Sound

There are four ways to add sound to your map.


Music

You can add level music to the worldspawn entity. It plays for all players all the time unless they turn music off (/s_musicvolume 0). Level music doesn't really have a place in Reaction and it takes up a great deal of space in the .pk3 so please don't use it.

Target Speaker

This is the way to add ambient sounds to your map. You can trigger sounds to play when a character steps into a certain area. You can have sounds playing the entire time. You can have sounds playing at regular or random intervals. See the RQ3 Entities page for the specifics of adding these sounds.

The problem with using target_speakers is that the sound will sometimes be cut off when the player turns a corner. This happens because a player can only hear sound from an entity that he can also see; that is, the sound entity must be in his PVS (potentially visible set). You can 'fix' this by adding additional low-volume target_speaker entities at some distance from the main target_speaker to extend the range of the sound.

Keys in Other Entities

Many of the entities have soundstart, soundstop, and soundmove or sound keys. This is the way to attach sounds directly to your entities such as buttons, doors, rotating doors, target_pushes, trigger_pushes, and platforms.

Surfaceparms

Footstep sounds and bullet effect sounds are added using custom surfaceparms. See the Custom Surfaceparms page for more information.




Return to Mapping Guide




Last updated: June 15, 2002
Valid for RQ3 Beta 2.1