CFS2 Sound.cfg: Water touchdown sounds.

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Folks,

I'm trying to get water sounds to sound when landing on water with a floatplane (contact point type 4 in Aircraft.cfg), but there seems to be a special syntax for water touchdowns in the sound.cfg.

Defining a wheel (contact point type 1) and changing the touchdown call in the sound.cfg to call a water-sound, makes the latter audible, on land touchdowns, so it is not a matter of sound-file incompatibility.

I was wondering if anyone knows and could help.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Cheers,

Aleatorylamp

 

[aleatorylamp]

Watery Sounds in silence

Hello Folks,

It seems a difficult issue, this water-sound business.
I tracked down a Microsoft document related to the FS config files, and the sounds appear to have a
flag parameter for the kind of surface that CFS2 supposedly detects, to activate a certain sound.

For water it´s Flags=8, and I´ve put it into the Ground_Roll and Touchdown sections of the Sound.cfg, calling
convenient watery sounds from the main sound library, as well as some watery touchdown sounds in the aircraft
sounds directory, but it all still remains silent.

Well...
Cheers anyway,
Aleatorylamp

 

[Shessi]

Hi A,

It's not something I know about that well. The doc you found, are you sure it's for CFS2 and not the FS series of sims. They are different and may not act the same?

Are you talking about an internal (2D/VC cockpit) water sound or external water sound?

I'm not on my Fs rig, so can't test, but I'm trying to think if flying boats/planes/amphibs give water sounds internally, and I'm not sure. As to parameters, I would think yes a combo of surface detection/contact point and sound call, as you say. The one thing I can say is that I would of thought you would have to use just float/skid contact points 4/2 and not wheel/1, so that the sound is connected to water surface AND a float contact point...try that.

I'll take a look in-sim tomorrow.

Cheers

Shessi

 

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Shessi,

Thank you for your answer!

The Microsoft config.file document I mentioned is not CFS2 specific, but seemingly a general one, so I don´t know if CFS2 is programmed to detect water with Flags=8.

Contact points I have, are defined as type 4 (floats). I only mentioned type 1 (wheels) because when defined as such and landing on land, any sound called, sounds. Of course, on water then, the plane sinks, but that is obvious.

With contact points defined as floats, they won´t sound on water or land, from within the plane or from outside.

It is strange that no Sound.cfg Left/Right/Centre Touchdown Section I have seen, includes flags or viewpoints.

Where flags seem to be used is in the Landing Roll sections, but CFS2 doesn't seem to react to Flags=8 (water).

Another thought: There is a system whereby a couple of gauges on the panel are defined, in combination with a Water Effect in the EFFECTS directory, which is called from the Aircraft.cfg, and this produces spray coming from the contact points when the plane taxis on water. Maybe a water-sound could be assigned to this spray effect...

I don't know.

Cheers,

Aleatorylamp

 

[Shessi]

Hi A,
Had a chance to check a few things. And no there's no internal or external splash sounds for FP/FB type ac.

If you look at a stock install of CFS2, you will see there are no FB/FP etc, and therefore the only references to water and aircraft in the main Sounds section is to an aircraft crashing into or landing on water.

The CFS2 developers had no idea that we would take it to where we are now, and so they gave little development room in the basic install. Having said that I have had an idea.

If you take a look at the sound config file for an aircraft there are entries for scrape points and fuselage sounds, the later entries refer to crash landings land and water, and are present in all ac sound configs.

Now a cunning plan! If you were to make the FB/FP ac scrape points at the points of your floats/hull (you'd have to experiment as they may get in the way, make them slightly higher), and in the ac sound config file you allied the scrape points to a customised splash/spray sound (in your main sim Sound folder), you possible would be able to get the water splash sound for your FB/FP??

The stupid thing is I've modeled loads of these type of ac and love 'em, but I'd not given that type of sound effect a thought!!! DOHHH!!

As far as a gauge driven sound is, yes I think (?) you my be able to do that. The DAP gauge is used in CFS2 to drive a visual float/hull spray effect, so there may be someone out there who would be able to do you a customised gauge driven sound. Personally I think the customised sound effect is the way to go.

I'll give it more thought....

Cheers

Shessi

 

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Shessi,
Your plan for using scrapepoints to trigger alternative sounds is very interesting, and could be possible.
Also, the damage threshold for the scrape points could be reduced so as not to interfere.
I´ll see if I can make any headway.
Thanks!
Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

 

[Ravenna]

This is a fascinating thread.

 

[dvslats]

This is a fascinating thread.

Tis, isn't it. Very curious to see what happens.

 

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Shessi, Hello Ravenna,

Yes, it is definitely very interesting, this new business.

I got some similar information from Kdriver yesterday along the same lines - i.e. using scrape points.
He mentioned a paddle steamer built for the sim that works with water sounds, so it seems that we are going to get somewhere.
Let´s see if I can get some experimenting on the subject done today.

I was thinking of duplicating the 4 contact-point lines for the two floats (type 4) in the Aircraft.cfg, and giving
those a Type 2 scrape point designation, with a really high damage threshhold, to see if I can get any reaction
of the scrape points mentioned in the Sound.cfg.

Contact point parameter Nº. 13 seems to be a sound an entry, to designate the kind of scrape point desired, and supposedly this
will correspond to the label of the scrape point type to be used the sound.cfg.

Also, it looks like the left/right/centre Touchdown sounds only apply to land, and will probably be left in - and a mistaken land landing
could even be made audibly destructive.

To make things easier, I´ve taken out all the engine sounds except starter and startup, to be sure of hearing something it it comes through.


Anyway... More, later!

Update: (Later...)
No success as yet. I was using Aux1 and Aux2 scrape points for the duplicated floats as scrape points,
with Flags=8 to detect water, but it´s all mute
Also, I added Landing Roll sections with watersounds, also with Flags=8, but it´s no good either.
Incidentally, normal L/R/C Touchdown sounds are mute too, probably because it´s not wheels that are
defined in the contact points.

Update 2 (Later still): Slight headway?
It seems Flags=8 is not interpreted by CFS2:
Taking out all Flag=8 lines, something seems to be working:
I get water-sounds sounds from inside the plane (2D panel view) only, because Viewpoint=1, for the landing roll:
A) On land, with wheels defined (contact points Type 1), and
B) On water, with floats defined, (Contact points Type 4).
Now I have to try withwout defining the viewpoint.


Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

 

[aleatorylamp]

One little step forward...

Hello again,

Duplicating the 4 float contact point lines to make scrape points out of them, interferes with the plane´s floating abilities,
and it sinks, so that´s no good. Then, I have had no success with Flags=8, so that also seems to be a waste of time.

However, it is interesting that values 7 and/or 8 can be entered in position Nº 13 of the float contact-point lines themselves,
(previously 2 and 3 for left and right gear), and this way the Sound.cfg can detect them as Aux1 and Aux2 scrape points,
and will assign sounds to them, in this case, water sounds.

For the moment, they are only audible from inside the plane, the 2D panel view, but at least it´s a tangible step forward.

Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

 

[aleatorylamp]

Water-landing sounds for interior views.

Hello Folks,

Thanks to input from Shessi and Kdriver I have had a certain degree of success in this endeavour.

Summing up after the water-sound experiments for water landings I have tried, it appears that neither Flags=18, nor Left/Right/Centre Touchdown sounds have any audible manifestation in CFS2, even using Viewpoint=1 or Viewpoint=2 to "force" the sound to be heard from outside or inside. Even the Landing Roll section was not audible, whichever Flags or Viewpoints were to be defined.

The only thing that CFS2 seems to recognize is assigning values 7 and 8 for Aux1 and Aux2 scrape point sounds in Aircraft.cfg Contact-Point entry Nº 13:

//13 Sound Type: 0=Ctr gear, 1=aux.gear, 2=Lgear, 3=Rgear, 4=Fus scrp, 5=Lwing scrp,
//......................6=Rwing scrp, 7=aux1 scrp, 8=Aux2 scrp, 9=Tail scrp
//
//.........0......1.....2........3......4....5....6 ....7....8...9...10....11.12.13..14..15
point.0=4,9.5000,6.000,-6.50,1575,0.0,0.54,0.0,1.0,2.5,0.88,0.0,0.0,8,0.0, 0.0
point.1=4,9.5000,-6.00,-6.50,1575,0.0,0.54,0.0,1.0,2.5,0.88,0.0,0.0,7,0.0, 0.0
point.2=4,-7.760,-6.00,-5.95,1575,0.0,0.54,0.0,1.0,2.5,0.88,0.0,0.0,7,0.0, 0.0
point.3=4,-7.760,6.000,-5.95,1575,0.0,0.54,0.0,1.0,2.5,0.88,0.0,0.0,8,0.0, 0.0

This allows the CFS2 Sound.cfg to play selected water-sounds, albeit for interior sounds only, i.e. 2D Panel and Virtual cockpit views.
No combination whatsoever yielded any positive results for water sounds to be audible from outside the plane.
Nevertheless, I suppose one could say this is a reasonable degree of success.

I chose the Watrlnd1 and Watrlnd2 sounds, combining them with the left and right touchdown sounds from the FS98 Catalina Flying Boat, which I renamed to watrsndl and watrsndr. The combination of the two I felt sounds better than either one on its own.
I defined Scrape 7 as left, and Scrape 8 as right, to get some degree of stereo effect into the speakers.
So, the lines in the Sound.cfg that made this work were:

[AUX1_SCRAPE]
filename=watrlnd1
minimum_volume=9000
maximum_volume=10000
minimum_speed=1
maximum_speed=55
minimum_rate=0.80
maximum_rate=1.60
link=AUX1_SCRAPE2

[AUX1_SCRAPE2]
filename=watrsndl
link=AUX1_SCRAPE3

[AUX1_SCRAPE3]
filename=watrlnd1
link=AUX1_SCRAPE4

[AUX1_SCRAPE4]
filename=watrsndl
link=AUX1_SCRAPE5

[AUX1_SCRAPE5]
filename=watrlnd1
link=AUX1_SCRAPE6

[AUX1_SCRAPE6]
filename=watrsndl

[AUX2_SCRAPE]
filename=watrlnd2
viewpoint=2
minimum_volume=9000
maximum_volume=10000
minimum_speed=1
maximum_speed=55
minimum_rate=0.80
maximum_rate=1.60
link=AUX2_SCRAPE2

[AUX2_SCRAPE2]
filename=watrsndr
viewpoint=2
link=AUX1_SCRAPE3

[AUX2_SCRAPE3]
filename=watrlnd2
viewpoint=2
link=AUX2_SCRAPE4

[AUX2_SCRAPE4]
filename=watrsndr
viewpoint=2
link=AUX2_SCRAPE5

[AUX2_SCRAPE5]
filename=watrlnd2
viewpoint=2
link=AUX2_SCRAPE6

[AUX2_SCRAPE6]
filename=watrsndr
viewpoint=2

If anyone should have any further suggestions or ideas to try out, of course they will be very welcome!

Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

 

[Shessi]

Hi A,
Well done fella!

A great bit of detective work there. I didn't really think that the M$ info was any good for CFS2, but the info got you thinking....

Well, water sound in 2 of the 3 areas (ie 2D, VC cockpits, but not external) is pretty good.

Have you tried hearing a crash landing or slide on landing externally?....nope there's nothing...only goes to a 'movie' when crashing. When gently slide-on landing land or water there' no sound externally, so unless M$ just didn't put a sound in (unlikely) or you find something they left and never finished I suppose there will not be any external water sounds, which is a shame. Have you studied the Fs9 sound set-up, there may be clues as to what the sound differences are between CFS2 and Fs9.

It is strange that they didn't put any sounds allied to slide-on landings, the sound of parts breaking on landing are there, but not for scrape points...or are there????

Cheers

Shessi

 

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Shessi,
So it seems there was some incompleted sound-related work that went into the CFS2 release... What a pity.

The M$ info has at least partially been interesting for our purposes, and for some secondary things...
Another thing I got out of it, but which also only works from internal views, was the existence of the
Tail Scrape Point (Pos.13 Value=9 in Aircraft.cfg Contact points):

//13 Sound Type: 0=Ctr gear, 1=aux.gear, 2=Lgear, 3=Rgear, 4=Fus scrp, 5=Lwing scrp,
//......................6=Rwing scrp,7=aux1 scrp, 8=Aux2 scrp, 9=Tail scrp
//
//..........0......1.....2........3......4....5....6 ....7....8...9...10....11.12.13..14..15
point.10=4,-7.760,0.000,-5.95,1575,0.0,0.54,0.0,1.0,2.5,0.88,0.0,0.0,9,0.0,0.0

Initially I had expected it would be an External Sound, given the Heading that begins with an "X"...

[XTAIL_SCRAPE]
filename=ssTouCC // (a central touch-down sound)
minimum_volume=9000
maximum_volume=10000
minimum_speed=1
maximum_speed=55
minimum_rate=0.80
maximum_rate=1.60
link=XTAIL_SCRAPE1

[XTAIL_SCRAPE2]
filename=watrlnd2
link=XTAIL_SCRAPE3

[XTAIL_SCRAPE3]
filename=ssTouCC
link=XTAIL_SCRAPE4

[XTAIL_SCRAPE4]
filename=watrlnd1
link=XTAIL_SCRAPE5

[XTAIL_SCRAPE5]
filename=ssTouCC

But no way... disapointingly, this doesn´t react to viewpoint=1 or Viewpoint=2 either.

It does, however, improve the variety of the sounds played, but is probably of no use for a float-plane
without a tail float, because it would add a central wake from a non-existing central tail float.

The M$ also indicated that from a sub-list of sounds (2 to 6 in some cases) with extra .wav files to combine in a certain
section, sounds are selected at random, so repeating sounds like I did is pointless, unless one were to bias the sound
combination in favour of one of the several sounds to be used.

Anyway, the result is better than nothing.

Incidentally, the FS98 Water Sounds that Mike Hambly put into his FS98 Sandringham Flying Boat, (which seem to
go with a FS98 PBY Catalina too), are one of the best sounding water-landing sounds I have come across. In his
Sound-Readme he does mention that all sounds are his, except for the Water sounds, but I haven´t found the
original author (yet).

Interesting that you say slide-on landings don´t have a sound either. I´ve never tried that...
I wouldn´t know about FS9, unfortunately, as I don´t have it...

Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

 

[Shessi]

Hi A,
All interesting I think. Would be good to talk to those who originally worked on CFS2, it would so easy to answer the many questions!

I'll have a comparitive look between CFS2 and Fs9, and see if there's anything useful.

And I must take a look at MH's water sounds, good to have choice.

Cheers

Shessi

 

[rohan]

Maybe it is irrelevant to this discussion, but I have been looking at a lot of planes that claim to use Mike Hambly's water sounds, and have found very few. That is, when I open the downloaded files, they contain no files called anything like "water" or "splash", despite the fact that the sound.cfg calls such files up. Perhaps this means that any water sounds you are hearing are actually default files from the simulator.

However, I did find 4 files at flightsim.com which do contain files with such names, and which have reference to these files in the sound.cfg. Perhaps these files will be useful to your discussion -

pscfloat.zip

ba_wp.zip

cubfp2k.zip

teal25v2.zip

HTH,
Ro

 

[aleatorylamp]

Water sound file names

Hello rohan,

Interesting comments. Amongst FS98 sea- or floatplanes, I found several water-sound wav files that had the original names of the normal left/right/centre touchdown sounds. The ones I´m referring to and using at the moment are ssTOUCC, ssTOUCR and ssTOUCL, (from Mike Hambly´s Short Sandringham). Variants of the same are found with normal names xmtoucl, xmtoucr and xmtoucr, (from a PBY Catalina), all with .wav suffixes of course.

The problem isn´t really which water sounds to use, but the fact that CFS2 poses limitaions as to where and how water sounds can actually
be made to work.

Anyway, at least we can give results a 70% or so pass mark to our endeavour: Aforementioned sounds are merrily working, nicely and clearly audible in 2D panel and Virtual Cockpit views. The 30% fail puntuation would be for inaudible water sounds from outside viewpoints and the slide-on landings Shessi was mentioning, but Oh, well... such is life.

Hello Shessi,
What are MH's water sounds? - I´m afraid I don´t understand.

Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

 

[Shessi]

M ike H ambly water sounds..ha!

Don't forget gents that M$ changed the sims a lot from Fs98 to Fs2000/2002, then again to Fs2004, AND these are the FS series not CFS series of sims. I think it would be more relavent to see if CFS1 did anything with sounds differently, but I bet not, as again ther are no native FB/FP ac in that sim, and therefore they would only want water bourne crash sounds.

As you say A, you have done well grasshopper, and I expect 2 out of 3 is the best you'll get (and 70% is a good pass mark in my books!), and I'll look forward to cockpit water sounds...

May I suggest making a 'how to' package, with an example, and uploading, so that others can get get water sounds?


Cheers

Shessi

 

[aleatorylamp]

Hi Shessi,
Oh! how obvious - Oh Dear! I must be getting old... never mind... Mike Hambly did come up with some excellent sounds.

Also, you are quite right that the CFS2 has come quite a long way - its spectacular visual water effects make up very
well for the lack of outside-view water sounds, especially when you take into account what you had to do to get a wake
on the flat blue monochrome FS98 water surface.

OK, I must look into how CFS1 does watersounds. I wonder...

Yes, I agree that a "how to" is a good idea. In fact, I wrote one into the Floatplane Readme this afternoon, explaining
about the Aircraft.cfg Contact Point Type 4 (floats) issue, with Position 13 having values 7 and 8 for the Sound.cfg to
do its act for Aux 1 and Aux 2 Scrape sound assignments, in case anyone needs the information.
I was just improving some texture business on the floatplane, and hopefully I can upload very soon!

Definitely, I also agree with you that a 2 out of 3 for the CFS2 sounds is a pleasing achievement!
Thanks for your comments!
Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

 

[Shessi]

Hi A,

I have been looking into Fs9 water sounds. As said, they are driven by the flag 8 call, but only a few ac actually have external water sounds, something I have never noticed. And internally most of the time the engine/wind noise drowns (ha!) out any potential water sound, so it's not that noticeable. I have a lot of water aircraft and have only found one that actually has water sounds in all 3 locations ie 2D, VC and externally (MVG's Cant 506).

I've also looked at CFS2 again, and yes, as you say, it doesn't use flag 8 sound calls, and that's why you can't hear it, only by fooling it like you have done in the 2D/VC. If we could get into the sim code, then a lot could be unlocked.

Look forward to the 'How to'.

Cheers

Shessi

 

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Shessi,
I´ll have to look into the way CFS1 handles watersounds, but at the moment I´m quite bogged down with quite a
few things, and have no time. Then, I don´t know enough about programming to get into the CFS2 source code,
but it´s an interesting thought.

The "How to" is really already in Post #11 and Post #13, so in reality, it already exists!

For float-planes without tail-float it is what I posted in my post #11 in this thread.
The only things that could change would be which and how many water sounds you would decide to use.

I used filenames watrsndl (or ssTOUCL would do as well) and watrlnd1 for left sounds,
and filenames watrsndr (or ssTOUCR would be OK too) and watrlnd2 for right sounds.

For Floatplanes with Tail float, you would add what I posted in post #13, for centre sounding sounds, and filenames could be
watrsndc, or ssTOUCC, combined with watrlnd1 and watrlnd2 (these last two are centre-sounding sounds anyway).

If all goes well and I have time in a short while I´ll upload the floatplane in question.

Cheers,
Aleatorylamp