Description
So you though this was over? No, Dynamic Sounds still lives, now reborn from ashes like a Phoenix. Now better than ever. Always with carefully chosen high quality sounds, some edited myself.
Dynamic sounds is a soundbank based system that adds and replaces many many sounds to the game. All dynamically using Lua. This means:
- you can install and uninstall the mod mid game without breaking it
- you can easily add your own sounds to any object, creature or just add ambient sounds, with zero knowledge of Lua or the TES Construction Set. If you are familiar to Dynamic Music or S3maphore, you will be right at home with this mod.
- Future proof. Any mod using objects covered by Dynamic Sounds or areas with the same general name ("Foo Cave", "Bar Ancestral Tomb", "Zeta Grotto" and so on) will automatically get the corresponding sounds out of the box.
Features
The mod is separated in two components.
Ambient and Object Sounds
You can pretty much add object or ambient sounds to anything (with some small restrictions), but along the months (or years), i implemented many of them, so you already have an out of the box solution, supporting the base game and dlc's, Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel (and a couple of other mods). The current mod implements the following:
- City Exterior ambient sounds, with some differences depending on the faction: Church bells, chicken cluking, dogs barking for Imperial, exotic temple chimes and sword training to depict the militaristic and faith oriented Redoran and magic chimes for Telvanni.
- Unique house Interior ambient sounds, from temples to smiths, from fighter's guild weapon training sounds to the mages guild book reading and alchemy workingm Telvanni houses with random wood creaks, taverns, apothecaries, Forts and more.
- Door exterior sounds. When close to doors from outside, you will hear the corresponding ambient sounds. Mainly inns and smiths at the moment, but easily extensible to other types of houses.
- Unique ambient sounds outside populated areas, with different sounds depending on the region. From the ominous sounds of the Ashlands to the bogs of the Bitter Coast, to the summer lands of the Grazelands, you will hear various types of birds near trees, insects buzzing around mushrooms and crawling on the sones, seagulls on some areas, ice cracking on glaciers, quakes on the Red Mountain, rock rumbling, sand debris and much more.
- Unique dungeon and cave sounds. Demonic sounds on Daedra Shrines, eerie sounds on Ancestral Tombs, water drippings on Grottos, ambient sounds on caves, deep metal and electrical related ambient sounds on Dwemer Ruins, custom sounds for Fort Ruins, Ayleid ruins, water dripping and rats crawling on Sewers and mine picking and carts moving on Mines. Some dungeon exits will also have sounds, like wind blowing.
- Interior and exterior weather effects. Different interior raining sounds depending on the construction type (stone, wood or cloth). The volume of the sounds are also adjusted to reflect this. The same for thunders and wind. Also, when you get close to the windows, you will hear rain or snow (depending on the weather) hitting the windows. On sand storms you will hear sand hitting your armor. Outside, tents will also flap or produce a sound when raining.
- Day/Night cycle support. For instance, crickets, owls and wolfs at night, daytime birds during the day. Quieter cities at night.
- The little things count to immerse yourself. Many, many sounds added to objects. Flags and banners flapping, boats creak (as well as other wooden structures), cauldrons boiling water, silent water fountains are no longer silent, metal chains rattle, crystals and portals emit sounds, ice and fire ingredients, bellows animation sounds, kwama eggs, and so on.
Creature Sounds
A separate module (enabled by default) deals with the creature sounds. Here are some of the highlights:
- A soundbank that allows you to easily add or replace creature sounds on any or every animation.
- Annoyed that many creatures share the same footstep? No more! Dremora finally sound like they are walking with heavy armor, instead of the original "bare foot". Big creatures now have proper sounding footsteps.
- Cliff Racers now play a flapping sound when flapping their winds. Originally there was none.
- Many creatures now play an aware/aggro/battle sound. When a creature starts combat it will play that sound.
- Many creatures now have a breathing loop sound
- Some creatures, like ice and fire atronach will also play a ice cracking or fire sound even after dead, to reflect what the animation is doing.
- Some Dagoth Ur and Vivec animations now have sounds
- All in all, many, many creatures sounds were changed, including the ones from Tamriel Rebuilt, Project Tamriel and OAAB.
- The best part, you can extend this with no knowledge of Lua. You just need to know the creature id and, if necessary, the animation name (you can do that easily by opening TES-CS and selecting the creature).
Great for Newcomers and Previous users alike
For newcomers, i suggest you check the features above. For users that at some point were using Dynamic Sounds before the mod disappeared, i'm happy to say that during that time the mod was being optimized and updated, so this version suffered an heavy code refactor and is now much improved, performance wise. On normal circumstances, you should no longer get a 1-2 second freeze when crossing cells. If you still do, it only should be happening on heavily populated zones when visiting for the first time after loading the game. After that, the data is cached and you should have no issues.
Also,
all sounds are now in opus format for extreme reduced size at the same quality of the original wav files (from 237Mb to 57Mb). This theoretically means faster reading times and as consequence, much better performance loading the sounds.
And as always, i highly recommend you play around with the soundbanks and share your work. Improvement suggestions are also welcome.
TODO
- Improve city sounds (ideally, using dunmer mumblings instead of classic D&D town voices)
- Improve differences between cultures even more
- extend sounds based on biome instead of regions. This is already present on swap regions (playing swamp/tropical birds) and Solstheim playing tundra/snow birds, but it would be great to extend this
- finishing dungeon/caves exit sounds
- adding base sound replacement
- [Always WIP] tweaking sounds, frequency and volume
- [WIP] Adding more stuff
How to Install
Install like any other mod, but keep in mind that for performance reasons all sound files are inside a bsa archive.
This means you have to both enable dynamicsounds.bsa on the Archive Files section of the OpenMW launcher and enable DynamicSounds.omwscripts on the content files section.
