[ZScript] Ambient Sound Objects

[Sarah]

Good evening everyone! I did some digging and I'm not finding conclusive answers, so I thought I'd ask, can an ambient sound object in a map be assigned a sound to play through ZScript? If so, how? Also if you could point me to the relevant source files, I'd also appreciate that; maybe I just overlooked something. Thank you!

*If not, gee darnit, that random idea just died a swift death, thank you still!

[necros]

Through zscript? You could, but you can just use sndinfo:

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$AMBIENT 1 ambient/world/fan5		POINT CONTINUOUS 1

Plays sound with alias "ambient/world/fan5" on loop at volume 1 and this is assigned to "ambient sound 1" entity.

If you want to do it with zscript, you can, you could just make an invisible actor with TNTA frames. Here, I attached the sound to a decoration. This is decorate script, but you can do the exact same with zscript:

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actor neStrifeStandLamp 32010
{
	//$Category StrifeLights
	//$Title "Strife Stand Lamp"
	Height 76
	Radius 10
	ProjectilePassHeight -16
	+SOLID
	States
	{
		Spawn:
			TLMP BB 1 BRIGHT A_StartSound("ambient/world/ne_hum5", CHAN_BODY, CHANF_LOOPING, 0.02, 3.0)
		Idle:
			TLMP B 100 BRIGHT Light("ne_candelabra")
			Loop
	}
}

Couple of things to note: you need 2 frames. for whatever reason, the first frame doesn't execute any functions. Also of note, to avoid constantly calling the sound over and over, make a second state and do not put a loop into the spawn state. zdoom will play through the first state and drop into the second state then loop the second state only.

[Virathas]

Couple of things to note: you need 2 frames. for whatever reason, the first frame doesn't execute any functions.

Just for clarity why this happens - first function of the spawn state is never called, which is original doom design. To have it called you need the NoDelay keyword. For more details see [wiki]Actor states[/wiki]

[Sarah]

Good morning! Thank you, necros and Virathas for replying! I very clearly wasn't clear enough about what I was asking, but I can also say that I wasn't 100% sure what I was looking for either. What I was primarily interested in was the ambient sound ID assigned to the "Custom Ambient Sound" object in DB; what I wanted to know was could I somehow access that variable from within, say, a ZScript event handler, allowing me to place a set number of objects and assign sounds to them at will. The answer seems to be: "You can probably do what your thinking, but not in the way you're thinking."

So what I'm thinking of doing: a dynamically generated soundscape system. Allow a level to have a set number of ambient sounds that will play regardless, but based on inputs, add or take some away. Now these inputs could/should be things the player is doing and events taking place in the level; health changes, objective accomplishments, etc. And finally so that the soundscape does not descend into a cacophony of out of time insanity, a sound could/should be described by a class that contains information, like root, beats per minute, etc. The soundscape itself should also specify a key; for example C, and scale (if it's pentatonic it has 5 notes instead of 7).

Lastly to not spend an inordinate amount of time on this idea, I thought the best course of action would be look into the ZDoom sound system; if I can't get sounds playing when I want them then the whole thing is pointless. So, thank you both again for your replies! I think this is doable in some form!

*Edit, I'm sure some audiophile is fingering their Pick of Destiny over my obvious lack of audio knowledge, I'm sorry! I haven't picked up a guitar in over a year and I'm sooo sad about it

[Player701]

You can access the ambient sound ID of the ambient sound actor via its args array. The first value in the array (args[0]) is the ID, and from the looks of the source code it appears that you can change it dynamically in-game and it will be reflected accordingly.

However, I'm not sure why you want to use the built-in AmbientSound class considering that most of its behavior is hard-coded. What you've described is probably best done outside the constraints of any existing ambient sound functionality.