Game is Unplayable due to there only being *one* combat sound effect- which an awful *pop* noise.

VICTORY!!!!!!!

edit: I replaced the sound effect with a custom one. The game is awesome now. #WINNING!


While I fully realize this is a work in progress, we are in R12 and the *one* melee combat sound effect is this big, ugly *blop* sound.

I legitimately thought I had corrupt game files, but I went on youtube and the videos I saw had this *pop* too when things are hit.

I honestly could stand to have only one sound effect for all attacks, if it was at all decent, but it doesn't sound at all like a sword or sword slice. Not even a mace pop or metal sound. No flesh being torn or damaged. It's worse than slashing a tree with a mace.

Is there any way for me to simply edit the game file and replace the ugly melee sound with a single sound effect of my choosing? (Which is literally almost anything being better than this.)

It is so bad, I can't even bare to play the game- despite how amazing it seems to be so far. I really want to test, get involved in the community, help find bugs, help improve the game. I am a huge fan of the Ultima series, a huge fan of Garriott, and a fan already of SotA (despite only playing a few hours).

The music is beautiful, the graphics are gorgeous, the performance is amazing- but that melee combat sound just kills it for me. And no, I don't want to use magic only until then

 

I was thinking this was a place for feedback not complaints. Its ALPHA, sounds and voices are some of the last things added to any game. Turn up your music and turn down your gameplay sounds if it bothers youthat much. UNPLAYABLE?? Really??

 

I think the Dev team are aware if the lack of sound effects (I'm sure they have mentioned this a few times in the hangouts). I expect as we move forward, more effects will be added and existing ones could be replaced.

 

Really.

Sorry, but I can't just magically change my opinion, or else I would.
For whatever reason, it just kills the entire experience for me. It prevents me from doing what I really want to do- help make the game better by playing it and testing for bugs.
If I could somehow tell myself, "Just enjoy the game anyway!" don't you think I would?

Telling me to turn up the music and turn off the sound effects is just silly. All other sound effects are perfectly fine for the alpha. I am not even asking for a real sound effect. Just a different placeholder. Anything. Seriously anything is better.

I'm not complaining at the lack of sound effects or the unpolished state. I am complaining that the *one* sound effect we get as a placeholder, is hideously unattractive and a pain to hear. The only thing worse is absolutely no sound effect at all, and that is only marginally worse than the *blop* pop sound, hehe


Anyway, since it is a Unity game, and I'm a Unity dev and game programmer myself, I can probably figure out how to alter the asset and replace the sound effect with a custom one. If I can do it quickly without too much effort, I will share the file (if allowed to) with everyone here. If it turns out to be too difficult of a task to mod the asset (too time consuming compared to my desire to play this game) then I will just wait.

I really love this community already- so I would be glad to share or even put up a tutorial to show others how to edit assets (if I can do so in a way that the novice can easily do). I've never actually reverse engineered anything, so I'm not sure how hard it would be. However, it's Unity, and Unity is pretty easy to do that with since it is so popular.

 

You can turn off sound effects and imagine them to be whatever you want them to be

Pre-Alpha (which is R12) is a phase in a game where systems are built for frameworks... there are a LOT of place holders... hell there are like 10 items that are all buckets! The purpose of pre-alpha is not to critique the quality of the finished product but to playtest the framework and systems... ie: how does leveling work NOT how long does leveling take... how does combat work NOT how many types of mobs are there... how does movement work NOT why isn't there encumberance and side backward ninja flips of awesome ownage.

Bottom line... SFX have placeholders like many other things... it's part of being in a pre-alpha phase I'm glad to see that you think the game is amazing like I do and hopefully the understanding of play-testing a pre-alpha helps clear up some of the frustration.

 

If i wanted to use my imagination, I'd read a book.

I am a game developer, so I fully understand the alpha phase. It's not really frustrating, it just sucks I can't play because of the ugly sound.

I found the file.
It's in resources.assets, it's called "Impact_Club_01.ogg"
Heh, I was correct to guess it was a club noise, which explains why it sounds so awful

I was able to extract it, and I found a nice replacement sound (coincidentally also a club sound from my favorite game DAoC, ha, but it sounds more like flesh being torn and is a lot softer) and I converted it to the ogg format.

However, the program I used to extract and import the file, gives an error when trying to import the DAoC sound (to replace the ugly SotA sound).
I tried two versions of the program, one results in an error, the next in a memory error. It re-imports the SotA sound fine, so I'm not sure the problem.

Too bad. I don't know of any other way to easily import my custom sound to replace the SotA sound in the resource.assets file.
So I will just wait.

 

Welcome Ronny!

 

Thank you Mata

Since I've been at this for over 2 hours, I decided to try one last time. I believe I got it to work. I have to update the game before double checking though. I will let everyone know if it was a success.

 

Just use magic until they get more sound effects

Their sound effects do need a lot of work. some of the magic sounds are annoying too.

 

Awesome.

I created the thread to voice my opinion as to how sound effects are very important, at least for me anyway. Just one more voice to maybe seeing them sooner rather than later. Come ooooooooon R14! lol

It really goes a long way to helping people have a better experience so they participate more often to help find bugs and provide real feedback.

 

We agree! The sound currently is the weakest part of our presentation. We have a community member who just this month started making new SFX for us so we hope to get the first batch in R13

 

Alright... I had to update the game...and ran into a bug where it said there was an error during updating. Something about windows binaries, lol.
Uninstalled, reinstalled, and that fixed the error.

Opened up resources.assets, and replaced the sound file with a custom sound from DAoC.

Loaded into the game, no crash...so far!

Testing the sound effect....and no sound!

Nooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!

Oh...sound volume was set to 0% Master Volume. That explains the lack of music and footsteps too.

Retest and.................

SUCCESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!





If anyone is interested, more than likely we can replace any sound effect with a custom one of our choosing.
I can even guide someone to doing it. It's pretty simple, even for a novice. However for now, I really need to sleep! Been up all day & night being a game dev, and reverse engineering SotA, hahahahha!
My eyes are so tired!

 

Too bad, I beat you to it! Bwahahahhaha

I will mod my nephew's sound effect too, and then we will start playing tomorrow! Hurrah!

 

@Ronny, I like your enthusiasm for hacking projects, but I have to admit, to me that sound effect you used literally sounds like someone is hacking at a piece of raw meat and not at a practice dummy

 

LOL, yea I was like "This on a dummy? Maybe the old effect was better in this instance, hahaha."

There were like, 100 to choose from in my DAoC folder, so I settled for the first one that sounded okay being repeated over and over while encompassing lots of weapon types (since every melee attack, for every weapon, has only the one sound effect).

I might replace it again later with one more fitting, or replace it every session or when I change weapon types. To me though, almost ANYTHING sounds better than the default sound

 

Here are a few high-fidelity, public domain melee sound effects from community member Kevin Fishburne, which are free to use even in commercial applications. At the least, they might give you a few extra releases to populate the other sound effects.

If anyone has any sound effects, or other assets that you want other fan projects to be able to use, consider sending them to the Digital Lycaeum. Our goal is to be a place where SotA and Ultima fan projects can go and get lots of ready-to-use game props.

 

Alright, I will describe a brief tutorial as to how to go about replacing the sound effect for melee combat. In theory, this should work for any and all file replacement. (Sound, even animations, models, textures, etc. Although I only have had success replacing one specific sound effect.)

What you need:

1) Grim's Unity Asset Editor (Beta)
Forum Link: http://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?13157-Grim-s-UAE-BETA
Direct Download Link: http://www.mediafire.com/download/h0ttkiz6oddroks/UAE_0_3(BETA_3).zip

2) A Custom Sound Effect in .ogg format, to replace SotA's sound effect.
(I used a Dark Age of Camelot sound effect, since all the game's sounds are in a single folder, in .wav format. I just typed in google "Convert .wav to .ogg" and used a website to convert.)

STEP -1) It is a good idea to backup your original resources.asset file. Simply copy it and paste it, and that will be fine. This is not required, but saves you from downloading the file again if you run into problems later. It's a big file.

Spoiler

STEP 0) Prepare your custom sound effect. Rename your custom sound effect to the exact same name as the file you are replacing. Since we want to replace "Impact_Club_01", then you need to name your custom sound effect "Impact_Club_01". Make sure the sound effect is in the .ogg file format. Use a website to convert a sound effect to the ".ogg" format if you need.
http://audio.online-convert.com/convert-to-ogg

Spoiler

STEP 1) Start Grim's UAE program: (Unity Asset Editor.exe)

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STEP 2) Go To: FILE ---> OPEN

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STEP 3) Navigate to your SotA data folder: (ex. C:\Program Files (x86)\Portalarium\Shroud of the Avatar\Shroud of the Avatar_Data)

STEP 4) Select the asset you wish to inspect or modify, and click OPEN. (ex. resources.assets). There are almost 100 asset files, but a hint for sound effects: they are usually in the bigger file sizes.

Spoiler

STEP 5) Wait for it to load. Resources.assets is a big file, so it may freeze or take a bit to load. Just wait. Eventually, it will finish loading and look like this:

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STEP 6) Now, you can scroll down to view all the assets and select the one you want to replace. Pay attention to the "TYPE", which tells you if it's a texture, audio, etc. This way you can find what you want easily. If you want to figure out what sound effect file is which particular sound, then you can use the "EXPORT" option, play it, and eventually find the one you want to replace. (ex. if you wanted to replace the fireball noise, or the arrow noise).

What we want, is a specific file named "Impact_Club_01" which is the one sound effect for melee combat.
(Tip: You can simply left click any asset, and then hit on your keyboard "I" and "M" really fast, type "IM", and it should send you straight to Impact_Club_01.)
So select "Impact_Club_01"

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STEP 7) Right click "Impact_Club_01" and select "IMPORT".

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STEP 8) Navigate to the folder where you have your custom sound effect. Select it, and click "Open".

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STEP 9) Now you need to save the new resources.assets. Go to: FILE ---> SAVE AS.

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STEP 10) Save the new "resources.assets" in the SotA data folder. If asked to replace the file, select "YES". You're done! Start up SotA and play! If you did it right, the new sound effect should be heard instead of the original. If you have any problems, delete "resources.assets" and rename your original backup to "resources.assets".

Spoiler

 

Wow, thats a lot of work Thanks for the suggestion, but personally I'll just put up with it

 

My pleasure.

Now... if only I could figure out how to format the tutorial images so they aren't covering the entire screen...lol...

 

I'd also like to add that reverse engineering Unity games is incredibly easy.
Like, one of the easiest things to do in relation to video games.

If there are any legitimate problems which result from this, it will directly HELP the developers and assist them in fixing any security holes there may be.
Although I don't forsee any problems with this. If there were some, and I didn't do this, then that means thousands of people would have easy access to security holes to help ruin the game post-launch.

Once again, this game is made with Unity. That means tons and tons of tools which already exist, fully updated and all, to help users alter, break, or even cheat the game.

This, IMO, would be a very important aspect of community-supported pre-alpha testing- insuring the best possible product.
I have nothing but love and admiration for the developers and their quality game.