How to control the announcer voice, and other annoying sounds

[StinkyTaco]

Hi,

If the announcer voice annoys you, you can just delete the sounds in the vox folder... By default it is here:
c:\program files\steam\steamapps\SourceMods\FortressForever\s ound\vox\female

there are also other voices in the sound folder so you can just copy tthem into the female folder as well, I think there is the old HL1 vox voice and also a robot voice.
The robot voice is less pierceing than the female vox.

If the volume is still too high, you can manually adjust the volume using a sound utility like audacity:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
If you get audacity, be sure to get the LAME library files too so you can save MP3 files.
Just load a sound in audacity, adjust the volume on the sound block (not on the tool bar) and export, and save over the old sound.



To adjust other annoying sounds take a look in these folders:
\steam\steamapps\SourceMods\FortressForever\sound\ quake -Anoying quake and unreal announcer.

\steam\steamapps\SourceMods\FortressForever\sound\ admin_plugin -couple of sounds here

\steam\steamapps\SourceMods\FortressForever\sound\ scuztools -more blairing SFX.... nice to be able to adjust the volume.The female map vote announcement made me wet myself the first time I heard it.

I guess my favorite is muting the quake and unreal sounds.... that way you dont have to type !quake in the console every time you log in to some servers.

It is a shame there is no volume control for this... it has annoyed me almost to the point of not playing FF anymore.
It would be wonderful to have a volume slider for downloaded mod SFX along with a separate slider for the announcer.

--note you cannot just delete the mod sounds, you can mute them with audacity though. If the sound file is missing the server will make you download it again...

[GeoKill----->]

I'm not sure why male sounds were not released. They sounds great for me

[bokko]

Can you modify all kinds of ingame sounds, or are you limited to tampering with the announcer voice? People in TFC often 'optimised' some of their sounds to get an unfair advantage over other players.

[mervaka]

you are aware that

A) i made a few sentence files for all three included vox sets
B) you can just replace sentences.txt with a blank file to disable the vox
C) they were made intentionally louder than the rest of the game, so that you could hear them?

http://www.fortress-forever.com/foru...ad.php?t=12651

i'm hoping to have a new vox for the next big release anyway..

[Ihmhi]

Why don't we have a vox volume slider?

[mervaka]

because it uses an engine feature, speak.

[StinkyTaco]

Originally Posted by mervaka

you are aware that

A) i made a few sentence files for all three included vox sets
B) you can just replace sentences.txt with a blank file to disable the vox
C) they were made intentionally louder than the rest of the game, so that you could hear them?

http://www.fortress-forever.com/foru...ad.php?t=12651

i'm hoping to have a new vox for the next big release anyway..

Hey cool!

A. Wonderful work, I like the voice's you made

B. hey cool, i wish I knew that before I started. Both methods work to the same end though.

C. Well, this is just poor design by Valve... Even unreal 2003-2004 and quake 3 has a volume slider for the announcer. Just because Valve did not make a slider for the VOX stuff dose not mean that it is not possible to add.
It really dose not matter. I think it is really cool of the fortress team to leave the sounds uncompressed, in a folder where we can edit them our selves.

In the original TFC the vox voices where supposed to be like someone over an intercom giving the announcements. the FF ones are like sitting next to some chick at a sporting event, who insists on narrating the entire event to you by placing a blow horn over your ear, and talking, with the volume maxed out.

The voices dont bother me too much, it is my wife and neighbors who are getting annoyed the voice is so pierceing that i can hear it over the explosions clearly, 2 rooms away. The sounds are set to a high dynamic frequency , this is the same tactic television stations use to make the commercials louder than the program you are watching.

Well, like I said before, it is nice of the fortress team to leave the sounds in an editable state so we are not forced into listening to them. We can mute them, change the volume, or just replace them all together (or delete the sentence.txt file.)

It would sure be nice if there was a CVAR we could tweak in a CFG file for the volume... editing all the sounds manually would take an entire afternoon.

I am pretty good with writing batch scripts for Audacity... I might make some tweaked announcer's ,so people can just download and replace the existing ones. I could use the NSIS installer so people can do it , without too much technical knowledge. i dunno... It would be much better to just have some way to adjust it in the game's option menu system.

@the guy who thinks people can cheat by tweaking the sounds...
Well, if that is the case , people are cheating already by turning the volume up higher than other people...
The people with 16:10 aspect ratio monitors are cheating because they can see a higher FOV than other people.
The people with SLI systems are cheating because they have a higher frame rate...
The people with broad band are cheating because they have an unfair advantage over dial up users.

i dunno, turning up the footstep sounds would be more annoying than an advantage. You would start hearing them at the same time as everyone else... the 3D Doppler sound system is the same for everyone, by turning up the volume would not make it audible any sooner, it would just make it un natural sounding.


Now If only i can find the end of round Music in Day of Defeat source i will be a happy man. even at half volume it would be obnoxious.

[bokko]

Originally Posted by StinkyTaco

@the guy who thinks people can cheat by tweaking the sounds...
Well, if that is the case , people are cheating already by turning the volume up higher than other people...
The people with 16:10 aspect ratio monitors are cheating because they can see a higher FOV than other people.
The people with SLI systems are cheating because they have a higher frame rate...
The people with broad band are cheating because they have an unfair advantage over dial up users.

i dunno, turning up the footstep sounds would be more annoying than an advantage. You would start hearing them at the same time as everyone else... the 3D Doppler sound system is the same for everyone, by turning up the volume would not make it audible any sooner, it would just make it un natural sounding.

I guess I'm that guy.

People are not cheating by turning up their volume, people who make certain sounds more audible in relation to others are. Cheating is if you make sounds such as the priming of a grenade or footsteps easier to distinguish, either by lowering the volume of background noise such as explosions or simply by altering these sounds themselves. There are sound packs available for download for TFC that do exactly that. There are even worse examples where people would replace sounds indicating the presence of another player with the prolonged jingle of a bell or something similar, so the player would essentially be running around with a bell around his neck always giving away his position (And I remember people arguing that it was too annoying to be effective, those people never denied to be using those sounds though ).

This is the same kind of people that think using transparent explosion sprites is A-OK.

I don't think people are cheating because their computer performs better, someone using a gaming mouse doesn't have an unfair advantage over those using a trackball. The only scenario where I can think of FPS being unfair is if an extremely high FPS count would break the engine like in TFC where you could actually jump longer or kill people quicker with the AC. Well at least there was a lot of talk of that at a time and IIRC servers started capping the FPS to 150 or something. I don't know if that's the case in FF.

[OneManArmy]

Are there any good voice syntesizers I can use for it?

[mervaka]

dunno, i've never used them

[StinkyTaco]

Originally Posted by OneManArmy

Are there any good voice syntesizers I can use for it?

Yea here is one that is webpage based, lots of voices, and lets you download ready made .wav files:

http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

I use Espeak for my games, but it is a bit more complicated to set up.you can pass it things to say via command line + text file. It also has a way to poop out .wav files, so you can make a basic VOX script, and batch feed it to Espeak.

there is a built in TTS system too in windows, I think it has SAM+ Julia and a few other common voices.

BTW, I was talking about a simulated doppler 3D sound system , not the doppler effect.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb447686.aspx

High dynamic frequency, is basically when you amplify a sound up into the high dynamic range.