How can I disable the unit sounds?

from Sins Forums

Hi.

I really love this game but there is one thing that really begins to bother me: the unit sounds, i.e. the unit acknowledgements when you select a unit or order it to move somewhere, to attack something etc. Like in any other RTS it is funny first, but when I have to hear the same voice samples over and over again it really makes me angry.

So please - is there any way to disable these unit voices WITHOUT loosing the event notification?

I tried to turn down the dialog / speech volume, but this also disables the spoken event notifications which makes it very hard not to miss anything important when your empires grows.

After searching anywhere in the options I didn't find any other setting, so I'm afraid that it might not be possible to disable just the unit sounds. But that's hard to imagine, because every other RTS that I know (even Warcraft II from 1995) has such an option (for a good reason).

Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks and best regards,

M.

technical
14,770 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

The only way to do that is modding.

Each ship has a sound set that can be edited with notepad. This links to the sounds in the Sound folder. I suppose you could use a 0.01 sec blank sound and make a lot of copies then start renaming the blank copies to the name of the sound you don't like. This method might allow online play without checksum errors.

Do not alter base game files. Create your 1st mod

Or with notepad, open each ships entity file and remove the sound lines and change the count. It is easy but there is a lot of them. Here is the TECs Heavy Cruiser sound section.

NumSoundsFor:ONATTACKORDERISSUED 4
 SoundID "FRIGATE_TECHHEAVY_ONATTACKORDERISSUED_0"
 SoundID "FRIGATE_TECHHEAVY_ONATTACKORDERISSUED_1"
 SoundID "FRIGATE_TECHHEAVY_ONATTACKORDERISSUED_2"
 SoundID "FRIGATE_TECHHEAVY_ONATTACKORDERISSUED_3"
NumSoundsFor:ONCREATION 1
 SoundID "FRIGATE_TECHHEAVY_ONCREATION"
 NumSoundsFor:ONGENERALORDERISSUED 4
 SoundID "FRIGATE_TECHHEAVY_ONGENERALORDERISSUED_0"
 SoundID "FRIGATE_TECHHEAVY_ONGENERALORDERISSUED_1"
 SoundID "FRIGATE_TECHHEAVY_ONGENERALORDERISSUED_2"
 SoundID "FRIGATE_TECHHEAVY_ONGENERALORDERISSUED_3"
NumSoundsFor:ONSELECTED 3
 SoundID "FRIGATE_TECHHEAVY_ONSELECTED_0"
 SoundID "FRIGATE_TECHHEAVY_ONSELECTED_1"
 SoundID "FRIGATE_TECHHEAVY_ONSELECTED_2"
 NumSoundsFor:ONSTARTPHASEJUMP 1
 SoundID "FRIGATE_TECHHEAVY_ONSTARTPHASEJUMP_0"

You could change this to..

NumSoundsFor:ONATTACKORDERISSUED 0
 NumSoundsFor:ONCREATION 0
 NumSoundsFor:ONGENERALORDERISSUED 0
 NumSoundsFor:ONSELECTED 0
 NumSoundsFor:ONSTARTPHASEJUMP 0

You will need the current set of reference files to edit the entities in the GameInfo folder.
  

Original Sins 1.191 Entrenchment 1.051 Diplomacy 1.011

Post back if you want to try either method and will walk you through.

I also got tired really quick with the voices so I changed all my TEC sounds to real military combat pilot sounds. Check them out here. http://sinsofhumanity.weebly.com/tec-radio1.html

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

Hi!

Thanks alot for the detailled description. Seems to be a lot of work, but I will look into this when I have a little bit more time during next week.

Thanks and best regards,

M.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

You know just in this vein, and a little off topic, even though the voice sample is identical each time, it can be useful.

When building, and I am not watching, it lets me know that a queue of LRFs is finished when I hear a Kodiak report when it is first built.

The best thing would be a sound mod whereby more samples are added and sound more authentically military in nature.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

I really would appreciate if the dev team could implement this. Those idiotic sounds never were "funny" to me. ITS THE MOST ANNOYING THING IN SINS!

Sins (^^) this is an old thread, is your instruction usable for rebellion or does anyone got another way by now? 

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting VulpesGER, reply 4
Sins (^^) this is an old thread, is your instruction usable for rebellion or does anyone got another way by now?

In general yes. There might be one or two new things added with Rebellion but the concept is the same.

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Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Ryat, reply 5

Quoting VulpesGER, reply 4Sins (^^) this is an old thread, is your instruction usable for rebellion or does anyone got another way by now?

In general yes. There might be one or two new things added with Rebellion but the concept is the same.

If you don't want to mod, I think there is a much quicker alternative. You can use a sound editing program such as Goldwave to delete the sound data inside the sound files (or replace it with whatever sound you like):

Copy the files you don't want to listen to anymore into a separate folder and use the batch editing function on all of them to automate the edits, then simply overwrite the files you edited into the sounds folder of your Sins installation (back up the old sounds first if you might want them back). The only disadvantage (particularly with deleting the sound/replacing with silence) is that the music is made quieter when a sound plays, so you might notice it when you are issuing orders.

I have Goldwave myself so let me know if you want me to do it for you.