Battle sounds missing/incomplete?

[KnuckleHead]

I realize this is early access so not a complaint, but wondering if the battle FX is missing/incomplete or if maybe I have an issue on my computer? Basically seems like most of the sound FX for battles (attacking, moving, etc) are missing their sounds.

[Martin]

I noticed there were no sounds for the new units when having animation speed set to high.
Turns out that the game uses two different sounds (one normal, and one sped up) for units depending on your animation speed setting.
The new units don't have any fastanim folder with sped-up sound files so thus they don't play on high animation speed setting, I reckon they must have simply forgotten to make it, because it's literally a 2min fix to batch speed-up copies of the sound files in Audacity and putting them in a fastanim subfolder like this: http://i.imgur.com/FJ2tPl6.png

There's still the problem where random sound effects stop playing after having played for a while (fixes itself when restarting the game), trying to figure out how to fix that currently.

[Makesito]

Originally posted by Martin:

I noticed there were no sounds for the new units when having animation speed set to high.
Turns out that the game uses two different sounds (one normal, and one sped up) for units depending on your animation speed setting.
The new units don't have any fastanim folder with sped-up sound files so thus they don't play on high animation speed setting, I reckon they must have simply forgotten to make it, because it's literally a 2min fix to batch speed-up copies of the sound files in Audacity and putting them in a fastanim subfolder like this: http://i.imgur.com/FJ2tPl6.png

There's still the problem where random sound effects stop playing after having played for a while (fixes itself when restarting the game), trying to figure out how to fix that currently.

Wait, what did you do exactly to fix that?

[Martin]

Originally posted by ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ & ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ / ♥♥♥♥♥.:

Wait, what did you do exactly to fix that?

Went into :\Steam\steamapps\common\Darkside\data\sounds\darkside folder.
Copied all the sound files in that folder, created a new folder inside that folder called "fastanim" and pasted the copies in there.
Then I opened Audacity (free audio editing software), dragged all the audio files from fastanim folder into it, clicked effect - change speed, increased speed by about 30% or so.
Clicked file - export multiple into the fastanim folder with overwrite existing selected, format: Waw 16-bit, clicked export button and held down a enter for a moment. Done.

[Makesito]

Originally posted by Martin:

Originally posted by ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ & ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ / ♥♥♥♥♥.:

Wait, what did you do exactly to fix that?

Went into :\Steam\steamapps\common\Darkside\data\sounds\darkside folder.
Copied all the sound files in that folder, created a new folder inside that folder called "fastanim" and pasted the copies in there.
Then I opened Audacity (free audio editing software), dragged all the audio files from fastanim folder into it, clicked effect - change speed, increased speed by about 30% or so.
Clicked file - export multiple into the fastanim folder with overwrite existing selected, format: Waw 16-bit, clicked export button and held down a enter for a moment. Done.

I did it, but it doesn't make much sense, where are the original sounds sped up? From where does the engine take them? Why does the game know that the folder fastanim (that didn't exist before), is the folder where it should take the sounds from? What about the unsorted folder? What about the magic? Only 6 files are in fastanim in the magic folder.

I swear to God, these developers did a horrible, horrible job. At least the writing is fun. I miss the devs from AP and The Legend, thought Crossworlds was/is amazing.

Thanks for the help, kind stranger. love<3

[Martin]

Originally posted by ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ & ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ / ♥♥♥♥♥.:

I did it, but it doesn't make much sense, where are the original sounds sped up? From where does the engine take them? Why does the game know that the folder fastanim (that didn't exist before), is the folder where it should take the sounds from? What about the unsorted folder? What about the magic? Only 6 files are in fastanim in the magic folder.

I swear to God, these developers did a horrible, horrible job. At least the writing is fun. I miss the devs from AP and The Legend, thought Crossworlds was/is amazing.

Thanks for the help, kind stranger. love<3

Aye there's definately some strange jank in these games, I saw most of the older units in the "sounds/chesspiece" subfolders where they had fastanim folders with them, so I figured: eh, why not give it a try.
There's probably some code somewhere for what needs to have a file duplicate depending on anim speed and whatnot, but yeah lots stuff appear to be leftovers from previous games too.

I do like how open they are to mess around with though, currently I'm porting over the experience system from Warriors of the North, although it's a bit slow as I pretty much just add a unit and test it whenever I grab a new one.

Another odd thing I encountered the other day as I was messing about with some textures was that Neoline's model doesn't use her specular mask, trying to figure out why no changes made to her specular mask or vsmp had any effect on her textures dullness, I eventually found that she has 3 duplicate .bma models with different names that don't appear to be used, so in an act of 'why not' I renamed those 3 model files with those that game actually uses, and voila. Spec mask suddenly worked lol.
The default specmask didn't look very good though, maybe that's why they tossed it, I've no idea.
I made a quick custom one that looked a lot better than having none imo, comparison: http://i.imgur.com/60L5Pkw.png

Aye, Crossworlds and the others were nice. I think I've liked them all so far. Dark side feels the most unfinished to me though.

No probs, happy to help.

[Makesito]

Originally posted by Martin:

Originally posted by ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ & ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ / ♥♥♥♥♥.:

I did it, but it doesn't make much sense, where are the original sounds sped up? From where does the engine take them? Why does the game know that the folder fastanim (that didn't exist before), is the folder where it should take the sounds from? What about the unsorted folder? What about the magic? Only 6 files are in fastanim in the magic folder.

I swear to God, these developers did a horrible, horrible job. At least the writing is fun. I miss the devs from AP and The Legend, thought Crossworlds was/is amazing.

Thanks for the help, kind stranger. love<3

Aye there's definately some strange jank in these games, I saw most of the older units in the "sounds/chesspiece" subfolders where they had fastanim folders with them, so I figured: eh, why not give it a try.
There's probably some code somewhere for what needs to have a file duplicate depending on anim speed and whatnot, but yeah lots stuff appear to be leftovers from previous games too.

I do like how open they are to mess around with though, currently I'm porting over the experience system from Warriors of the North, although it's a bit slow as I pretty much just add a unit and test it whenever I grab a new one.

Another odd thing I encountered the other day as I was messing about with some textures was that Neoline's model doesn't use her specular mask, trying to figure out why no changes made to her specular mask or vsmp had any effect on her textures dullness, I eventually found that she has 3 duplicate .bma models with different names that don't appear to be used, so in an act of 'why not' I renamed those 3 model files with those that game actually uses, and voila. Spec mask suddenly worked lol.
The default specmask didn't look very good though, maybe that's why they tossed it, I've no idea.
I made a quick custom one that looked a lot better than having none imo, comparison: http://i.imgur.com/60L5Pkw.png

Aye, Crossworlds and the others were nice. I think I've liked them all so far. Dark side feels the most unfinished to me though.

No probs, happy to help.

Man, your mask looks waaay better than without.

Honestly, I'm kinda saddened that you're "working" on this game more than the developvers (seemingly). Do you have any other trick to improve the game? I'd love it!

I didn't dislike any king's bounty yet, but I have yet to finish WOTN and Darkside, so we'll see. The new units in Darkside seems pretty nice.

Now, optimization is..really, really bad. Everything maxed at 1080p grants me 44FPS on a GTX770/i5 4670k/8GB RAM. I can play GTA V on high settings @60fps. It's a bit ridiculous.

I had to turn shadows and anistropic filtering down, I didn't really want to see the textures quality go down.

ty for the answer<3

[Makesito]

So many sounds are missing. My character doesn't make any sound with or without horse, most magic sounds work 50% of the time only, same thing happens with the archers/priests.

I'm really considering leaving the game, this is really a mess. I consider the FX to be very important in my gaming sessions :(

[Makesito]

Do you think I should stop playing this game and start the viking one? is it more polished? :/

[Martin]

For tricks to improve the game, it would depend a lot on what you consider improvements, I think of it much like Skyrim with mods: Think of something you would like or don't like? Then there's probably a mod or a change to find or do yourself, like tweaking unit stats is very easy by just dragging their .atom out of the data/ses.kfs changing it with a text editor. You can change pretty much anything in the game, except making new models/animations because of their obscure file format.
Like yesterday I decided to do something about the dialogue windows as I never liked them being in the top left, so I changed them to be in the center, I also find the army shop mod almost essential for my enjoyment. Not everyone would think of such changes and a ton of other ones as improvements though.

I couldn't really say anything about the performance as I'm playing it in 4k max with shadow res customly set to 4096 in darkside game.ini in /my documents, which is higher than the default highest. And it rarely drops below 100fps for me. I do have a Gtx980ti though.
Still, the previous games were capping out my Gsync monitors refresh rate pretty much constantly so I reckon it runs worse than the previous titles though. 40ish fps on a 770 at 1080p in this game does sound odd though.

I haven't really come across any more missing sounds yet after the fastanim fix, except for when some battle sounds randomly stop playing during a session (which can affect any unit), which I was troubleshooting, but then I got sidetracked by other stuff.

In C:\Steam\steamapps\common\Darkside\data there is a default.ini file with a sound section of settings that you can try changing the values of, which is what I was doing but I haven't played long enough in one session since then to encounter missing sounds, so I cant confirm or deny those as a fix yet.
What mine looks like atm:

# software sound (0/1)
setf ~cl_swsound 0
setf ~cl_volume_master 1
# "music" volume
setf ~cl_volume_music 1
# "voice", "effects_3d" volume
setf ~cl_volume_effects 0
# "ui" volume
setf ~cl_volume_ui 1
# enable sounds (0/1)
setf ~cl_sound 1
setf ~cl_sound_module 1
# FSOUND_3D_SetDistanceFactor
setf ~cl_sound_factor 1.0
# FSOUND_3D_SetRolloffFactor
setf ~cl_sound_rolloff 1.0

Do the sounds return after restarting the game for you? just to confirm it's the same issue. The walking sound is very low compared to the horse gallopping also I noticed, and lowered the galloping in another file.
There are some other possible files to have a look at after that as well, but everything in order.

Aye I would say Wotn is more polished gamewise, it also has the unit exp system with the Ice and fire dlc, which I like a lot as I'm making it work in Dark side. I didn't have any sound issues with it either.
The dialogue has possibly the most typos and grammar errors of the series though, but if you tolerated that in the previous two games it's no problem.
Funnily enough, Dark Side seems to be the most polished in terms of dialogue.

It's up to you, I can update you on the sound issue whenever I got it sorted.

[Makesito]

Originally posted by Martin:

For tricks to improve the game, it would depend a lot on what you consider improvements, I think of it much like Skyrim with mods: Think of something you would like or don't like? Then there's probably a mod or a change to find or do yourself, like tweaking unit stats is very easy by just dragging their .atom out of the data/ses.kfs changing it with a text editor. You can change pretty much anything in the game, except making new models/animations because of their obscure file format.
Like yesterday I decided to do something about the dialogue windows as I never liked them being in the top left, so I changed them to be in the center, I also find the army shop mod almost essential for my enjoyment. Not everyone would think of such changes and a ton of other ones as improvements though.

I couldn't really say anything about the performance as I'm playing it in 4k max with shadow res customly set to 4096 in darkside game.ini in /my documents, which is higher than the default highest. And it rarely drops below 100fps for me. I do have a Gtx980ti though.
Still, the previous games were capping out my Gsync monitors refresh rate pretty much constantly so I reckon it runs worse than the previous titles though. 40ish fps on a 770 at 1080p in this game does sound odd though.

I haven't really come across any more missing sounds yet after the fastanim fix, except for when some battle sounds randomly stop playing during a session (which can affect any unit), which I was troubleshooting, but then I got sidetracked by other stuff.

In C:\Steam\steamapps\common\Darkside\data there is a default.ini file with a sound section of settings that you can try changing the values of, which is what I was doing but I haven't played long enough in one session since then to encounter missing sounds, so I cant confirm or deny those as a fix yet.
What mine looks like atm:

# software sound (0/1)
setf ~cl_swsound 0
setf ~cl_volume_master 1
# "music" volume
setf ~cl_volume_music 1
# "voice", "effects_3d" volume
setf ~cl_volume_effects 0
# "ui" volume
setf ~cl_volume_ui 1
# enable sounds (0/1)
setf ~cl_sound 1
setf ~cl_sound_module 1
# FSOUND_3D_SetDistanceFactor
setf ~cl_sound_factor 1.0
# FSOUND_3D_SetRolloffFactor
setf ~cl_sound_rolloff 1.0

Do the sounds return after restarting the game for you? just to confirm it's the same issue. The walking sound is very low compared to the horse gallopping also I noticed, and lowered the galloping in another file.
There are some other possible files to have a look at after that as well, but everything in order.

Aye I would say Wotn is more polished gamewise, it also has the unit exp system with the Ice and fire dlc, which I like a lot as I'm making it work in Dark side. I didn't have any sound issues with it either.
The dialogue has possibly the most typos and grammar errors of the series though, but if you tolerated that in the previous two games it's no problem.
Funnily enough, Dark Side seems to be the most polished in terms of dialogue.

It's up to you, I can update you on the sound issue whenever I got it sorted.

Thanks for the helpful answer! my default.ini file had different values:

# software sound (0/1)
setf ~cl_swsound 1

setf ~cl_volume_master 0

# "music" volume
setf ~cl_volume_music 0

# "voice", "effects_3d" volume
setf ~cl_volume_effects 1

# "ui" volume
setf ~cl_volume_ui 1

# enable sounds (0/1)
setf ~cl_sound 1
setf ~cl_sound_module 1


# FSOUND_3D_SetDistanceFactor
setf ~cl_sound_factor 1.0

# FSOUND_3D_SetRolloffFactor
setf ~cl_sound_rolloff 1.0


I'm going to put it just like yours.

Also, at the bottom there's
# Integer parameter
setf ~cl_force_soundcard -1

I do have a soundcard, but I had no idea -1 was there. Apparently this option is for people with different sound cards, but I only have one. What. So in other king's bounty's the ini file was like this:

# Integer parameter
setf ~cl_force_soundcard -0


Umh. I'll see if it works or not tonight.

And I didn't even bother restarting the game, I was just exhausted after a day working and I decided to roll with it, but it became unbearable after reaching the first island of the game, in which I'm asked to kill 3 different heroes. Ijust stopped playing.

If the sound problem is fixed with this, I'm gonna love you and keep playing, if it isn't fixed, I'll still love you but start the viking one.

Thanks again for your answer, I readed every bit of it :p

[Makesito]

My game.ini file has this:

setf ~r_anim_speed 0

Why is it at 0? I have it at fast speed in-game. wtf

[Makesito]

in Crossworld's ini I had this: setf ~r_anim_speed 1

[Martin]

The values are different as I changed them, I had the same as yours at first.

Oh bear in mind that there are two game.ini files. Default in the game folder, and your custom one in C:\Users\Martins\Documents\My Games\Kings Bounty The Dark Side which have it set at 1.

I wouldn't change that setf ~cl_force_soundcard -1, due to -1 most likely meaning automatic.
That and there's a note above saying no need to change lol.

[Makesito]

Originally posted by Martin:

The values are different as I changed them, I had the same as yours at first.

Oh bear in mind that there are two game.ini files. Default in the game folder, and your custom one in C:\Users\Martins\Documents\My Games\Kings Bounty The Dark Side which have it set at 1.

I wouldn't change that setf ~cl_force_soundcard -1, due to -1 most likely meaning automatic.
That and there's a note above saying no need to change lol.

Lol, I already changed the one in documents.

Anywho, I decided to try the game after all my changes and it runs perfectly now. Protagonist makes sound, every sound is in the game, everything works perfectly!

Except, there's no fast animation. I'm too scared at this point of changing anything, so I'll just leave it like this I guess haha.

Thanks <3

[Martin]

Oh I meant that if the game.ini in your game folder has setf ~r_anim_speed 0 , that is correct as its the default settings (before your custom game.ini is generated in /my documents), but your game.ini in my documents should have have 1 if it's set to high ingame.
The game.ini in the game folder you can pretty much ignore afaik.

Don't be afeared, if you change the animspeed ingame it's the only thing that will change.

Could you do me a favor and test setting :
# "voice", "effects_3d" volume
setf ~cl_volume_effects 0

to

# "voice", "effects_3d" volume
setf ~cl_volume_effects 1

as it does sound nicer with that on, and to see if maybe it's only the first software sound setting that needs to be 0.