2011-07-30, 04:03 PM
Well, I was riding the lawn mower this morning and I was thinking about the SOM game I want to make, and I decided I needed a way to do some voice overs in game.
Now I think I have a way to do it, raising the limit of 15 sound effects to something far more, but still far from unlimited.
As you already know we can use enemies or npcs to create ambient sound in areas of the game by putting a 'noisy' npc/enemy off screen or make them impossible to see. But what if we didnt want a noisy enemy, but an enemy that only made one sound?
Well consider the wonderful concept of triggered enemies, ones that normally dont move until you get close to them. SOM has built in a sound effect for when this event occurs...so here is how the voice overs work, its a bit complicated, but not impossible.
The enemy editor has 1024 slots, I would assume (maybe Im wrong) that a typical SOM made game is going to use maybe 200-300 of those slots. Maybe more or maybe less...but lets assume 300 for this.
That leaves us with 724 enemies to use for voice overs. I would guess a typical Kings Field game doesnt hvae more than 700 pieces of conversation, so for a game in that style this should suffice.
Now I tested using my custom knight who gets activated when the player approaches and this worked just fine.
I set up several events... and this is the summary of what happens (I will post a working example project some time if someone needs help).
You have an npc, and right on top of it you place all the enemies youll need to complete his conversation...each of these enemies is placed to spawn as a triggered event. all of them should be non visible when they spawn and set to a high range of 'trigger' distance so that its guaranteed they go through that part of their animation.
ok, so when you examine the npc youll add the dialogue event if you want to have both written and voice over...and in the event youll do a few things - youll trigger the proper enemy, youll modify a counter number that keeps that enemy from triggering again, and youll begin a timer.
in another event that requires your counter to be x (set above in the conversation) youll have it be always on and check for when the timer is above say 2 seconds (just to be safe) and have that event terminate the enemy.
youll have to do this for each step of the conversation, but once you get the knack of it, having an enemy pop on (invisible), run its 'trigger' animation which pops out the sound of the voice over, then dies nice and clean.
The only other thing i can think of that would be an issue is the available slots in the sound file that SOM uses, I cant recall how many blank ones there are, but there are quite a few sounds in there that arent even used in the game so you could overwrite them if need be.
Now I think I have a way to do it, raising the limit of 15 sound effects to something far more, but still far from unlimited.
As you already know we can use enemies or npcs to create ambient sound in areas of the game by putting a 'noisy' npc/enemy off screen or make them impossible to see. But what if we didnt want a noisy enemy, but an enemy that only made one sound?
Well consider the wonderful concept of triggered enemies, ones that normally dont move until you get close to them. SOM has built in a sound effect for when this event occurs...so here is how the voice overs work, its a bit complicated, but not impossible.
The enemy editor has 1024 slots, I would assume (maybe Im wrong) that a typical SOM made game is going to use maybe 200-300 of those slots. Maybe more or maybe less...but lets assume 300 for this.
That leaves us with 724 enemies to use for voice overs. I would guess a typical Kings Field game doesnt hvae more than 700 pieces of conversation, so for a game in that style this should suffice.
Now I tested using my custom knight who gets activated when the player approaches and this worked just fine.
I set up several events... and this is the summary of what happens (I will post a working example project some time if someone needs help).
You have an npc, and right on top of it you place all the enemies youll need to complete his conversation...each of these enemies is placed to spawn as a triggered event. all of them should be non visible when they spawn and set to a high range of 'trigger' distance so that its guaranteed they go through that part of their animation.
ok, so when you examine the npc youll add the dialogue event if you want to have both written and voice over...and in the event youll do a few things - youll trigger the proper enemy, youll modify a counter number that keeps that enemy from triggering again, and youll begin a timer.
in another event that requires your counter to be x (set above in the conversation) youll have it be always on and check for when the timer is above say 2 seconds (just to be safe) and have that event terminate the enemy.
youll have to do this for each step of the conversation, but once you get the knack of it, having an enemy pop on (invisible), run its 'trigger' animation which pops out the sound of the voice over, then dies nice and clean.
The only other thing i can think of that would be an issue is the available slots in the sound file that SOM uses, I cant recall how many blank ones there are, but there are quite a few sounds in there that arent even used in the game so you could overwrite them if need be.
- Todd DuFore (DMPDesign)
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