Exultstudio SFX tab

[synthphase]

Hello all.

First I'd like to just thank all the people who've worked on Exult over the years. I keep coming back to this project and am delighted to see that it's still being worked on.

ExultStudio is a fabulous tool and I've been having a lot of fun with it. Mostly I've been adding sound effects to the game, which started when I noticed the SFX for fire was missing from both games and proceeded to dig in to Exult Studio to fix that.

That brings me to my question though: Are all the objects in the world hard-coded in initgame.dat with the SFX flag on/off? Shouldn't turning on a sound effect and saving "shape info" in ES re-populate the world with SFX enabled objects? If the latter is the case, there may be a problem with this functionality in ES. What happens is when I enable SFX for an object (both with the "sound effect" flag and checking "SFX" under extra), objects in the world do not have that sound effect unless they are re-placed with ES. I hope this is clear and that there's some way to fix the problem, I don't want to have to re-place all the objects to give them sound effects!

[marzo]

The objects will only gain their new SFX once they are reloaded -- for example, by going far enough away from them to trigger a cache-out then returning or by saving and reloading the game.

[synthphase]

Hmmm. I tried that too. I actually exited the game and started a new one just to see if the map had anything to do with it. After teleporting to an object I enabled SFX for, nothing plays. Dragging the same object out of the editor plays the sound as expected, maybe there's a disk cache somewhere for recently visited areas?

I played around last night and found that the spells are also a major problem SFX wise. I wonder where they're all hiding? It seems that in the Serpent Isle sound # 20 is being used for almost every spell (in BG it's # 65), and the spells you can find in Exult Studio don't have anything to do with the casting SFX.

[synthphase]

I found out that the two problems are probably related. The spells can be given custom sound effects but they also have to be placed fresh from the map editor. They are usually as small as a few pixels and transparent, but can be used as a weapon. maybe the game swaps the spellbook for one of these squares when a spell is cast then swaps back to your regular weapon?

[marzo]

Spell sfx is controlled by usecode, and usecode alone.

[synthphase]

Ahh, thank you for saving me the headache of looking for it!