Echo featured sound mod?

[KL2004]

I'm looking for a sound mod that will add a bit of echo, sounding a bit more like video footage of combat I've seen.  Any suggestions?

[Kaunitz]

I'd be interested into sound mods myself. To be honest, sounds are the most underwhelming aspect of CM games, but luckily there are mods around that greatly improve the experience.

I've tried to mod a bit in the past, but it proves to be rather difficult. 

There are several unsolvable problems:

• Weapons would sound differently depending on whether you're close or far away. In CM, you only ever get 1 sound for a weapon.  This is particularly bad with some of the modded sounds that add some "out of ammo" sound (clip-*ding*). If you make the overall shot sound large enough, the *ding* can also be heard very far away. Generally speaking with increasing distance, you want to filter out the high/treble frequencies.
• Weapons would also sound differently depending on the overall circumstances (humidity, hills/echoes, etc). Again, in CM, you only ever get 1 sound file for a weapon.

Then there are some handicaps that could probably be improved somehow: 

• You run into troubles with any weapon that fires rapidly. If you add some echo to the sound, then the echoes of multiple shots will overlap and you'll end up with a very weird and artificial noise. Most weapons have several files (e.g. gun mg42 0, gun mg42 1, gun mg42 2, etc), but I don't know exactly how the game makes use of these additional files. I tried to use a burst sound (several shots in a single sound file) for "gun mg42 0"  (i.e. shot nr. 1) and silent files for shots nr. 2-4 - I hoped that this way I'd only hear that one burst sound. But the problem is that the game seems to start the burst with any of the files - it does NOT iterate through the sound files per burst, so you could end up with totally silent bursts, or the burst sound setting in too late (with the last bullet fired) and going on for too long.
• The game seems to randomize the pitch of sounds quite a bit (too much imho). 
• By default, all sounds are WAY too silent (i.e. they don't get played at all or only at reduced volume over distance). Therefore, if you want to get a proper battlefield atmosphere, sounds need to be very very loud (clipped). Clipped sounds mean more "noisey", low quality sounds. Take a look at any sound mod out there and you'll see that most sounds are clipped. It's really unfortunate and something which could be improved quite easily, I guess.

So in the end, I couldn't come up with a good solution for the MG42. It bugs me out.  Right now, I'm using the mg42 sound from Audigisil's sound mod. I think that for the MG42 it's the best of all the available sound mods.

 

Edited September 18, 2018 by Kaunitz

[Erwin]

2 minutes ago, Kaunitz said:

Most weapons have several files (e.g. gun mg42 0, gun mg42 1, gun mg42 2, etc)

Have similar issue.  It is unclear if alternative sounds play randomly in the same way that alternative graphics mods do.  IIRC the naming convention for alternative sounds is different than for alternative graphics.  One has to name the sound files correctly or they don't play.

Some of us have compiled maybe eight or more MG42 sounds as there are so many sound mods for that weapon.  My favorite is the very short BRRP! where one can barely distinguish individual shots - as that seems to reflect the RL rate of fire being described as a "zipper". 

I use 8 alternative MG42 sounds.  However, it seems to me that only one of the alternative mods plays in the game.  Probably the first one: mg42 or mg42 0.  

In terms of naming conventions it would be great to have the naming convention explained.  AFAIK if there is one mod it would be called mg42.  If there are more than one mod, then the first is mg42 0 and the second is mg42 1 and so on...  (ie: when there are multiple alternatives "mg42" will not play.)

Additionally confusing is that I have found MG34 sound mods named "mg34" as well as "gun 7 lmg".  Have no idea why...

 

 

[Kaunitz]

Well yeah figuring out what weapon uses which sound can be a tricky. Some time ago, I started a systematical approach, but I somehow ran out of motivation ^^