SndInfo: $Random List Weighting

[NeuralStunner]

Suppose you have some sounds in your selection that you'd like ZDoom to play more rarely than others. Say you've added a couple new alert sounds for the Zombieman, and want him to (rarely) exclaim "aw crap!" or "I'm hungry!"

Currently, you're forced to do this:

Code: Select all

$random grunt/sight
{
	grunt/sight1
	grunt/sight1
	grunt/sight1
	grunt/sight1
	grunt/sight2
	grunt/sight2
	grunt/sight2
	grunt/sight2
	grunt/sight3
	grunt/sight3
	grunt/sight3
	grunt/sight3
	grunt/sight4
	grunt/sight5
}

Note how long and messy this is.

Suppose you could do this, instead:

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$random grunt/sight
{
	grunt/sight1 4
	grunt/sight2 4
	grunt/sight3 4
	grunt/sight4 1
	grunt/sight5 1
}

(Of course, not specifying a wight defaults to 1. Also, I guess a weight of 0 would keep it from even being added, for whatever reason.)

[Xeotroid]

That would be useful, why not?

[Graf Zahl]

why not?

The only reason that comes to mind is how badly the SNDINFO syntax is suited to such a change because it lacks any kind of sufficient structure to decide whether the number is an actual number or a sound name consisting entirely of digits.

[Xeotroid]

Doesn't a space solve that? I have never seen a sound name with a space in it.

[Graf Zahl]

No, a space doesn't solve that.

Imagine

$random { sounds/bang 1234567 sounds/poof 3 }

Can you tell me if '1234567' is a supposed to be a weighting factor or an actual sound name? I can't and neither can the parser.
Oh, and I HAVE seen mods using sound names like '111'.

[Gez]

What if there is some special token? For example:

Code: Select all

$random grunt/sight
{
   grunt/sight1 = 4
   grunt/sight2 = 4
   grunt/sight3 = 4
   grunt/sight4 = 1
   grunt/sight5 = 1
}

[Graf Zahl]

What if someone has a sound named '='?

[Edward-san]

mmm, does ',' suffer the same issue?

[Xeotroid]

I guess so, everything in SNDINFO is divided by space. God damn it Raven, you're not helping! Maybe if the number property had to be included and it would be separated by lines? So it couldn't be "sound1 4 sound2 5" but every sound + weight would have to be its own individual line, like in NeuralStunner's example.

[Graf Zahl]

mmm, does ',' suffer the same issue?

The non-CMode parser won't end a token on a parser so it'd have to be separated with a space from the preceding name.

I guess so, everything in SNDINFO is divided by space. God damn it Raven, you're not helping! Maybe if the number property had to be included and it would be separated by lines? So it couldn't be "sound1 4 sound2 5" but every sound + weight would have to be its own individual line, like in NeuralStunner's example.

Cannot be done without breaking the existing format.

[HeXaGoN]

I don't know if this would be the best idea, but maybe a second statement?

Something along the lines of this:

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$random sound { sound1 sound2 sound3 }
$randomweight sound { 4 2 1 }

The numbers in the $randomweight statement would be respective to the list of sounds in the $random statement.
So "sound1" would have a weight of 4, "sound2" would have a weight of 2, and so on.

Lets say list lengths don't match:

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$random sound { sound1 sound2 sound3 sound4 sound5 }
$randomweight sound { 4 2 1 }

Well, what we could do there is perhaps, default the weight of every sound in the $random statement after the third sound to 1.

[Graf Zahl]

You are getting on the right track but that's just way too messy.
Actually the real solution would be

$randomweight
{
sound1 4
sound2 2
sound3 1
}

[HeXaGoN]

$randomweight
{
sound1 4
sound2 2
sound3 1
}

That's much better. At first glance I thought we were stepping back into our original problem, but then remembered we were using a different command.
I really like that solution though! It lets us set the weight of each sound individually as we like rather than setting the weight for all of them.

[NeuralStunner]

That would work for me! Might be better to call it "randomweighted".