Any plans to overhaul sounds?

[geengaween]

I strongly believe 7DTD could be a 1000% better experience if the sounds were overhauled. It could be more exciting, more creepy, more immersive, and a lot more fun if they got rid of all the stock sounds and replaced them with better ones. It's really the icing on the cake that will turn this game into AAA quality. It makes such a massive difference.

 

Are there any plans for this? If not, TFP should think about hiring a dedicated sound guy with experience in horror games. Hire a couple of male and female heavy metal vocalists from local bands for the zombie voices too. Any heavy metal vocalist would be able to do great zombie voices and put their own unique spin on it.

[jotek]

Funny you should say this... I have been thinking the same thing for a while. I am also a professional VO artist (and actor) and I have lately been doing lots of animated stories with zombies, spiders, ghouls, etc.

Also have recorded voices with some other peeps for an xbox game or two.

But it would be a massive undertaking, just FYI. Getting it exactly right is pretty hard, especially for horror. Some of the weapon sounds changing would be nice, especially if there was occasional variance, such as a bank of 3 sounds for axe chopping rather than 1 stock, in which 1 was played 80% of the time, another 15 and another 5. Just to break it up.

Anyhow, fun stuff. I would love to have a mod or API where you could include your own sounds as well. If I didn't have 2 little ones at home I would have already done one :)

[eXSe]

It wouldn't be a bad idea, but it's something that I'd leave for finishing touches and let them polish out the bigger stuff first.

[warmer]

I want to do a crowd sourced zombie sound mod where you get as many people to submit their zombie sounds and you pick the top 100 and put them into a random zed sound pack for a sound to randomly be assigned to each zombie when they spawn. That way you would have a huge range if zed sounds on horde night. I feel that would be VERY terrifying.

 

I have all the equipment and experience to properly mix it. I am just lacking the coding expertise to execute.

[doughphunghus]

@warmer Adding sounds to the game to existing “things” that already have sounds defined for them in XML is relatively easy. I have some mods for adding sounds.  You cannot just add/link a sound, you have to make Unity "bundles' out of them first.

 

There are a few “difficult parts” mostly around getting the volumes near what the game uses.  Another one is trying to make the sounds sound “about the same” as the in game zombie sounds, meaning you don’t want one to go “grrr” and then make a completely different voice a few seconds later.  If you can avoid it. Also getting a “clean” recording with no hiss/background is kinda hard (for me) or when trying to use “free” sound resources for vocals (in my opinion).  I have not tried making changes to sounds in Unity ( there appears to be some editing capability, especially if attaching to blocks).  Mostly I just make all changes in Audacity and then put the finished sound in Unity to bundle it for the game.

 

anyway, if anyone is interested I can dig up some of the posts I used to learn how to do it, and offer some advice on how to do it as well as I could make some example mini mods as a starting point. Outside of the xml modding “code” All you need is the proper version of Unity (it’s free) and (I would recommend) the sounds in .wav format

 

as recommended above by @eXSe, you might want to wait until the sounds/capabilities are polished before doing a large undertaking (I have a sound mod that adds some door sound variations, and they just changed them up for a20 so I might have to redo them… sigh…. But if you just wanted to experiment to see how it would sound/feel like you could do that relatively easy today.

Edited December 4, 2021 by doughphunghus (see edit history)

[jotek]

I mean, I would totally be willing to get involved with this. Plus, to make the sounds the same levels, etc., would be no different than mastering a commercial for tv, for example. I do it all the time.

There are some great programs for cleaning the hiss, etc., like iZotope rx8, or their audiolab cleaner, which could fix a lot of that.

I also have a booth and Rode nt1a mic, and the samples are good enough for microsoft, pepsi, audi, etc., so could record whatever.... unfortunately, I'm based in Eastern Europe so it would be hard to get people here to help... but I can ask some local people if they would.

You guys interested in doing a sound overhaul mod together? 

Cool about the doors mod... I'll check it out.

 

Oh, and btw, about the finishing touches stuff... I absolutely and totally am of the opposite thought. People tend to forget we are using an audio/visual medium. No one even says anything about decent sound, only about fabulous sound or crappy sound. It fades in our list of importance as compared to visual, yet we rely on it for the realism quite a bit. There is absolutely no reason that it would need to be pushed to an afterthought mode or down the list... it is easily worked on simultaneously, and as with the alpha progressions, get better over time.

Just my 2 cents

[canadianbluebeer]

I really want them to change the blasted HORN sounds on the chopper and 4x4. That clown horn has gotta go!

 

(leave it on the bicycle though, it actually is appropriate)

 

[doughphunghus]

@jotek: I’m hosting/supporting quite a bit of mods already, but I also (hopefully) have the XML side of modding and setup down quite well so I can probably set up a lot of the mod and “community” aspect of it at least to start. What I’m not too good at is finding/editing/etc the sounds themselves. I just have audacity and have been leaning as I go, and I’m not a “sound person” by trade, mostly just hobbyist level. Anyway, give me a few days (a20 experimental releases today) and I’ll see if I can get some stuff together (and on these forums) so hopefully if anyone wants to contribute sounds it will be easy for them (no XML or modding experience hopefully).

 

what I would like to do is make sure at least everyone is credited for their contributions as well as try to keep the sounds “royalty free” as I wouldn’t want people just taking sounds from things and putting them in a pack and the have people like streamers get banned from twitch/YouTube if it flags the content (and to also not have anything bad happen in general). So “self generated” or at least “sounds linked to verifiable open sources/copyright free” will be the norm. I personally have just been remixing the vanilla game sounds so it’s easy to make them sound “natural” in game. 
 

anyway, let me try to set something up and see if my instructions make sense, and then see if contributing/merging/crediting new content is easy enough to do. My initial thoughts are to do something similar to what others are doing: host the code in GitHub/gitlab , and set up a discord for chatting/ideas.  Guppycur already has a modding discord with lots of people/mods associated with it so if it takes off a bit we can always move there.  I will likely use GitHub as a start just because I have a presence there, but I am not married to it, it’s just a free place for stuff.

 

anyway I’m open to any ideas about it, but that’s what I’ll try to do this week if there’s no additional input from anyone. This is likely the type of thing that will only have a few people/contributors at the start for awhile anyway.

@canadianbluebeer I have a “horns” mod that I’m maintaining that was written by someone else.  Look at my mods page. search for “Doughs Mods”.  It’s called “Get Horny” by khelldon. I also have a YouTube link there that allows you to hear the horns.  I’m on mobile so getting all the links for you isn’t easy

 

edit: I also want to bounce the idea off of some other modders, just to see if there are any gotchas involved. This has been discussed before (I think somewhere) and it seems like there were some gotchas.

Edited December 6, 2021 by doughphunghus (see edit history)

[doughphunghus]

Update: Its a bit late in the evening for me and I haven't gotten a lot done today, but I did some searches and set this up on Github: 7D2D-CommunitySoundPacks

 

It has a few links back to this forum I used to learn how to add sounds (and video tutorials), and if you want my *literal* process and troubleshooting when I installed and messed with Unity for the first time and tried to add sounds, I made a big post in those threads here.  As Guppycur (and xyth and others) mention in those threads, its very easy to package sounds into unity3d sounds (once you get it working once you go "ahhh") but I found the biggest hurdle for me was just navigating Unity.

 

Anyway: Current thoughts are it might be good to try to make multiple sound packs (mods), each one focusing on certain areas of the game so you're not forced to load all the sounds if you don't want them(similar to the "community creature packs" design).  All of these mods would be in this repository for now if I had any yet .  I'll probably make one for a "tutorial mod template" just to give people a small mod to test their own sounds/imports/etc.

 

I'll put a little more work into this tomorrow if I can (mostly all we need is some simple documentation and some basic guidelines for naming files/sounds to make the XML mods easy to update), but for now hopefully anyone who wants to add/mix/generate sounds in "unity3d" files that are suitable for importing into the game will at least have some instructions/guides in these links for making them and can do some tests in their own games if they don't want to wait for the XML templates.

 

Additionally: I have a sound pack you can look at for how the XML and linking/accessing the Unity3d files is done here and another (smaller) one for just the horns here . Even if this doesn't "take off" as a project, I'm considering repackaging my mods for the "Community Sound Packs" just so if anyone wants to contribute in the future they will have a method to do so and it will be documented.  If it does "take off" and I get hit by a bus, its a Github repo for now so anyone can just fork it, but likely we'd want to add a few people to the repository who have permissions to merge sounds into the main project.

Edited December 7, 2021 by doughphunghus (see edit history)

[fragtzack]

On 12/4/2021 at 12:25 AM, geengaween said:

I strongly believe 7DTD could be a 1000% better experience if the sounds were overhauled. It could be more exciting, more creepy, more immersive, and a lot more fun if they got rid of all the stock sounds and replaced them with better ones. It's really the icing on the cake that will turn this game into AAA quality. It makes such a massive difference.

 

Are there any plans for this? If not, TFP should think about hiring a dedicated sound guy with experience in horror games. Hire a couple of male and female heavy metal vocalists from local bands for the zombie voices too. Any heavy metal vocalist would be able to do great zombie voices and put their own unique spin on it.

 

Agree with OP

[doughphunghus]

TLDR: It might be most beneficial to the game/community/users to *not* create a singular repository for sounds and instead create a clean and simple "standard" format to follow with documentation that's easy to find and updated when new versions are released.  A "Community Sound Pack" might just be to signify it follows these simple standards.

Making this documentation would be required anyway (well, SHOULD be done) so I'll go ahead and start making it and maybe this is all that needs to be done.

ALSO: This means anyone who wants to make sound packs, can just do so whenever they can.  "Reformatting" a pack to the "standard" will likely be easy, if you even wanted to.

 

Current status: still working through all the scenarios and thinking.  Some of the issues/thoughts that lead to the TLDR conclusion above.

 

- Since IP is weird, and sounds can come from "anywhere" not sure how to handle if someone sneaks in something that shouldn't be added as its hard even to manually screen sounds to know if they are originals or just copied from somewhere.

- The amount of work to maintain and categorize such a project (and possibly work with a random group of people. Modders come and go a lot)

- Given we have an excellent mod site available (7daystodiemods.com) that's very searchable and also auto pulls from the "Mods" forum as well as github/gitlab, we might do better if a very solid "Community Sound Pack documentation/tutorial" were instead built and maintained for each game release.  This way anyone can make their own packs and be responsible for maintenance/updating of them, or can pull/remove them if they want to.

- There is a "Tutorials" section to the official game forums. This gives a nice place for this to exist for everyone (in case I got hit by a truck) as well as comment on it.

- The "Actual tutorials" could be on github and people can submit documentation issues/wants

- Putting sounds into a unity.3d file is almost "too easy" and its possible a LOT of sounds may be submitted by a lot of people.  Its not nearly as hard as it is making new 3D models work with the game. Many sound submissions might not... be so great to one persons ear, but wonderful to another.  If the "documentation/tutorial" were really good, then this will not have to be dealt with. everyone can simply create the sound packs they want

- Compatibility between loading multiple sound packs. Maybe there's 10 people all who have made their own "door sounds". Maybe 4 out of 10 are "excellent" , and 3 are "bad/comical/inappropriate". Having a nice "standard" documentation for a "Community Sound Pack" format will allow easy pack naming/formatting to make most of these packs compatible with each other.

- If someone makes a very good/unique/desired sound pack, then they get all the glory and recognition as well as can keep all the IP work and license it as they see fit (e.g. they can buy licensed sounds as they are the maintainers)

- Good clean docs might also give "regular modders of the game" a nice format to follow so their mods don't collide as well.

Edited December 8, 2021 by doughphunghus (see edit history)

[geengaween]

7 hours ago, doughphunghus said:

Since IP is weird, and sounds can come from "anywhere" not sure how to handle if someone sneaks in something that shouldn't be added as its hard even to manually screen sounds to know if they are originals or just copied from somewhere.

 

It's perfectly fine and legal to use copyrighted sounds for a game mod which you'll never make money from. You're not affiliated with TFP in any way and they won't be officially using or promoting your mod. There's plenty of mods for other games that use copyrighted material, and I think Steam is even allowed to host them on its Workshop as long as it isn't making any money from it. If you're at all unsure, just credit the source for every sound file you use and the absolute worst you'll get is a cease and desist letter, which in itself is so unlikely it's not even worth worrying about.

 

Corporate lawyers don't care if some mod for an obscure game is using sound files from another game. They only care if you are profiting from it.

Edited December 8, 2021 by geengaween (see edit history)

[theFlu]

20 minutes ago, geengaween said:

It's perfectly fine and legal to use copyrighted sounds for a game mod which you'll never make money from.

1st, I wouldn't take legal advice on a gaming forum and thus, I'm not giving any myself. That said;

 

I think "profit" is actually a secondary consideration in most of IP cases, all you need to do is "compete in a similar market". Even if you're giving stuff away for free, you may still be considered in the wrong. The thing that let's one get away with it is the judgement of each copyright holder, be it "kindness" or "lazyness". Doing something as a fan-project helps in the kindness front.

 

(That's just about the legal logic, in case anyone cares, personally I'd just abolish all "IP rights" other than a strict version of trademarks.)

Edited December 8, 2021 by theFlu (see edit history)

[doughphunghus]

I think the dilemma is “most” of the time no one cares or finds out if someone is using their IP for other uses.  Only if they are profiting from it would it normally have the capacity to grow enough for it to be noticed. And usually suing or doing any legal action is expensive, so it only makes sense to legally pursue if it’s being done by a company that has deep pockets AND it’s really easy to prove the original source of the IP. Like if Toyota decided to use Metallicas “One” as their horn and sold 5 million cars with it. Both parties are wealthy and everyone has proof of the source IP.

 

anyway… what I didn’t want to promote was having to manage a bunch of possibly “not user created” sounds that I know people will want in game, and then have someone decide to do a DMCA takedown or something on it (easy to do. Their website literally begs you to submit them). Additionally, with web scrapers it’s possible a bot might auto do it. Then it’s more management to pull out the sounds and (possibly) go through the git history and pull it out of the history, etc. 

 

I know it’s likely a 0.0001% chance it would happen, but it’s a consideration.  The dilemma is that I kinda don’t want to be a gatekeeper for this as it’s too easy to make/generate sound content so the better solution (for everyone) to get as many sound packs out and used there is likely to let the fans who create them do a bit bit more work to manage it. If someone stops maintaining their sounds or wants to buy licensed sounds or makes a big pack with a bunch of …. Sampled… sounds, should anything happen to that pack it naturally just disappears or stops being updated. No central management to clumsily deal with it. 
 

that’s why I propose “document and propose a simple standard first, see if this is enough” as an initial attempt. If 5,000 people start making sound packs and start wanting a place to manage it all then it will make sense to form some sort of higher level management (like the compopack for pois).  And even then hopefully everyone followed the “loose standards” to make the packs so merging/crediting them will be much easier.  If only like 10 people make sound packs, then the documentation on “how to do it” was enough, no need to bring them all together. The 7daystodiemods.com site will make it easy to find them (as well as the modding forums here).

 

also: if his methodology is kinda used by the current compbopack, but they don’t have any extra IP to deal with.  People choose to submit to the compbopack, or they can choose to make poi mods that are “compbopack compatible” and then submit them. The compbopack team(s) spend a lot of time (IMHO) fixing and managing and updating these POis. but they also take quite a lot of time to develop so there’s not a lot of people building a lot of them. “Sounds” in general would be easy to screw up as you don’t want a zed to be like “arreegh!” And then to go “quack quack” if someone was not listening and testing every submitted sound to a large collection. If a zed goes “quack quack” at least the offending user may be easy to track down (as you will have loaded their sound mods). Once a lot of packs that are “good” and people use/like them, maybe then an effort to bundle and maintain them will be worth it.

Edited December 8, 2021 by doughphunghus (see edit history)

[jotek]

Wow! Someone doesn't check for a few days and BAM!

Awesomesauce! I will, tomorrow, list a few sites that offer free sounds, and put down some of the rules, but I suggest that people try with Foley as well... which is creating sounds themselves from different things (i.e. the old horse clop sounds from MGM were actually half coconuts smacked down on a wooden board placed on a concrete floor, with rhythm of course).

I would actually say that people at least have a pack rating if its purely free-to-use (like from freesound.org) or with ripped/copyrighted sounds, so that we could maintain a IP free pack that we push.

And, since I am a de facto sound engineer, I would be willing to go through them (albeit I probably wont be extremely fast, 2 kids, job, wife... etc. :D) to clean and categorize

Sound design example (my voice too):

 

 

This one is sound design, all of it with free to use sounds, recorded the speaker as well:

 

[doughphunghus]

I’m a little slow (with IRL stuff as well) but I’m cobbling together something. Maybe I can get it out this week. 

[doughphunghus]

Just an update for anyone here   I haven't forgotten I'm just busy with other work... I'll keep cleaning it up and hopefully make this a "nice" tutorial when I'm done (on the mod forums) but this much here might give you something to mess with.  Its basically the first 1/2 of the tutorial, and not tested/cleaned up. This should give you enough to load a new/custom sound of your own into the game and test it if you're interested.  If you are not able to get this part to work , please let me know!  Installing the proper Unity version is the hardest (and longest) part.

 

Its *possible* the a19 Unity template project by xyth doesn't work in a20.  I have not tested this yet!  We're just importing sounds so its likely it still works.  the template is made to do "all sorts of things" like importing/exporting 3D models/blocks/etc.  Sounds are the easiest and simplest and don't require a lot the template project contains ( like the special tags you need to use for the game so blocks collide properly, doors open properly, etc).  You'll likely know there's an issue if you load your sound mod in and it throws an error or there's no sound, but its also possible no sound will play if you made an XML formatting error.  If you hit "F1" after the game loads you can check for any errors/warnings and hopefully they will have the name of the mod or filename in your mod if it has errors.

 

Rough Sound Mod Tutorial below....

 

############
# READ THIS FIRST!
############
Before beginning, a few things should be done by you to make the steps below easier:
1. Get a single sound file (.wav format) that is short (1-2 seconds long). You will use this for the tutorial below
2. Name this sound file "testsound" (all lowercase!). If you are using Windows and "file name extensions" are turned on, the name will look like "testsound.wav"

Notes:
- This is a basic tutorial for creating a barebones XML mod that adds a single "new"
sound (of your choosing) into the game to an existing object in the game.
- The methods used here are not "absolute" or "the best" or "the only" way to accomplish this.
- This will not cover all the different ways of adding sounds like altering/changing/replacing
  the existing game sounds. It is only meant as a way for people unfamiliar with Unity and XML modding
  to get something basic working.
- Additional updates to this may be added where common pitfalls/problems exist or game updates change the process.

 

############
# Installing Unity
############
This is for a19. A20 not ready yet!

Info:
- Unity is what the game is developed in and you need it to export into the .unity3d file format.
- I recommend not attempting to use Unity on non-Windows systems for your first project (it may have issues)
- The "Unity Hub" is like a wrapper for handling multiple Unity installations. You want to use this to install Unity itself.
- Modding for & Days to Die usually works best if you use the same version of Unity as the game was built in. This changes when major game updates come out:

7 Days to Die version -> Unity version to use/install
A18 -> Unity 2019.1
A19 ->  Unity 2019.2
A20 Experimental ->  Unity 2020.3.14f1

 

Installing Unity Hub and Unity:
See these posts from xyth to install Unity and his Template project.
Note: This template project can be used for many other things, not just sounds!
Note: The template project contains the *required* "MultiPlatformExportAssetBundles.cs" file to export your sounds in the .unity3d format.

 

NEWER: "Consolidated Guide to Modding 7D2D with Unity"

 

OLDER: "Creating and Exporting Models from Unity for use in 7D2D"

 

############
# Using Unity to import a sound and export it as a .unity3d file/format
############
Convert the "testsound" .wav file into unity.3d format:
Referenced from the 1st link above, this video shows on how to import and export sounds into .unity3d files:

 

 

Note: When exporting the sound, make the filename: test-sounds-cupboard.unity3d

 

############
# Making a simple XML mod for the sound
############
- Instead of starting from scratch, download the fully functioning "template-sound-mod" from here: https://github.com/doughphunghus/7D2D-CommunitySoundPacks-a20

Note: If you load this mod into the game it should load without errors. It adds a single extra sound when opening a cupboard.

Copy your "test-sounds-cupboard.unity3d" file into the "template-sound-mod/Resources" folder

So the mod will load your sound, lets replace the sound that comes with the mod with your .unity3d packaged sound:
- open the file: template-sound-mod/Config/sounds.xml with a text or XML editor of your choice.
- Change this line: <AudioClip ClipName="#@modfolder:Resources/doughphunghus-cupboard.unity3d?wrench_harvest-5"/>
To this: <AudioClip ClipName="#@modfolder:Resources/test-sounds-cupboard.unity3d?testsound"/>
- Save the file.

 

############
# Loading the sound mod into the game and testing it
############
Manually installing "simple" mods guide:
Manual installation: https://7daystodiemods.com/how-to-install-7-days-to-die-mods/

 

- Once the mod has been copied to the "Mods" folder, Create a new game using the "Navezgane" map AND
Enable "Cheat mode" in the "Advanced" settings before launching the game so you can spawn in a cupboard to test your sounds on

- When the game is loaded, open the menu ('M' key will work) and choose the creative menu (lightbulb icon at the top)
- On the left search area, type in "cupboard" and choose any block named "cupboard" (not the "open" ones) and put it on your toolbelt.
- Close the menu and place a cupboard block on the ground and open (and close) it a few times to hear the new sound.
 
Note: The game chooses the new sound 'randomly' from the available 'open_cupboard' sounds so it may take a few tries.

Edited December 17, 2021 by doughphunghus (see edit history)

[geengaween]

Please, kind modder man, for the love of god, remove the birdsong sounds from the forest biome and make a quieter ambient track with less constant repetitive noise

[jotek]

Sorry! Haven't been on a bit, holidays, 2 kids, and 1 got Covid, so been really sick for a while (almost well now). I'll dive in after first of the year!