question for iain or kerensky :)

[pizzagrenadier]

dear devs, thanks for the awesome new patch!! i have a question regarding the new death sound feature.

which .whdat file makes the call to activate the death sound when a unit dies? i was looking thru the game directories and couldn't find any .whdat files that do that. i must have missed something.

thank you for your time.

[Kerensky]

Hmm that's a good question. Let me see if I can scare up an answer...

[Kerensky]

Unless I am mistaken, this is likely a hard coded feature.

[pizzagrenadier]

i see, thank you kerensky for the answer.

this is unfortunate, because for mods like tyranids , we will have to turn off the death sound all together in order not to break immersion. it's easy to do , just rename the 2 folders that contain the death sound , "Death" "Destruction" in Armageddon/Audio. and if you want to reactive the death sound again, just change the name of those 2 folders back. no need to backup or delete those sounds files.

[Kerensky]

Out of curiosity, how is a mod or Total Conversion such as yours affected by this? You don't rename those folders... do your custom entry units make any death sounds? Do Tyranids randomly make vehicle explosions sounds?

[pizzagrenadier]

Out of curiosity, how is a mod or Total Conversion such as yours affected by this? You don't rename those folders... do your custom entry units make any death sounds? Do Tyranids randomly make vehicle explosions sounds?

ok i did some more digging, it works like this :

basically the death sounds are somewhat tied to a .whdat file called "factions.whdat" located in Armageddon/data directory. in this file, there is a newly added column named "death prefix" . in this column there are 3 values named IG, SM, ORK. now if you open those 2 death sound directories, ( 1 is for infantry , 1 is for war machines. ) for the infantry death sound folder, you will see those IG, SM, ORK prefix. while the war machines death sound folder has no prefix, just a bunch of sound based on vehicle size.

so for the tyranids mod, if you don't change the directory name to turn the death sound off, and lets say the nids are attached to steel legion faction. you will have these hilarious situations in which:

A. whenever a nids unit classified as infantry dies, it will play a human ( guardsman ) death sound.

B. whenever a nids unit classified as walker, aircraft or titan, etc, dies, it will play a vehicle explosion sound. seems like the norn queen decides to mutate some metal into the new tyranids to toughen them up !!

anyway, even though its not ideal, but it's not too bad, since the death sounds can be easily turned off. and lets face it, we fans like this type of strategy games are never bothered by lack of death sounds.

[Kerensky]

Mod support is something we always want to have and encourage, but not something we are always able to do immediately with brand new features.

As the game continues to grow and expand we will of course have our eye on improving mod support. Following on the heels of tomorrow's scheduled release, the next update will hopefully add some extra help in this department, most notably in the form of an independent data folder for extended content and also user content. No promises of course, but we'll see how things play out!

[pizzagrenadier]

that's awesome news kerensky! can't wait for the mod support update! thank you guys.