48 replies to this topic

[Tash]

File Name: Infinity Sounds
File Submitter: Tash
File Submitted: 17 Mar 2014
File Category: Miscellaneous Released Mods

This small mod for Baldur's Gate II restores many sound effects used in the original Baldur's Gate for the sheer enjoyment of a bit more complete "that BG1 experience" some players seem to be nostalgic about.
 
Consult the readme for more information about Infinity Sounds.
 
Note: A number of the restored sound files have been cleaned of audible compression artifacts or any degree of clipping. The original spell casting voices were especially affected and often unpleasant to listen to.
 

An updated version available here.

Edited by skellytz, 23 May 2024 - 04:03 PM.

[Yovaneth]

Nice! 

 

-Y-

[Tash]

New version is out with minor volume adjustments to combat sounds. Positional audio in BG2 is just horrible at getting these loud enough; hopefully now you'll be able to hear them slightly better.

 

Wading through BG1 sound files revealed a bug in the vanilla TotSC in which Melf's Acid Arrow played no sound due to an error. It should use the same casting completion sound as Flame Arrow was originally assigned; Restored.

 

And now, last but not least, I stumbled upon an alternate chunked death sound effect among BG1 files. This one is more gruesome and actually fits the animation of body parts scattering on the ground. Yeah...

Edited by Tash, 10 January 2015 - 02:31 PM.

[Ithildur]

Awesome idea for a mod (and I'm very picky when it comes to mods). DLed it just now, will try it out.

 

cheers!

[Tash]

Well, let me know if this works and sounds right before I start digging into some more files. I've only tested it myself using BGT, for the most part.

[Lollorian]

Awesome stuff! This is like the 1PP for sounds

[Tash]

During last night's tests I noticed a small compatibility issue with Spell Revisions which rewrites the structure of spell files. That's easily fixed, but I had to upload a new version.

 

So far I've restored only a handful of spell casting sound effects. There's more coming, sure, but I'd love to hear suggestions as to your favorite spells/effects which simply don't sound as good in BG2.

Edited by Tash, 10 January 2015 - 05:28 AM.

[gloomfrost]

Dumb question and forgive me if i have missed this in the FAQ, but do you know if BG2:EE already uses BG sounds?   I think it does but if it doesn't would your mod work for BG2:EE?  Thanks!

[Tash]

This mod isn't compatible with the EEs yet; I don't have the games, and so I can't test whether the EEs use the same files.

 

From what I gathered, both EEs use BG2 sounds upsampled to 44.1 kHz. This means I'd have to re-encode everything. But I'm not sure if they use the same compression method.

[Almateria]

I approve of this audio mod 

because i like sounds

[jodan-no-ken]

Now here's some sounds I haven't heard in an age and a day. Hits me right in the nostalgia, love it.

[Tash]

It's summertime and I'm back. Long story short, I played through the first portion of BGT and I wasn't happy with the quality of some of the sounds shipped with the original Baldur's Gate (and, by extension, used in this mod). Dunno how this slipped through developer QA, but a lot of spell casting voices have weird artifacts or distortion in several places across the sound effect. I believe this was caused by poor ACM encoding which damaged these files. I managed to reproduce this using bad encoder settings, so I think I nailed it down.
 
Whatever, right? Well, I got a little summertime surprise for you, guys. This should've been done years ago. I spent some time analyzing the waveforms and here are the results:

Original Sample

Fixed Sample
 

Hear the difference?

 

Edited by Tash, 10 January 2015 - 02:33 PM.

[Sergio]

Great, thank you <3

[Tash]

I've released v3 Beta. Why "beta"? Well, I enabled installation on BGEE, but I don't have the game to test it all. From what I've read so far, everything *should* work much in the same way. Please, check it out if you want and report any issues here.

 

As for the major change in v3, already mentioned a couple of days ago, I spent way too much time extracting and rebuilding the original BG1 sound files. A lot of them were just horrible quality. I believe I managed to fix 97.7% of the sounds which had nasty distortion/clipping.

 

You can probably play the game with the sound volume slider all the way up, but I still don't recommend it. Anywhere 70-80 is fine. This, of course, may depend on your system, but if it doesn't sound right, you'll just have to adjust volume settings in the game options and/or your system.

 

Oh, and I suggest you disable the "Environmental Audio" setting. Some of you may have noticed that it's bugged to the point where both stereo and mono channels are heard only in one speaker, depending on the direction, while some sounds are way too quiet and some blaring out loud. Really annoying experience. Yes, you lose some of the hardware environmental effects, but it's not like they change that much in terms of atmosphere. In exchange, you get better sounding game in general, with less annoying positional audio. I've read that this issue is fixed in BGEE, but I can't confirm it.

Edited by Tash, 13 June 2014 - 01:44 AM.

[Creepin]

Wow this mod sounds so cool (pun intended)! Hopefully it will be included into BWP/BWS soon enough

[Tash]

Thanks for all the comments, guys

 

I'm currently thinking of changing the scope of this mod. A lot of the sound effects used in BG series are inconsistent when it comes to quality and general feel. Hell, some of the sounds aren't even assigned properly in vanilla game (I'm sure Almateria has something to say about this). Take, for example, Animate Dead which has this cool back-from-the-grave sound effect. And it's not even assigned to the spell! Instead, some generic Priest swirl plays when you cast the spell. (Btw, I restored the proper sound in v3 Beta).

 

So, I'd like to extend this mod to something like Infinity Sounds which would house the best (subjective) collection of sound effects from different IE games. The mod would replace default BG sounds with more appropriate ones whenever necessary. For instance, more exotic and rare spells would use, well, more exotic and unique sounds rather than a generic "whooosh-zoooom-wheeeze". I propably don't want to go beyond IE games, as I still want these to sound familiar to players, but improved in a way.

 

If anyone would like to participate in this, I'd be happy to collaborate. Yes, this all would be rather subjective, so a couple of modders could be better here. And it's still a remote idea, so it's not like pack your things, Dorothy, we're leaving Kansas

[DrAzTiK]

Hi Tash,

 

Have you noticed that battle music are looping each time you check your inventory ? Would it be possible to fix that ? it breaks immersion so much.. ( maybe it has been fixed in EE?)

[Tash]

Have you noticed that battle music are looping each time you check your inventory ? Would it be possible to fix that ? it breaks immersion so much.. ( maybe it has been fixed in EE?)

 

Hmm, can't say I have. I tried to reproduce this, but I don't hear anything unusual. As I understand, during a battle you enter the inventory and a short battle piece just loops, right? Could you describe it a little more? Does it happen all the time in battles or only when there's a spell active? If it's the latter, I can probably fix it. I've just fixed Grease this way, so it won't loop battle music when cast. There's a little side effect (actually a rule fix), but more on that later.

 

Edit: Ah, I think I know what you mean. Yup, when you enter the inventory, the battle music keeps on playing, but when you close the inventory, it starts over. That's the game engine, and I agree -- it just doesn't sound good. Ascension64 and his TobEx could potentially fix this; maybe head over there and post this nice suggestion? The project is currently inactive, though.

 

Btw, this issue is fixed in BGEE: http://forum.baldurs...nventory-screen

Edited by Tash, 12 July 2014 - 12:52 AM.

[Tash]

Good news! I finally got around to playing some BGEE. Restored BG1 Sounds work just fine. The volume levels generally don't exceed those in some of the files modified by the BGEE devs (they might've raised the peaks, as some spells are louder than bombs). I had to fix a few issues, for some of the spells are handled differently in BGEE. As a result, v3.2 is out. All of my patches should sound good now.
 
What immediately struck me, though, is that BGEE uses OpenAL. And I knew this would be trouble for me. Ever since I tried OpenAL in System Shock 2 and Thief, I've learnt my soundcard doesn't like the default OpenAL choice of "Generic Hardware" implementation. Thing is, BGEE doesn't give you any options to change OpenAL to "Generic Software." So, if you're like me, and you have a 10-year-old soundcard with old drivers supporting EAX 2.0, you'll get very loud sound effects, blaring walking sounds, bombing voices etc. Even at 10/100 volume it's just bad.
 
Well, if you're having sound volume/positional audio issues in BGEE, follow these steps:
 
1. First, install the OpenAL redistributable provided by the BGEE developers (oalinst.exe); it's still required.
 
2. Download a different API implementation called OpenAL Soft here: http://kcat.stranges....html#download.
 
3. Grab the appropriate package from the link above, extract it to wherever you want, go to Win32 (or Win64, if you have 64-bit OS) folder inside the package, rename the file "soft_oal.dll" to "OpenAL32.dll" (for both 32- and 64-bit OS,) and then drop it into your BGEE directory.
 
Alternatively, if it doesn't work on your OS, drop the file into your Windows system32 (32-bit) AND/or systemWoW64 (64-bit) folder(s).
 
The sound issues should be gone. If you had problems with LOUD sounds prior to this, the volume levels should be fine now, too (except the sound files that may have different/altered peak values than the original BG1 ones; these still would need to be normalized by the devs/modders). If you have further issues with positional audio (e.g loud footsteps, blaring sound effects, incorrect sound sources) disable "Environmental Audio" in your baldur.ini.

Edited by Tash, 12 July 2014 - 12:55 AM.

[DrAzTiK]

Have you noticed that battle music are looping each time you check your inventory ? Would it be possible to fix that ? it breaks immersion so much.. ( maybe it has been fixed in EE?)

 

Hmm, can't say I have. I tried to reproduce this, but I don't hear anything unusual. As I understand, during a battle you enter the inventory and a short battle piece just loops, right? Could you describe it a little more? Does it happen all the time in battles or only when there's a spell active? If it's the latter, I can probably fix it. I've just fixed Grease this way, so it won't loop battle music when cast. There's a little side effect (actually a rule fix), but more on that later.

 

Edit: Ah, I think I know what you mean. Yup, when you enter the inventory, the battle music keeps on playing, but when you close the inventory, it starts over. That's the game engine, and I agree -- it just doesn't sound good. Ascension64 and his TobEx could potentially fix this; maybe head over there and post this nice suggestion? The project is currently inactive, though.

 

Btw, this issue is fixed in BGEE: http://forum.baldurs...nventory-screen

Sorry Tash, I forget to answer you.

It's really cool to have this annoying problem  been fixed with BGEE.  Thanks you so much for noticing it !

Hope Ascension64 could also fix it for BGT.