for fences because I don't want collision issues but still a metal sound.
To me it's not really an option because I don't want it to block projectiles nor bullets, but simply act as an obstacle to players while producing wooden sounds when walked on.
CS:GO uses varying surface clip brushes and I also tried achieving the same for TF2 with a simple vmt edit of the player clip and block bullet2 textures. They worked until it came to properly release a level, to which the surface defaulted back to concrete (the clip sounded proper if I remember until I packed the textures with VIDE). I did a couple and just got tired of getting them to work, like here: Spoiler "LightmappedGeneric" { "$basetexture" "tools/toolsplayerclip_wood" "$translucent" "1" "$surfaceprop" "wood" "%compilenodraw" 1 "%compilepassbullets" 1 "%playerclip" 1 "%keywords" "tf" } or blockbullets2 "LightmappedGeneric" { "$basetexture" "Tools/toolsblockbullets2_dirt" "$translucent" 1 "$nodecal" 1 "$surfaceprop" "dirt" "%compileNodraw" 1 "%compileDetail" 1 "%keywords" "tf,Tools" } Although I've seen the above method comradecommie mentioned in pl_ququmannz where func brushes with a metal beam texture is used over a construction light to fake a metal surface as clipping.
Within TF2, (player)clips can not have any surfaceprop. Doing so will result in the correct sound playing only at random. Blockbullets can have a surfaceprop, but it will only affect the sounds from walking on it. Shooting it will still act like concrete. Using an invisible func_brush as a replacement for blockbullets is somewhat common, considering how rarely such a thing is even neccesary in the first place. In general, don't worry about it. Seriously nobody is gonna care. Half of the C tower on gravelpit sounds like concrete when you walk on it and nobody ever talks about that.
Pretty interesting information. I wonder if the failure on embedded content is related to (or happened during) the "sv_pure" bug, and/or previous bugs (#1, #2). Mine never did, fyi.