Atmospheric Sound Effects 3.0 Update 4

Atmospheric Sound Effects 3.0
Created by Duncan

Contents

> Description
> Installation
> Acknowledgements
> Removing the plugin
> Cleaning a savegame (for users of previous versions)
> Compatibility
> New in version 3.0
> Miscellaneous notes
> Don't like a specific sound?
> Default ini entries
> List of reference objects

Description

> This mod adds over 220 sound effects to the entire land of Vvardenfell. There are 13,621 emission points in exterior locations, 283 points in taverns for sound effects, 20 for music, and 180 inside Daedric shrines. Most sounds are randomly picked, play at random time intervals, and are controlled by weather conditions and day/night cycles.
> In swampy areas, at night, you'll hear crickets only when it's clear or cloudy. Frogs ribbit in all but thunder, ash, or blight storms. Three types of owls hide in thunder, ash, or blight storms, while three more types of owls come out only in clear or cloudy conditions. During the day, you'll hear a wide assortment of swampy sounds, 26 in all with 5 random pitch variations each, coming from the ground and trees.
> Other regions have a similar setup but with their own unique sounds.

Installation

1. Extract ase30.exe, a self-extracting ace archive, to your Morrowind data files folder. There are no files that are over-written.
2. Use the Morrowind Launcher and select the plugin to load. Either AtmosphericSoundEffects-3.0.esp if you don't have Tribunal installed or AtmosphericSoundEffects-3.0-Tribunal.esp if you do have Tribunal installed.
3. Backup morrowind.ini, located in the root installation folder of Morrowind by making copy of it and rename it to morrowind-pre-ase30.ini.
4. Backup your savegame.
5. Open morrowind.ini, and change the following entries to read:

   > `[Water]
   > NearWaterOutdoorID=_ase_water layer
   > [Weather]
   > Minimum Time Between Environmental Sounds=5.0
   > Maximum Time Between Environmental Sounds=15.0
   > [Weather Clear]
   > Ambient Loop Sound ID=_ase_clear loop01
   > [Weather Cloudy]
   > Ambient Loop Sound ID=_ase_cloudy loop01
   > [Weather Foggy]
   > Ambient Loop Sound ID=_ase_foggy loop01
   > [Weather Overcast]
   > Ambient Loop Sound ID=_ase_overcast loop01
   > [Weather Rain]
   > Rain Loop Sound ID=_ase_rain
   > Ambient Loop Sound ID=_ase_rain loop01
   > [Weather Thunderstorm]
   > Thunder Sound ID 0=_ase_thunder01
   > Thunder Sound ID 1=_ase_thunder02
   > Thunder Sound ID 2=_ase_thunder03
   > Thunder Sound ID 3=_ase_thunder04
   > Rain Loop Sound ID=_ase_rain heavy
   > Ambient Loop Sound ID=_ase_thunder loop01
   > [Weather Ashstorm]
   > Ambient Loop Sound ID=_ase_ashstorm loop01
   > [Weather Blight]
   > Ambient Loop Sound ID=_ase_blight loop01`

Acknowledgements

- Thanks to all the people who provided feedback for this version on the official Morrowind forums. Many of the ideas I would not have thought of myself. The feedback thread is titled Looking for feedback to improve next version of Atmospheric Sound Effects and is located in the Morrowind Mods forum.
- Here are the credits for the music in taverns. You can also find a playlist, on the bar counter, in each of the taverns that has music.
  1. Taverne, by Kirill Pokrovsky, http://www.kirillpokrovsky.com, from the game Divine Divinity, http://www.larian.com. `(sound\_ase_\tavernmusic01.wav)`
  2. Smolder, by Mark Morgan and Richard Band, from the game Planescape Torment, http://www.planescape-torment.com. `(sound\_ase_\tavernmusic02.wav)`
  3. mus_tavern3, by Jeremy Soule, http://www.jeremysoule.com, from the game Neverwinter Nights, http://nwn.bioware.com. `(sound\_ase_\tavernmusic03.wav)`
  4. Tavern Mountain Dulcimer, by Michael Futreal, http://www.runtimesound.com. `(sound\_ase_\tavernmusic04.wav)`
  5. Track15, by Kirill Pokrovsky, http://www.kirillpokrovsky.com, from the game Divine Divinity, http://www.larian.com. `(sound\_ase_\tavernmusic05.wav)`
  6. Track26, by Kirill Pokrovsky, http://www.kirillpokrovsky.com, from the game Divine Divinity, http://www.larian.com. `(sound\_ase_\tavernmusic06.wav)`
  7. PubTune, by George Oldziey, http://www.oldzieymusic.com, from the game Ultima IX: Ascension, http://www.ultima-ascension.com. `(sound\_ase_\tavernmusic07.wav)`
  8. Tavern Song II, by Balaghan, © B. Kahlen, http://www.beat-stomper.com, `(sound\_ase_\tavernmusic08.wav)`
  9. Tav1a, by Michael Hoenig (Metamusic Productions), from the game Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, http://www.bioware.com. `(sound\_ase_\tavernmusic09.wav)`
  10. Tav2a, by Michael Hoenig (Metamusic Productions), from the game Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, http://www.bioware.com. `(sound\_ase_\tavernmusic10.wav)`
  11. Tav3a, by Michael Hoenig (Metamusic Productions), from the game Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, http://www.bioware.com. `(sound\_ase_\tavernmusic11.wav)`
  12. Tav4a, by Michael Hoenig (Metamusic Productions), from the game Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, http://www.bioware.com. `(sound\_ase_\tavernmusic12.wav)`
- There are too many sounds in this mod to credit each sound effect individually. Some of the sounds I got from other games, some from the web, and some I made myself. If you want to use any of the sound effects in this package for whatever reason, except to make money, I have no problem with that.

Removing the plugin

1. Look in the data files folder for a file called ase30-uninstall.bat and run it.
2. Delete ase30-uninstall.bat.
3. Delete morrowind.ini (only if you made a copy of it when you installed the plugin).
4. Rename morrowind-pre-ase30.ini to morrowind.ini or change the morrowind.ini entries back to their defaults.

Cleaning a savegame (for users of previous versions)

> Sometimes, a savegame can become unclean from a plugin. This can lead to some strange errors and occurrences ingame. This applies to many plugins available.
> Note that if you have a savegame that has been used with a previous version of ASE and you want to use version 3.0 with it, you should clean your savegame.
> So, if you're experiencing problems, and not necessarily with ASE, here are some instructions for cleaning a savegame quickly and easily.

1. Open morrowind.ini, located in the root installation folder of Morrowind, in whatever text editor you use.
2. Add the following line anywhere under the `[General]` section: `AllowYesToAll=1`
3. Save the modified morrowind.ini.
4. Use the Morrowind Launcher and select Data Files.
5. Deselect all plugins you want a savegame cleaned of.
6. Run Morrowind.
7. Load the savegame you want cleaned.
8. When given the choice, select the Yes To All button.
9. Once the game is loaded, re-save. The savegame is now cleaned of whatever plugins you deselected in step 4.

Compatibility

- There are some plugins that have conflicting sound entries, but technically there is no problem with this. The newer plugin will override the older one. For example, Morrowind Sound Enhancements has some conflicting sound entries. By default, ASE is the newer plugin file so any conflicting entries will be over-ridden by ASE and will therefore not be heard from MSE. If you want the opposite to be true, just load MSE in the construction set and re-save it. Now any conflicting entries will be overridden by MSE.
- The official sound plugin, Bitter Coast Sounds, will work fine with this plugin. However, there really is no reason to use that plugin with ASE because the activators from BCS are used in ASE.
- Warning messages will occur if used with other plugins that alter certain default reference objects. These warnings might cause the game to crash, so you can either continue using this plugin and disable the conflicting one (first you have to find the conficting one), or you can disable this plugin. I'm sure there are some plugins that will conflict with this one because of this reason. How many there are I really don't know. My guess would be that the number is small because I have only received three reports with this conflict for version 2.1, which is also suseptible to this type of error.
  It's not easy and very time consuming to tell for certain if the object references in question in these mods are altered defaults (either intentionally or not; only the author would know) or added references. If they are added references, there shouldn't be a problem. Also, this type of conflict does not show up in the Plugin Conflict Detector up to and including version 0.30 RC5. I don't know about future versions of TESPCD.

New in version 3.0

- If an object is emitting sound, it will likely be randomly picked from 6 or more sounds and also be played at random time intervals.
- Each randomized sound is able to be individually controlled quite easily (on/off) by weather conditions.
- The following regions have separate day/night randomized sound schemes: Bitter Coast, Ascadian Isles, West Gash, and Grazelands. The remaining regions also have randomized sound schemes, but are the same for day and night.
- Added 193 more activators in taverns (173 for 40 unique randomized sounds and 20 for 12 randomized songs).
- Added 11 unique randomized sounds to Daedric ruins (also affects interior Daedric shrines), plus randomized pitch variations.
- Prefixed all changes in this plugin with _ase_ for ease of editing and seeing what has changed. This includes putting every sound file this plugin uses in a folder named _ase_. There are some exceptions to the _ase_ prefix for sound ids.
- Redid all of the region schemes to make them more unique for each region and only included effects that sound right during both day and night since there is no way to have separate day/night sounds in the region dialog. And in some regions, there are intentionally no sounds in this dialog.
- Changed the bubbling sound in swampy areas to a more murky sound, not as loud, and randomized by pitch.
- Added sounds to the hunger creature for left, right, moan, roar, scream, and land.
- New footstep sounds for the skeleton creature.
- New footstep sounds for the bonewalker creature.
- New sounds for the corpus stalker (left, right, and land).
- New sounds for flame, frost, and storm atronachs (left, right, and land).
- Touched up the cliff racer moan sound.
- Changed the default fire sound for larger fires (camfires and such).
- New cave wind sound.
- Removed unintentionally changed default references in interiors.
- Health Damage and Critical Hit sounds are back to the game defaults.
- All footstep sounds, except for certain creatures, are back to game defaults. The reason is some users have reported odd behavior with footstep sounds, so I chose not to touch these sounds.
- Changed the default land sound back to the game default, body fall medium. It was body fall large.
- New drowning and drowning damage sound.
- Changed the location of meshes\f\photodragons.nif to meshes\_ase_\photodragons.nif and textures\photodragon.tga to textures\_ase_pdragn.tga.
- Made an uninstall batch file for versions 1.2, 2.0, and 2.1.

Miscellaneous notes

- This plugin is fairly script intensive and as a result, I do notice a slight reduction in frame rate (2 or 3 fps reduction) in some areas and a little more in other areas (mostly the bitter coast region or areas with many trees that have transparant leaves. Note that the updates for this plugin fix this problem.). But the majority of locations I don't notice any slowdown. However, for locations that do have decreased performance, it is nothing drastic enough as to make the game unplayable. I'm actually amazed there isn't more of a frame rate reduction. I have the following system (not exactly state of the art by today's standards):

  > First generation Pentium IV 1.5GHz 256KB cache
  > 512MB RDRAM
  > GeForce3 TI200
  > First Generation SBLive Value
  > Windows XP Professional SP1
  > Four speaker setup with subwoofer

- If you use headphones, volumes of some sounds may seem too loud because I tweaked everything on a four speaker setup. If you're used to using headphones though (I'm not), everything may seem fine.
- If you're having volume problems in general, try messing around with the volume sliders in the Morrowind audio options.
- I made this mod and tweaked the volumes with hardware accelerated mode selected in the Morrowind audio options. Software mode really sounds crappy plus it seems to ignore min and max range values for certain sounds, such as footsteps and creature moans, roars, screams, etc.
- In Windows control panel for sounds and audio devices, make sure the acceleration slider for playback is either second from the right, or preferably, all the way to the right.
- There are some additional morrowind.ini entries you might want to mess around with. Some of them don't seem to work, while most I'm unsure what they do. Remember to always make a backup before you start messing around with stuff. All of the default values are listed.

  > `[Water]
  > NearWaterRadius=1000
  > ;not sure what this does
  > NearWaterPoints=8
  > ;not sure what this does
  > NearWaterUnderwaterFreq=0.3
  > ;pitch of sounds while underwater
  > NearWaterUnderwaterVolume=0.9
  > ;volume of sounds while underwater (seems to be ignored)
  > NearWaterIndoorTolerance=512.0
  > ;distance from indoor water before you hear it
  > NearWaterOutdoorTolerance=1024.0
  > ;distance from outdoor water before you hear it
  > NearWaterIndoorID=Water Layer
  > ;sadly, this seems to be ignored
  > [Weather Thunderstorm]
  > Thunder Frequency=.4
  > ;seems to control the frequency of thunder and lightning
  > Thunder Threshold=0.6
  > ;not sure what this does
  > Flash Decrement=4
  > ;not sure what this does`

- I recommend turning off any music while using this plugin. Obviously, you don't have to (there would be no technical problems), but you might not hear some of the weather dependent looping sounds and some of them may not sound too good with music playing. Additionally, the default game music will clash with the music this plugin plays in taverns.
- I have experienced a problem with the water sound not fading in or out only if I have Tribunal installed. I'm still not certain what causes this on my system, but one thing that may have fixed it is the following: In Windows control panel for sounds and audio devices I set the speaker arrangement to desktop stereo speakers. Then, in the Creative Surround Mixer, I set the speaker setup to four speakers. Speaking of sounds not fading in or out, the weather dependent looping sounds do not fade in or out if Tribunal is installed. Update: This turned out to be a bug with Tribunal and it is fixed with version 1.4.1313. However, version 3.0 without updates will not sound correct with version 1.4.1313.
- The reason I made a Tribunal and non-Tribunal version of this plugin is because many sound volumes seem to be processed differently. For example, if you were to run the tweaked non-Tribunal version while you have Tribunal installed, many sounds would be way too loud. But, if I were to make a non-Tribunal version without tweaking any volumes, and you loaded that plugin without Tribunal installed, many sounds would be way too quiet. Update: This turned out to be a bug with Tribunal and it is fixed with version 1.4.1313. However, version 3.0 without updates will not sound correct with version 1.4.1313.
- For those who look at the scripts and wonder why they are organized the way they are: if they are organized differently, they don't work. Update: Guess I was wrong here, because CoolDemon optimized these scripts. Further, the scripts could have been simplified a lot if only the pitch value for playloopsound3dvp could accept a variable. I would have used playsound3dvp, which would have made the scripting even simpler, but this function seems to ignore (or processes very strangely) the min and max range values for a sound. I made a note of this in the readme because the scripting language drives me nuts, as I'm sure it does a lot of other people.

Don't like a specific sound?

> I realize that this type of plugin is very subjective in nature. So there are bound to be sounds that some people won’t like. Here are some instructions to replace a sound or sounds you may not like with a blank wav file:
> 1. Take a look in data files\sound\_ase_. You will see many wav files.
> 2. Look at the filenames or listen to them with whatever media player you use until you find the sound you don’t like and make a note of the filename.
> 3. Delete the sound file you don’t like.
> 4. Make a copy of blank.wav located in data files\sound\_ase_.
> 5. Rename the copy you made of blank.wav to the filename you noted in step 2.
> 6. Repeat steps 2 through 5 for each sound you want to get rid of.

Default ini entries

> `[Water]
> NearWaterOutdoorID=Water Layer
> [Weather]
> Minimum Time Between Environmental Sounds=1.0
> Maximum Time Between Environmental Sounds=5.0
> [Weather Clear]
> Ambient Loop Sound ID=none
> [Weather Cloudy]
> Ambient Loop Sound ID=none
> [Weather Foggy]
> Ambient Loop Sound ID=none
> [Weather Overcast]
> Ambient Loop Sound ID=none
> [Weather Rain]
> Rain Loop Sound ID=Rain
> Ambient Loop Sound ID=none
> [Weather Thunderstorm]
> Thunder Sound ID 0=Thunder0
> Thunder Sound ID 1=Thunder1
> Thunder Sound ID 2=Thunder2
> Thunder Sound ID 3=Thunder3
> Rain Loop Sound ID=rain heavy
> Ambient Loop Sound ID=none
> [Weather Ashstorm]
> Ambient Loop Sound ID=ashstorm
> [Weather Blight]
> Ambient Loop Sound ID=ashstorm
> `

List of reference objects

> flora_tree_ai_03, flora_tree_ai_04, flora_tree_ai_05, flora_tree_ai_06, flora_tree_ai_02, flora_tree_wg_04, flora_tree_wg_02, flora_tree_wg_01, flora_tree_gl_01, flora_tree_gl_02, flora_tree_gl_03, flora_tree_gl_04, flora_tree_gl_05, flora_tree_gl_06, flora_tree_gl_07, flora_tree_gl_08, flora_tree_gl_09, flora_tree_gl_10, flora_tree_gl_11, flora_tree_wg_07, flora_tree_ai_01, flora_bc_tree_01, flora_bc_tree_02, flora_bc_tree_03, flora_bc_tree_04, flora_bc_tree_05, flora_bc_tree_12, flora_bc_tree_13, flora_bc_knee_01, flora_tree_wg_05, terrain_rock_ac_08, terrain_ashland_rock_02, terrain_ashland_rock_12, terrain_ashland_rock_04, flora_bc_knee_02, terrain_rocks_gl_01, terrain_rocks_ai_01, terrain_rocks_wg_02, terrain_rocks_wg_01, terrain_rocks_ai_03, terrain_rocks_ai_02, terrain_rocks_ai_04, flora_bc_knee_03, terrain_rock_bc_11, terrain_bc_scum_02, flora_bush_01, ex_dae_ruin_01, ex_dae_ruin_02, ex_dae_ruin_02_skew, ex_dae_ruin_03, ex_dae_ruin_04, ex_dae_ruin_04_skew_01, ex_dae_ruin_04_skew_02, ex_dae_ruin_platform_01, ex_dae_ruin_stair01_short, ex_dae_pillar_02_ruin_02, terrain_rocks_gl_03, flora_tree_wg_03, flora_ashtree_01, flora_ash_log_01, flora_ash_log_02, flora_ash_log_03, flora_ash_log_04, flora_trama_shrub_01, flora_trama_shrub_02, flora_trama_shrub_03, flora_trama_shrub_04, flora_trama_shrub_05, flora_trama_shrub_06, flora_ashtree_02, terrain_rock_ma_04, terrain_rock_ma_10, terrain_rock_ma_43, flora_tree_ac_01, flora_tree_ac_02, flora_tree_ac_03, flora_tree_ac_04, flora_bc_tree_08, terrain_rock_rm_15, ex_dae_pillar_02_ruin, terrain_rock_rm_07, terrain_ashland_rock_10, flora_t_podbud_03, ex_dae_wall_512_07, ex_dae_wall_512_08, ex_dae_wall_512_09, flora_ashtree_04, flora_emp_parasol_03