Sword of the Stars Complete Collection

Sword of the Stars Complete Collection

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Mod: Changed Emitters Mk2
By Nevermore
Greetings, do your ears start bleeding and your head starts spinning when you hear Emitters?
If so, this mod is for you.
It replaces the Emitter muzzle sounds and makes sure the right sounds are used.
   
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What is this mod about?
Here's the thing. The sound of Emitters actually does hurt my ears. So much so that normally I don't even research emitters except when I need to clear up a Swarm Infestation early on.

Which was the case in my latest game, but the Emitters proved to be so ridiculously successful at wiping out Destroyer Fleets that I kept using them and after a few hours of playing my ears hurt and I felt dizzy from the shrieking noises of the Emitters.

I looked at the game files and those shrieking high-pitch noises are the Emitter Muzzle sounds.
I couldn't find a mod that had other Emitter sounds so I just made one.

Here, I have done some autism for you:
EDIT: The links are broken.

This is the soundspectrum of the orginal light emitter sound (the only emitter sound as used by the original game files):
https://files.catbox.moe/42ala3.png

and the spectrum of my changed light emitter sound in comparison:
https://files.catbox.moe/kp2xld.png

Darker areas have low intensity and brighter areas high intenstiy.
For me there is no question then why the original emitter sounds are so painful. They blast the full spectrum and most intensely the highpitched noises.
How the devs figured thats a good idea I don't know.

Why the Mk2 in the name?
Because after changing the sound files and uploading those as a mod I found out that the original .weapon files for the game are either bugged or the dev's had a change of heart at the last moment, because all emitter files were set to use the light emitter sounds. I changed that as well and now all emitters use their respective sounds.

In case you play with the Bastard Sword of the Stars mod the Point Defense Emitters use the Light Emitter sounds and the Huge Emitter uses the Heavy Emitter sounds.
What have I done?
First I tried to pass the original Emitter sounds through a Low Pass Filter to filter out the shrieking noises, which didn't quite work without making everything sound like I am trying to smother it with a pillow.

So instead I went online and looked for free thunder sound effects and chose some that sounded good enough. Basically the light emitter muzzle is a small thunder, the heavy emitter a big thunder.
I kept the impact sounds, because they sounded okay.

In game everything sounds a bit different than in the .wav files, but it still makes a decent thunder sound. If I had to critique it myself it doesn't sound like electricity anymore and more like an explosion. I like it that way and at least it doesn't hurt my ears anymore.
Download Link
https://www.mediafire DOT com/folder/813hzrfzsvo2b/Sword_of_the_Stars_Mods
Change the DOT to an actual "." Steam doesn't allow MediaFire links to be posted.

This contains the Changed Emitters Mk2 for regular SotS and the BSots mod.
BSotS uses different .weapon files so there are two mods, depending on which version you play.
If you use yet another mod, you will have to tweak the .weapon files in that mod to use the right sounds.

Also there is a .rar file with a few graphical mods that enhance the textures and ship models. It's the vanilla style, just upscaled and with more details.
Any last words?
If you try the mod for yourself let me know what you think of it. Especially if you run into problems with the mod or the download link.

That's all from me.
Have a nice day!
Captain's order!
:)
5 Comments
Nevermore  [author] 21 Jun, 2021 @ 4:39am 
I don't take it as an offense.
But if I am not mistaken the mod manager just allows you to automatically "install" and "deinstall" mods from the mod folder. What it does is edit the .ini text file which tells SotS which mods to load upon starting the game. As far as I know it doesn't help in making mods.
Niko 18 Jun, 2021 @ 3:17pm 
I don't mean to sound offensive, it's just I'm trying to help your development process along. Also I'm still gonna DL your Emitters mod too. It's revolutionary
(Steam doesn't have an edit button for comments.)
Niko 18 Jun, 2021 @ 3:16pm 
Actually, I just looked on an old hard drive, and I don't think I'll be needing that...
https://imgur.com/a/z56CXAY

I can try to upload this to something like Google Drive if you want to use it instead, the *.zip is only 96KB surprisingly. Might aid your development process too!
Nevermore  [author] 4 Jun, 2021 @ 12:29pm 
You're welcome :happypug:

All I use for modding is the Dragon UnPACKer 5 and a texteditor.
Dragon UnPACKer 5 lets me open the sots.gob file and extract files in there, then I change those to my liking in a texteditor (I use Geany) and change stuff. Although most often I have no idea what to change as for example weapons have some values and numbers behind them. But that let me see that the soundeffect that is played is the same for all weapons. So I changed that. And the new files cannot be entered into the sots.gob file, but put into a mod folder which overwrites parts of sots.gob in the memory...I think.

Anyway, when you get Dragon UnPACKer 5 you can start fumbling around in the sots.gob file and if you wanna know how to really mod the game, you gotta ask someone like the dude who made the BSOTS mod. He is a cool guy and can probably explain you a lot more.
Niko 4 Jun, 2021 @ 10:25am 
Finally someone changes the most aggravating thing about the faithful energy weapon we know as the Emitter. I too unfortunately was curious enough to datamine SotS and discover the unused Emitter files, but I didn't have any modding experience due to the tools being no longer available from their official download source (trust me, I'd mod the cr@p out of this game if I knew how).

Not only that but we have better Emitter sounds that don't just scream at you, they actually sound like they look they should--actual thunder and lightning. I'll be downloading this immediately, thank you for your efforts noble captain.