Soundscapes

[garrynewman]

What sucks about the current soundscape system in HL2 and in Alyx?

What do you wish you could do differently? What do you have to work around?

[conneath]

writing script files is pretty tedious, would be nice to have all of this in the Inspector
also there was a bug that prevented you to use multiple looped sounds that have the same name? im not sure if this is fixed in alyx though, probably is

[handsomematt]

Soundscapes as an asset that can be changed and loaded live is gonna be way better alone.

Also preview in Hammer is something I know @bakscratch has wanted

[conneath]

yeah a hammer preview would be pretty nice actually

[GunnarKafel]

I feel that right now the main issue with Half-Life Alyx's soundscape system is obscurity. There's a lot of boilerplate that can only be figured out by looking at the base Valve maps, or by opening the sound stacks directly in a text editor.

For example, the Stack Name/Operator Name/OpVar Name keyvalues on the opvar setters have unintuitive names that can be confusing for new mappers

Valve's Opvar Array is also unclear to new users, since the only reference to its function is the Opvar Index keyvalue.

Creating custom sounds to use with soundscapes is completely undocumented and requires looking at HLA's included soundstack files through an external program. Certain variables are also relegated to specific sound types, which makes it difficult when working outside of an Inspector.

This is more quality of life than an actual issue, but it would be nice to have some debugging for the final value of the different opvars. As far as I know in Alyx there is only debugging for the opvar setter entities.

[bakscratch]

Creating the soundscapes has always been the worst part, having to write it by hand in a txt files really feels like something out of the 90s, Plus no way of really testing out how it sounds without having a map with it compilied into adding another step into a already long process.
Some form of graph view/ node based would be ideal, with the ability to drag in sounds and set things like volume, distance, pitch, is loop, how oftern should play, where it should play, ect...

What GunnarKafel said also is another thing, its not very clear on lots of stuff and should be streamlined a lot, but still have the options for more experienced people.

[garrynewman]

So let me ask mappers something.. Some of the soundscapes in HL2 define points in the world to emit the sound from. These are exposed as Point 1, Point 2 etc on the soundscape entity. Is this dumb? Would it make more sense to define these in the soundscape itself by targetname?

[conneath]

i think its fine the way it works right now but it could be better if you could define the point's locations without an info_target and just put it directly in the snd_soundscape entity or something, probably like what you just said

[GunnarKafel]

For me I'd prefer to control ambient sound positions through the sound itself, or to use a sound event to set the position in Hammer. The soundscape's point keyvalues need you to reference the soundscape files to see the indices. I feel like setting points through entities is irrelevant to the new Source 2/Alyx soundscape design philosophy. Instead of there being multiple soundscapes specialized towards specific map areas, one giant soundscape is used and controlled by different scalars. Because of this, any situation where you would have to specify a sound location through a target would most likely fall back to using a sound event entity.

These are some sounds with a hard coded position used in the a1_intro_world soundscape:

[garrynewman]

It would pain me to hardcode positions like that..

[GunnarKafel]

Yeah I agree, I don't like how there isn't a visual representation of where the sound will be. My main concerns with the HL2 style point keyvalues is that you wouldn't know what sound the points reference. A targetname on the sound would probably fit the best