Recently I've been making a load of new sound effects for a project I'm working on, except I've been creating them in audacity with 44khz project rate. Evidently all sounds need to be converted to 22khz in order to properly work in Halo. The change does not seem noticeable on voice acting clips and other ambient character sounds, however other sound effects like guns and impact sounds are drastically dampened which is discouraging considering so much effort has been put in to make these specific sounds play a certain way. Are 44khz sounds entirely out of the question? Has anyone been able to successfully have 44khz sounds work in-game or am I just going to have to deal with having the quality of my new sound effects severely botched?

the only thing I make 22khz is dialog, sometime I don't even do that.
I can compile 44khz just fine as long as I compile everything using ogg compression.

tool sounds <stuff> ogg 128000
regardless of what the file is I always put 128000. Not sure where I got the habit but I do that.

^ it says 44khz
Edited by Spiral on Sep 26, 2014 at 04:47 PM

take look at this map it dose use 44k sounds and you may see y I stop using 44 k sounds

http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=6741
Edited by DOOM899 on Oct 4, 2014 at 07:38 PM

You're actually suppose to put music and some other sounds at 44khz. Dialog remains at 22khz.

Just render out your sound stereo 44khz and it should work. I've done it before.

Never make gun sounds stereo.

always make them stereo just out of spite

Well that's awfully convenient. I have ~51 sounds ready to import into Halo (nothing longer than 6 seconds so I haven't gotten into splitting long sounds into permutations yet) however I have just about no idea how to get them to work in Halo, or what the limitations of the engine are. This is why I had somebody else do compiling for me, but evidently he needed a virtual machine and could only compile at 22khz. Thankfully 44khz is totally doable, because anything else would kill the quality of the sound effects I've been working on. I figured it would be best to learn how to do this myself, so I'll have a lot of questions.

a) What is wrong with stereo gun sounds? I converted some to mono just to see what it would sound like, and they no longer feel overpowering. I haven't successfully compiled a sound myself yet so I don't know what exactly happens.

b) Could I get a simple basic tutorial regarding getting sounds into Halo? I've tried the tool command 'tool sounds "insert directory here" ogg 1' but I don't get "compressing..." in tool and when I open up the newly created sound tag in Kornmann's Guerilla no permutations were created and no sound actually plays. I was compiling 44khz 16 bit sounds, and I tried both mono and stereo.

c) What's the difference between OGG sounds and Xbox ADPCM sounds? I don't plan on converting any of my maps to be playable on an original xbox, but this is a new ballpark for me and I'd like to know what I'm dealing with.

Thanks so much for the help.

You can have mono with Ogg sounds. I've only had it crash when the sound is 44 kHz. It seems to work fine with 22 kHz.

For me it crashes with 22 kHz too.

Oh well... I guess it just happens to me then.

when I compile 44k mono sounds for use with weapons they never play :/
Edited by Maiku3 on Oct 12, 2014 at 08:03 PM

Tried compiling sounds again. got this:




wot

lel good luck with that.

Tools bitchy errors tho.

Try this http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=1632

I installed the 4 new DLLs that altis provided.

So now I'm in the same boat as Maiku. I successfully compiled 5 44khz sounds through tool (EEEEEEEE thanks guys) except only stereo sounds will play in-game even though I can listen to mono sounds in guerilla (so I know the sound data is there.) Also I noticed at a distance the sounds get pretty @$#!ed up. For example I have a 22khz mono gun sound that sounds fine in repetition up close, where at a distance the sound starts to skip. The same happens with a 44khz stereo gun sound (don't crucify me altis I'm experimenting, and 44khz only plays at stereo ATM). Both sounds have near fade value at 6 and far fade value at 45.

The goal here is to have working 44khz sounds (mono or stereo, mono seems to be the better option?) that function correctly at various distances.

Next step? Am I still doing something wrong?

Is there any particular disadvantage to using .ogg encoding for weapon firing sounds? I've been using it for a couple of different sounds I'm working on, and haven't encountered any problems thus far, but I know the Blam sound engine can be pretty fussy at times.



Blam gets pretty fussy about playing 44khz sounds positionally for some reason. I've had the exact same trouble, and it's a bit of a nightmare, but as far as I'm aware, it's a hard limit.
Easiest workaround I have found is that Reaper does some pretty accurate downsampling. What I did was take my 44khz stereo sounds and bounce them down to 22khz mono, and the difference is practically inaudible if you select a high enough resample mode.
Edited by beaucephal on Oct 18, 2014 at 05:01 PM

I've found that generally judicious use of the quality setting means I can keep Vorbis-encoded sounds at roughly the same filesize as those of their ADPCM-encoded counterparts. But yeah, thanks for clearing that up. I'm mainly avoiding using ADPCM as I'm on a Windows 7 machine just now, but I suppose I can always switch to using a Windows XP VM and re-encode if I start encountering trouble with dropouts. Cheers!
Edited by beaucephal on Oct 26, 2014 at 02:48 PM

And a NEW problem arises- permutations!

So I've been compiling some sounds at 22khz mono for simple things like bullet flybys and impact sounds, and compiling went fine. I also have some 44khz sounds that sparky managed to compile for me, and I'm super thankful for that.

However, I typically have 4 permutations for each sound, and Halo's sound engine seems to only want to use half, regardless if I'm using 22khz or 44khz. For example, if I have 4 permutations in the sound tag, Halo will only choose between the first two. If I have 2 permutations, it will only play the first, and if I have 3 permutations, it will only play the first, etc. I've been trying to experiment with the only TWO values in the sound tag, skip fraction and gain, to try and make it so each permutation has an equal chance of being played. I think a janky workaround would be to double the amount of permutations in the sound tag with empty blank permutations, but I feel like this would be a huge waste of space and something would go wrong in the long run.

Any advice?

For every permutation try setting the skip fracture to 0 and gain to 1.

Tried that, didn't change anything. However, I found the problem, but have yet to solve it completely. Halo's engine only chooses the first half of the permutations if the sound tag is a weapon_fire class or projectile_detonation class. I changed the sound tag to unit_dialog and the permutations work flawlessly, with the gain and skip fraction set to 0. However, the sound is slightly muffled because of how Halo's sound engine juggles sounds. Also, these sounds are for a singleplayer map, so I wonder how changing the sound's class will affect the AI. If it really matters, I could try playing the gun firing sounds with a new class (dialogue) and another inaudible-to-the-player sound as a weapon firing class which would get the attention of the AI.

If there is any other workaround anyone knows of it would be appreciated.