Modding quake 3 arena sound

ioquake3 dev
1

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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too old, but i thing this guy left this project, haha.
i’ve making something with this but replacing “mastering” the weapons original ones by the quake champions, because qc have been released all the quake 3 weapons and they used the uncompressed versions, i mean, 22khz on q3 vs 44.1khz on qc.

but, i’ve encountered that q3 vanilla can’t reproduce 44.1khz sounds, only 22khz ones.

i know i know, newer engines can reproduce 44.1khz, i’ll make two version, for vanilla and newer engines.

for the vanilla case: i’ve converted them to 22khz, some fine tuning, and the result is awesome, even when the sample still 22hz, the rework sounds is impressive.

i’ll share this soon on moddb, i want to convert some remain weapons that i want to “remaster”.

cheers.

weapons already remastered:
qcq3_sfx_lightning.pk3 | this one i like the new hum sound
qcq3_sfx_machine.pk3 | now sound a lot better, with more power without left the original sound stile
qcq3_sfx_plasma.pk3 | i’ve done a trick here, i don’t use directly the sound file, i’ve played the sound trough the game, from the saber engine placing the player on alone place, and then shot 1 plasma. the saber engine have a impressive sound 3D effect, so that was captured on the final sound file.
qcq3_sfx_rocket.pk3 | new explosion effect, new flight effect, very cool
qcq3_sfx_shotgun.pk3 | this is my favorite, again, i’ve played trough the saber engine, and the results now is a exquisite powerful shotgun, you want to use this weapon more than other only for hearing the new sound effect.