Expanding the sound system

[mr.master]

Hey all! I've been going through the idea of expanding the sound system a bit more further. Not something big though. Some of you know, weapon specific death sounds are possible, and where made few years back.

http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,153564.msg3688205.html#msg3688205

But what I'm looking to expand it a bit further. Weapon specific hit/damage sounds, individual body fall sounds (Armored, not armored), individual walking sounds, dependant on what you wear (Heavy/light armour, no armour) etc.

Would this in theory, be possible? I haven't played around with the ms for ages, so I'm looking some advice from those who have and know better.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

It would be possible but it'd be laggy as hell, and the results would be underwhelming because you'd be relying on clunky workarounds.

1. Weapon-specific sounds already exist in native, but they're grouped into damage type (blunt or not) and how much damage is done in proportion to the weapon's full potential.
You could potentially add a trigger that plays a sound when a weapon hits an agent and use the parameters to define the sound (ti_on_agent_hit), but you'd potentially "lose" a lot of other sounds: there's a cripplingly low engine limit to how many sounds can play at once, and since you'd be playing your own sounds over the hardcoded ones, that's double the sounds. The result would be silence whenever fighting starts.

2. Individual body fall sounds are impossible since the crumpling you hear normally is tied to when the character skeleton hits the ground. Unfortunately this is inaccessible via the module system.

3. Individual walking sounds are probably the easiest, but they'd cause some deal of lag and wouldn't sound very good. You'd have to set a trigger that checks if a troop is marching or not, possibly every frame, and cycling through each agent via a global variable to prevent lag (i can tell you how to do this if you want), and giving them a walking sound if they're moving. The problem with this is that agent_id's usually go from left to right in a formation, so for moderately complex reasons you'd hear a rapid crescendo of footsteps moving up and down your army which would be quite silly. Also for the same reasons as in 1, you'd get a lot of silence.