Looping sound that stays with player

[Baker]

I am trying to set up some triggers that play an ambient wav warning the player that some sort of danger is imminent. (I'm actually using this to limit player freedom to just go anywhere they want and if they ignore this ... kill them. Sure I could just centerprint a warning only but I'd rather freak out the player).

1. Now I am rather certain there is no way in standard Quake to have this play only for the player (and not other players). Not a problem. However, anyone know what extension (if any) can do a player only sound (no CSQC)?

2. Is there a way that the origin of the looping sound can move with the player in standard Quake? If not, what extension would allow such a thing?

I'd dig in QuakeC except ... well ... I'm not sure what mod has such a feature (if any).

[Spike]

stuffcmd("play foo/warning.wav\n");
many engines either have a play2 command, or directly modified the play command such that the sound follows the player (audio code already accepts some specific entity value to mean 'follow player').

[Baker]

Not on topic, but QuakeC would royally suck without fteqcc

I've been looking at Nexuiz source codes and I see div0 wrote most of his QuakeC sensibly Stock QuakeC without fteqcc is quite the bit of a mess.

[Spike]

still offtopic, but qc even with fteqcc is a bit of a mess, when it comes to complex stuff.
noone is brave enough to use classes and pointers and other stuff that would really help out quite a lot of things, mostly on account of those things being the most likely to blow up.
Still, I would like to see people use classes more (which are meant to work without engine extensions). It would greatly help readability in mods like TF that munge all fields together and then forget what each field was used for, in theory at least.
Xonotic's code on the other hand uses some seriously evil features that I had never intended, like #defines within #defines. Utterly evil, but also quite useful (and I often wished #pragma worked in #defines in C as well), and also an unintentional feature. Still, a feature is a feature and people tend to use features.
Arrays are handy, but you have to remember that they are emulated with V6 progs, and so somewhat inefficient.
Heads up for you: from here on in, I'm just gonna start using malloc in qc, when I can get away with targetting just fte.

on topic:
*no text*

[Seven]

Hello Baker,

I know that you asked for a standard Quake possibility. I cannot gve you one.
But then you also asked: "If not, what extension would allow such a thing ?"

At least I want to throw this extension into this thread, that I personally use for sounds with fixed coordinates:
DP_SV_POINTSOUND
It is similar to the standard Quake sound function, but it uses an origin instead of an entity.
Which is, I guess, exactly what you wanted.
Again, this is only an engine specific extension, but you (as an engine dev yourself) can easily implement it into your engine.

Then again, maybe this extension is not capable to do this, but maybe worth a try.
void(vector origin, string sample, float volume, float attenuation) pointsound = #483;
vector origin = player origin

Please dont punish me for mentioning a dpextension...

Kind regards,
Seven

[Baker]

[qbism]

Some engines have a built-in called localsound that calls PF_localsound or similar. Only a specific player hears it, and it's non-locational. (it's all in your head...) "PF_privatesound" might be more accurate.

[Spike]

its also unusable.
single player because its no different from calling sound - only one player hears anyway.
multiplayer because you really get no control over *who* hears it - only the person playing on the server hears it, which is useless if its a dedicated server.

note that fte's dimension stuff includes dimension_send which allows filtering sound calls. However, as an extension that encompasses so much more than just that, its a little clumsy to use for specific players, and non-trivial to implement into an engine (fte multicasts everything), but it does exist and can be used to send sounds to specific players.

[r00k]

play the sound from the viewentity?

[goldenboy]

I'm playing radio transmissions on the player in RMQ, via trigger.

The trigger code simply uses sound(). The engine does the moving sound stuff (no csqc). Sound in rmqe was buggy though recently.

[qbism]

[Spike]

fte's pf_localsound was added for compatibility with telejano. I don't recommend using it.
qbism, which builtin number are you using? I assume it uses channel=0, attenuation=0 over the wire...

I guess you can do it with unmodified QW servers but its really hacky!
create a room in some far away corner of the map.
when you want a sound, setorigin the player into that room, play the sound (quakeworld plays sounds using multicast so it won't be sent to anyone not in that obscure room), then teleport the player back where they were.
You'll near to center the sound on the player though, which can cause problems with sounds overriding each other. An attenuation of 0.001 is also a possibility, but it will still be spacialised (ie: stronger in one ear, depending on which way you're facing).


From an engine perspective, all you really have to do is to build the svc_startsound message into a unicast message instead of broadcast, and make sure SND_Spatialize sets the leftvol and rightvol to the same value for the sound.

[qbism]

I'm using #33, which in some engines is 'PF_Fixme'. I wrote that pf_localsound independently in 2002 which is slightly different, but I was looking at telejano code at the time. I don't really remember why svc_localsound had to be different that svc_sound in the first place but somehow it did for a mod at the time.

[Spike]

#33...
flymove in qtest (unused)...
tracebox in hexen2...

the (handicapped) telejano one is apparently #177

[qbism]