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.

[Ihmhi]

Point, buuut there's a lot of retarded stuff the Source engine did that we done fixed, no?

Couldn't we set up a volume slider to control the output volume of the speak command?

[OneManArmy]

Originally Posted by mervaka

because it uses an engine feature, speak.

Female vox set is made by you, right? Which voice synthesizer you were using?

[Private_Joker]

Originally Posted by OneManArmy

Female vox set is made by you, right? Which voice synthesizer you were using?

He wasn't.That's merv's real voice.

-Joker

[mervaka]

it was a colleague of mrbeefy's. it sounds robotic because i batch processed it in audition to sound synthey

[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.

[OneManArmy]

Originally Posted by mervaka

it was a colleague of mrbeefy's. it sounds robotic because i batch processed it in audition to sound synthey

Can you describe process more with more details, I need to make a synthesized speech sound like Overwatch dispatcher in HL2. Or like HL vox.

[mervaka]

Originally Posted by StinkyTaco

C. Well, this is just poor design by Valve...

story of my life.. a lot of the sound system implementation seems like an afterthought. i'm often finding myself having to work around it.

Originally Posted by StinkyTaco

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.

indeed, its like that by design. the main thing i set out to do when i was making it was to make it loud and clear. however, i dunno what you mean by "high dynamic frequency".. i think you mean "high RMS level" or "compressed to fuck!"

Originally Posted by StinkyTaco

the 3D Doppler sound system

<pedant>that's not what doppler is. doppler is a frequency shift depending on the change in distance between you and the noise source, much like a helicopter flyby (it sounds higher pitch as it approaches, and lower once its passed)
</pedant>

Originally Posted by OneManArmy

Can you describe process more with more details, I need to make a synthesized speech sound like Overwatch dispatcher in HL2. Or like HL vox.

in a nutshell: stick it through a bandpass filter, compress it to fuck, attenuate it a little, add reverb/delay effects where desired.

[OneManArmy]

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

[mervaka]

dunno, i've never used them

[Private_Joker]

Originally Posted by mervaka

it was a colleague of mrbeefy's. it sounds robotic because i batch processed it in audition to sound synthey

I was referring to the female vox.

protip: I was calling merv a girl.

:-p

-Joker

[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.

[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.

[StinkyTaco]

People are not cheating by turning up their volume, people who make certain sounds more audible in relation to others are.

Well, they might think they are getting an advantage, but they get the sounds to happen the exact same time as everyone else dose. The only thing they are doing by adding volume is just making it more obnoxious.
The Doppler effect is simulated, the sounds turn on and off at the exact same time, no matter what the volume is.

it is not like real life, where if you attached horns to someones feet you will hear them sooner because the horns are louder than footfalls. It has to do with the distance between the player than the actor that is making the sound effect turn on or off.

If anything, making the footfall sounds louder would make it so the persons who is attempting to cheat will be disoriented as to how far away the sound is, and what direction it is coming from.

I was part of the "Jungle warfare" mapping team for the ut2003 mod, one of the gimmicks the teamleasder wanted to add is the ability to hear much more than with the stock ut2003 sound system... So our team leader turned up all the footfall,gunshot, and jump sounds , and set the sound trigger radius's twice that of ut2003.

It sounds like a really cool idea, but in all reality, it made the game confusing as hell . It felt like there was some major bugs with the sound system.It gave absolutely no advantages, if anything it was a dis-advantage because of all the confusion, and disorientation it created.

well, as you can probably tell by me saying UT2003, that the mod did not even last 1 year, until ut2004 was release. Funny too, we thought we where going to win the make something unreal contest, we where up against Red Orchestra , which as some of you know not only won the prize, but got a commercial game contract.

[bokko]

Are you arguing just for the sake of arguing?

You don't seem to know what the doppler effect is.

I never stated sounds would go off earlier if they were louder, where is the logic in a statement like that? Sounds made louder would be easier to distinguish, are you honestly trying to argue against that? You are obviously being confused here, so imagine all the superfluous sounds such as explosions being toned down, it would be easier to pick up the other sounds that are unaffected or optimised.

Why would increasing the volume of a sound make it sound like it's coming from a different direction?