EpiQuake - New ORIGINAL HQ Sound and Music Pak

[seanstar]

Hello,

Tried this out today and it's pretty good, the sounds seem to fit nicely from what I've heard.

Nice work.

regards,

Sean

[Spirit]

When "ITS" was first released I d'loaded and played it, now... I didn't exactly care for it but did I rip it apart? Hell NO! Out of respect and admiration for sock, I just kept my opinion to myself. It would serve no good purpose to say what I actually think in as an honest opinion as you guys are showing rdmusic.

Trust me, sock wants you to rip it apart. Please leave him with feedback on what you liked and what not. He uses feedback to improve the quality of his mod.

-------

So this is not a perfect trolling attempt then?

In that case I will not waste my time on in-depth criticism of the inappropiate sounds but just say two things:

A) You increased the loudness of the sounds to insane levels. (Or is that the mysterious cinematic-ness?)

B) You have a lot of clipping. You should hear that on your amazing sound system or at least see it when looking at a waveform plot.

[rdmusic]

This wasn't meant to be trolling in the least... but rest assured after the elitist welcome here I'm not sure why the hell I'd ever feel the need to come back...so congrats, mission accomplished. You guys really truly know how to make a new contributor feel welcome. Had I posted this in the "works in progress" section, then all of this feedback would be welcome... but maybe you shouldn't always give (or feel the need to give) unsolicited advice / feedback unless the author requests it. Sometimes a project is what it is and an entire community giving advice isn't the best approach, especially when it comes to such subjective things as audio or level design.. too many chefs spoil the soup. A profound game designer once told me something you guys should really take to heart... a game is never done, it just ships.

The loudness is all part of proper sound design...and there is a huge difference between clipping and red lining. Clipping means the sounds distort... none of which do in this mod, red lining (which many game sounds do across many titles) simply means the sound was mastered slightly above 0 db.

Many of the games original sounds red line a bit and are super loud in an editor due to crazy amounts of hard limiting. You of all people should know that Spirit after your attempt at a sound mod.

And now a little unsolicited advice for you, You ALWAYS master weapon sounds as loud as possible.. and if quake had any sort of built in audio bus system then these sounds could be balanced a bit better.

I still say the sounds work extremely well within the context of the game.

lol.. isn't posting stuff on the web fun?

[Syluxguy28O3]

eh, just roll with the blows and keep on trucking. i mean, what did you expect?

[damage_inc]

Still on NIGHTMARE MODE... in the second episode... with my ole school Yamaha HTR-5450 paired with two Polk Audio floor standing speakers... CRANKED and loving it

I won't say it's "amazing sound system", but it delivers plenty for a PC video game I could imagine if I still had my sub, sadly it died and has since gone unreplaced

To put this all in perspective, I've PAID for games several times that didn't have this level of QUAILTY! That says it all regardless of personal critiques

[gdiddy62]

I have to say it is no wonder we have some members dropping from this forum with the way all of this so-called "feedback" is given. I see no value personally in the venomous way most express themselves here. It is childish the way many rip apart the efforts of others. If you don't like something, which is to be expected by some as we cannot expect to please all, then say so politely and just a simple "I prefer the classic look" or whatever will suffice. Why the attacks guys? Look at how many people have truly decided to hang it up due to this.

@rdmusic
Thank you for the effort, I appreciate the time and energy you gave. I will admit that I do not like all of your replacement sounds for my personal tastes, but it is NOT that hard to mix and match to get things the way I want them. I want you and any others who want to create to do exactly that. Syluxman has a point, roll with the punches and move on, no need to dwell on the negativity. I'm sorry your first experience here on this forum was so negative, but realize not all members are that way. I speak from my own experiences of sometimes speaking when I should have shut-up.

Regards

[Spirit]

Yeesh, chill out. You got more praise than criticism here. Your music tracks kick ass by the way.

If you release anything you are bound to get feedback. If you are not prepared to get negative feedback, then don't release stuff where people can comment. The world would be a boring mediocre place if people would not give feedback and creators learned from it.

I am always happy to learn things so why is red-lining used here? I only found mentions online when it was about DJs maxing out their systems and it was frowned upon. And why should weapon sounds be made as loud as possible?

My criticism on the loudness is that you did not emulate the loudness of the original sounds. That seems weird for a package that is meant as straight replacement of them. If you do not adjust it in comparison demonstrations, then it is just misleading.

edit: One petpeeve: You credit Trent Reznor where Nine Inch Nails should rather be credited.

[rdmusic]

All very good points, and you guys are all correct. Releasing anything on the internet for others to view / listen to is a tricky situation as not everyone can be happy.

As to your Questions Spirit, I'm delighted to answer them.

Red lining is really a slang term so you may not find too much formal info on it. Really any player related sounds are supposed to be as loud as possible (but not loud enough they distort)... heck, everything save for environmental sounds need to be mastered loud. This is really because when you deliver the sounds to the sound lead or audio programmer (whomever is implementing the audio) they can mix them within the game however they see fit. The last thing you want is the sound to NOT be loud enough which can make things impossible to mix which leads to a very unhappy client and revisions. This is especially true when doing audio for iOS / android games as those tinny on board speakers as well as the headphones much of the public is using dont project very well at all. Speaking of mixing, I mentioned seperate audio busses in game earlier... when mixing in game, ideally every sound would be put on it's own audio bus / volume control. So seperate volume controls for ambient, weapons, footsteps, breakables, dialogue, enemies, etc etc. so everything can be mixed and matched as desired. New audio engines (like Wwise) even allow for real time ducking so dialogue can be heard better during the game and in cutscenes. Pretty cool stuff. Quake has none of this... any of you crazy code minded peeps up to the challenge of implemnenting a real time volume control with a basic GUI into Quake? It'd be killer.

As for Reznor and crediting... well, actually... I worked for Id many moons ago and talked about this very thing with Carmack. Reznor was solely respoinsible for the sound design aspect of the game, and to my knowledge did it as a favor as he was such a huge Doom fan. The music is in fact credited to Reznor and NiN so you're spot on there. Another interesting tidbit some of you may not know, they brought Reznor back for Doom 3... but he was spending waaaaay to much time articulating / designing the sound for each room and requested a very large team to help him do so. Having a looming deadline (and not wanting to hire tons of other contractors), they had to let him go and eventually hired Ed Lima to complete the audio design. Crazy.

[lucky88shp]

Mind blowing! I am using Dolby Surround(Headphone Amp) and cheap gaming headphones(Creative Fatal1ty) and the ogre sound comparison, old vs new, just blew me away!! This is really gonna gimme a whole new experience in Quake! Really good job!! THANK YOU!!

EDIT: After trying this sound pack out, IMHO, this is just too awesome! It's like I am so tired of the old sounds that they sound like S#I@ compared to this! This with dolby surround enabled, is eargasm!!

EDIT 2: I just feel like the explosions from grenade and rocket launchers should sound a bit more powerful and loud. Currently its just too quiet!

[rdmusic]

Glad youre enjoying it Lucky! Yeah, I agree... the explosion sound needs to be louder. It's quite loud outside of the game and I think when played in game the falloff distance for the sound is too damn short.. hence the reason it sounds so muffled sometimes.

Speaking of, anyone know where in the code I could find values to control the volume and or falloff distance of specific sounds?

[LambentHammerBurst]

Great job
I will admit some of the sounds are way too out of place (for me). However some are just downright awesome and fit perfectly.
I will have to go through and keep the ones I like

[_Smith_]

anyone know where in the code I could find values to control the volume and or falloff distance of specific sounds?

Volume for each sound call is controlled by a float in the sound function call in QC.
Attenuation is the last value in the sound function call, the higher value the faster falloff, only four predefined values are used in original QC:
ATTN_NONE = 0; // full volume everywhere in the level, ATTN_NORM = 1; // normal, ATTN_IDLE = 2; ATTN_STATIC = 3;
Search for a sound filename in QC to find out how it is used.

When I look into the code, most of the sounds are called at a max volume, while a handful of ambience sounds at half volume, so they were actually mastered at desired relative loudness levels. This is why you should try to replicate relative loudness of original sounds and then eventually adjust them from that point, if you feel like it. Mastering the sounds to be as loud as possible to fully utilise available range and then allow game designers to do whatever they want with them, is a reasonable production pipeline, especially for outsourcing. It seems, this is not a pipeline Quake creators adhered to, though.

I've actually tried your sounds in game and while I definitely prefer originals, I have to admit that the pack is not as bad as videos made me think.
It is less tedious as on videos and loudness levels seem to be a bit different and more reasonable in game.
This makes wonder... Is it my negative bias ? Video compression ? Or, maybe you've made some adjustments since recording preview videos ?

BTW if someone is using epiQuake with Seven's SMC I recommend to remove shells sound files from SMC,
or in case of modified SMC from QHD, to disable shells sounds in autoexec.cfg

[rdmusic]

THANKS smith, all very good info! Lol, going to have to unlearn what I've been taught in regards to pipelines for future Quake sound work. Good to know.

It's the video compression via moddb for sure. The raw movie files sound great... but they definitely come across as muffled when viewed on moddb. A couple of the videos and the first part of the trailer feature an older version of the shotgun which wasn't nearly as big in sound as the current version.

[Spiney]

Some quick feedback:

+ soundtrack is pretty sweet, wish there was slightly more texture or granularity in the more orchestral parts, but really nice.
+ enemy sounds are great all around. Really nice.
+ weapons are mostly good, I'm really picky with those...
+ great work all around

- the check-for-pulse death sound on the enforcer is a great idea (why didn't I think of that?), but it sounds kind of invasive, maybe use a more 'neutral' scentence and a bit less distortion/bitcrushing on the computer voice? Maybe just a case of needing more variety in death sounds, don't know...
- there's some reverb/convolution on the monster sounds which sounds off when the environment doesn't support it. I really feel that should be an engine feature rather than being precomputed into the sounds.
- the shell-falling-to-the-floor sound is something a lot of replacement shotgun sounds use, but sounds unrealistic to me, since that should be positional based on the actual shell hitting the floor. But that might just be a pet peeve on my part, it does add something, I just think someone should mod in shell casing support
- computers are too loud imo
- the bleeping sound when elevators grind to a halt sounds off in non-base maps. It's also a little loud imo.
- super nail gun sounds weak?

I encountered some DirectQ specific issues:
* Shotgun sounds don't play, I tried converting to native quake format but it still doesn't work for some reason.
* Likewise DirectQ doesn't play .ogg, but I converted to mp3 and it runs fine now.
* You could just lump everything in a PAK3.PAK file and throw it into the folder (easier install)

I might suggest incorporating some of these into Schism (RemakeQuake mod), if you would be okay with that?

[_Smith_]

Both DirectQ and Quakespasm play .ogg without a problem for me, they go into id1\music\ folder.
We do have shell casings modded in, btw maybe you could cut out your casings sounds and release them also as different, short and separate shell-floor-tink sounds
Edit: Oh... Damned quakespasm plays music only if tracks are named track02.ogg etc, but not when track002.ogg, if not for z-fighting everywhere in DirectQ...