Modding quake 3 arena sound

greetings everyone

my name is tiago . i am 28, and i completed a master degree in sonology in the hague back in 2013. i’ve been working towards modding quake 3 arena sound for already some months. i first tried it with open arena. now, i am trying it with the official content. my first step will be mixing and mastering all the library sounds, so that i can then focus on making new sounds from scratch. the first thing i did was converting the pak0.pk3 file to a zip file, extracting it, and now i am re-engineering all the sounds from scratch. i first tweaked the world sounds. some sounds sound far much better then the original ones. another of them will have to be reviewed. after that, i will make my own sounds from scratch, by re-sampling it from ableton live sound library combined with maxmsp csound predate and supercollider, and then getting the whole thing together within a single package. the issue is that when i try to test my sounds, i pack them back to zip by zipping them on the macosx terminal and then chasing the extensions of the files from *.zip to *.pk3. when i replace the original content in ioquake3, i get a checksum error. i think it might be related to either the size of the files, or a changing in the number of files. can someone help me to fix this. kind regards. tiago

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You can avoid the checksum error by creating a new pk3 file (that alphabetically is after pak8.pk3, such as sounds-tiago.pk3) instead of modifying the official Quake 3 pk3 files.

An alternate option for testing is to put the files (unzipped) in baseq3/sound/ using the same sound path structure as in the Q3 pk3 files (i.e., baseq3/sound/feedback/hit.wav) and set sv_pure console variable to 0 so that non-pk3 files are loaded. I think you can reload sounds in-game using the snd_restart console command, which would skip the need to restart the game to test changes.

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