Sound modding in KCD

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Revision as of 12:31, 9 March 2018 by NLY64 (talk | contribs) (Project description)
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Getting started

To learn about modding of music, please refer to Sequence Music Engine in KCD

To help the community with creating mods that modify in-game sounds you will need FMOD projects and original sounds.

As the sound files are present in the "sound.pak" file within *.bank files the FMOD projects are not included in game data. You can download it directly from Warhorse Studios pages.

  • FMOD project download (note: please download it only if you really need it in order not to generate big traffic)

Project description

When you open the kcd project you can see various event folders in the event editor. It contains all sounds that are used in the game.

  • animals: Includes various animal sounds.
  • cinematics: Sounds made for in-game cutscenes. Most of the sounds have panning override to center channel (or to wide L - R - Ls - Rs surround image used with stereo sounds).
  • combat: Here are all combat impacts, bow shots and foleys, bullet time sounds and different types of combat yelling.
  • foley: Foley sounds for 4 basic clothes types: plate, chainmail, leather, fabric.
  • footsteps: Self explanatory enough, I guess.
  • music: Mainly in-game cutscenes 5.1 music, also includes music programmer sound. This event is permanently used by the Sequence Music Engine in KCD.
  • npc: Different sounds of different professions.
  • special: Special sounds which are used in Alchemy, Dice and other minigames. Quest sounds which were made for concrete situations are there.
  • test: Sound events for testing purposes.
  • ui: Inventory, menu sounds.
  • voice: Burping, farting, coughing, yawning and in the subfolder dialog there are programmer sounds which are used by our robust voice replay system.
  • world: Folder contains sound atmospheres, water streams and dams, random sounds which will trigger in forests, meadows etc.

In mixer editor window there is group hierarchy. Most sounds are in subgroups Dieg, which contains diegetic sounds. In the Snapshots pane there are lots of environments which are basically different delay/reverb presets for our listener-centric reverbation system. Under setups group there are snapshots which damp certain mix buses in certain game situations (when player enters main manu, in skiptime, inventory view etc).

When you finished modifying or creating new sounds, simply build audio banks and overwrite old banks. If you created new sound events, CryEngine has to know about them in order to use them. CryEngine only can execute ATL triggers which can be connected with FMOD events. Open XML files which are located in data\libs\GameAudio, open it and add new entries. Distance culling parameter is distance in meters. If the sound is farther from listener than culling distance, the sound won't be triggered at all. You may want to set culling distance for diegetic oneshot sounds according to max distance parameter in FMOD. For sounds you don't want to get culled at all use distance culling 65535. You can use ATL triggers in various animations or in static world sounds which are located in data\levels\rataje\Layers\sound.lyr.