This is a thing that has annoyed me for some time. I have an area where I have some Placed Effects like an Air Elemental or two. Whenever I open this area in the toolset there’s a quite loud noise fromt the Air Elemental. Trying it InGame everything sounds great, but in the toolset it’s really annoying to have this loud sound playing when you’re fiddling with the area in question. Sure, I can just turn the volume to zero on my amplifier but…Is there anyway in the toolset to turn off sound coming from objects when working on an area? I’ve looked but I haven’t been able to find any such thing.
I already have those two off, so that doesn’t work.
If you try put an Air Elemental in an area yourself you’ll see what I mean.
Your right, Air Elementals play by their own rules.
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You may be already aware of this, but in case you are not, the elementals take their “appearance” via SEFs (effects), and as an example, the Air Elemental uses “fx_air_elemental.sef”. The sound you are hearing is attached to the SEF and not “part” of a creature or a placeable as such.
This sef file is made up from various aspects, including a sound file, which you are hearing and is called
“c_airelementalambience03.wav”. This info can be found via the Visual Effects editor.
Now, you could (I suppose) copy an “empty” sound file with the same name into your override, so that when you are working on them, it only plays the empty “soundless” file. This would work for every Air Elemental in your game/toolset all the while you have the “empty” sound file. (I believe the sound file needs special formatting to work, but it can be done.)
While turning the sound down is certainly an option, I can appreciate needing to hear other sounds while building, and so this would be the best solution as far as I can see. Just remember NOT to ship this “blank” sound file with your module and remember to remove it for your own testing, but it would be a quick and relatively easy thing to setup and use moving forward.
You could then add other “empty” file names for other intrusive sound files to a folder to add to your override, making it easy just to drag the folder into or out of your override as required.
And if you do manage to do this, I would be interested in having a copy of such a folder for my campaign … or I guess it is something I will do also if and when the time comes. 
As an aside, it was these exact same sound files (and the like) that would crash my toolset when played as I worked with them, due to the way they worked or rather did not work alongside some CODECs I also had installed on my computer. i.e. They are a little more unusual in the way they are implemented in the toolset.
Cheers, Lance.
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Thanks for the great reply, Lance! I did not know of this and your explaining seems very logical. I’ll try out the empty sound file thing. It shouldn’t be too hard. Hopefully the toolset and NWN2 will accept this. I’ve had other weird problems with sound files in the toolset (certain sound files not playing and so on even though I’ve followed all the “rules”…I’ve posted a thread about this some time ago, I think) so I’m not totally convinced this will work. I will get back to you.
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another simple solution would be to not place those air elementals. instead you could work with two spawn points and place the creatures at run-time via script on entering the area.
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It worked like a charm. I just created an empty mono wave file in Cubase. Here’s the empty file. Now I also have Fire Large that I need to do an empty file for. I’ll see if I can find out what that sound file is called.
EDIT: Found the name of the Fire Large sound file and added that too. If you want more empty sound files just copy one of these in the download and rename it to the sound file you want to replace temporarily.
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Sure, I could do that, but in this case the air elementals are more for mood and setting the tone in the area, and I like seeing them in the toolset as that let’s me know how things look.
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plug : SpecialEffectsViewer
A plugin for Neverwinter Night 2's Electron toolset.
This plugin plays nwn2's SpecialEffectFiles. Features include
list effects from the data, module, campaign, or override folders
search and/or filter the effects list
3 scene configurations: Display the effect on
a placed-effect object
a single creature (property: AppearanceSEF)
a source creature and a target creature
creature appearance is selectable
displays event-data of effects
play selected events only
restores window, camera, and other settings
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Sorry to hijack the thread, but this plug-in is very useful!
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