Stellaris Enhanced Sound Project

Link to soundcloud for weapon examples - You can also expect to hear new sound samples from my profile there https://soundcloud.com/peerawat-nonthaphodej/sets/enhanced-sound-project-weapon-categories Note : The soundcloud does not includes Apoc Titan or Fallen Titan sounds or npc weapons atm. But they are all in the mod.

This is my second mod project for Stellaris, it aims to replace various space and UI sounds within the game with probably more epic and cinematic ones. Most sounds are a combination mix of Starcraft 2, Command and Conquer 3 and the base game itself.

It is still in it's early-middle stage and will see a lot more updates as I work more on it alongside my other projects and my master degree study. I am still experimenting on how much I can tamper with the game's sound designs and systems.

I encourage people to check patchnotes often, I archieved every changes I made in every updates.

Background

I really like many things about Stellaris, however the sound designs are not really one of them. While many sound effects are acceptable, I feel like the weapon and ship sounds kinda not epic enough. And there're certain sounds I absolutely dislike, such as the fleet clicking sound "Hsssszz" "Hsssszz" or mass drivers "pennng pennng" and FTL drives which sounds like a slap more than "tearing a frabic of space and jump into the new system"

It's probably not realistic, but I base my inspirations from Mass Effects, Starcrafts and some other sci-fis and those games have awesome sounds.

Requirements :

Base Game - It is rather important you have the base game for this mod to work, no seriously!

The mod also make chances to DLC sounds, but those without DLCs should be able to use the mod regardless.

What does this mod change?

• Almost every weapon sounds.
• Explosions - "Commander, you may want to inform your pilots to excersie restraints when using explosives"
• Various event sounds, some with musical stingers to increase intensity.
• Ship movement sounds.
• All colossus sounds.
• FTL sounds
• Starbase, spaceport, mining station sounds.
• Ship-related UI sounds, such as Repairing, retrofitting, selecting and ship designing sounds.
• Other sounds I dislike in the base game and want to see improvements.
• Allows human diplomats to have multiple voices instead of keep saying the same word everytime.

Important Note : Any weapons/component mods that use the base game sound files will also likely recieve these changes so they too will be changed to the enhanced versions.

Known Issues

• Stellaris has rather limited maximum sound channel capacity. Originally, the game sound assets somehow decided that shields and ship explosions should take priority over weapon sounds. This results in many weapon sounds being muted in heat fights. This mod attempts to correct this problem by redefining all the parameters so that weapons take priority in space battles and stupid, minor things like "shield-hitting" sounds no longer has any priority and will not try to fire if sound channel is full.

Furthermore, the original game has rather terrible variables on certain weapons or sounds that should have been loud and proud (like the darn Titan Perdition Lance), do you know that the game set these to be 0.4 of the original .wav, and then further reduced it to 0.4 in the soundassets. Resulting in many weapons simply being quiet as hell. The mod attempts to fix this issue as well by altering the numbers, bringing weapon volume to bear.

The new sound prioritization defines are changed as followed for space combat

3000 - Perdition Lance - You'll always hear this bad boy no matter, this is the same number as Fallen Titan's Lance. 100 - XL-sized weapons - In space battles, you'll always hear these most of the times, they are the big hitters. 80 - L-sized weaoins - Not as important as XL, but still very much so. 60 - Laser, Gauss, Plasma and Disruptor. 50 - Missiles, they have long ranges and fire fast, so you'll hear them at the start of the fight everytime anyway. 40 - Torpedoes, abit less often than missiles and they also has longer sound files, hence lower priority. 10 - Autocannons and Flak Cannons, they fire fast so they are low in order to not eat up the space. 10 - Large ship explosions. 5 - Small ship explosions. N/A - Shield-hitting sounds and point-defense, these are minor things that should only be played if more important stuffs are not playing.

Perdition Beam fire and charge up volume has been increased to 1.1 and 0.9 and another of the same numbers in the assets because why the hell not.

Tachyon Lance and Arc Emitter charge up sounds have their volume slightly increased so they can be potentially heard.

Also, I chose to not change the "distant" version of the sounds atm as that'll take too much work, these sounds will only play if you literally zoom out at maximum and/or is looking away from the battlefield.

Compatibility

• Save Game Compatible and probably Ironman/Multiplayer Compatible too - It's just a sound project.
• Overwrites many base game sounds, so it will conflict with mods that also changes those sounds
• Overwrites the following files within the sound folder (I'm almost 100% certain majority of the mods don't touch these if they're not changing sounds.

1. sound.asset : Controls the volume, priority and importance of individual sounds.
2. soundeffects.asset : Controls the sound group and how much each sound are permitted to play at the same time.
3. apocalypse.asset : Contains sounds for Apoc DLC, most importantly, the Ion Cannon and Perdition Lance.
4. gui_sound_effects.asset : Controls various UI-related sound