Similar to custom graphics, custom sounds crosses multiple domains, including but not included to, custom weapons, items, and map props. This page will cover some of the common use cases with implementing new sounds and show a brief example of how that sound might be used in practice.
<aside> 💡 Required Materials:
For the sake of starting fresh, we’re gonna start this tutorial by just creating a new PK3 archive in SLADE. We can do this by opening SLADE and clicking on the buttons shown to the right.
Starting to create a new archive.
Once you’ve clicked that Archive button, it’ll prompt you for which type of archive to create. You’ll want to create a Zip Archive. With our new archive, let’s go ahead the sounds folder which we’ll need for our new sounds.
This folder must be named like this for the sounds to be recognized proper!
Now that we’ve made some changes to our archive, we can go ahead and save it by using the save button in the upper left, or its shortcut hotkey, CTRL + S. Be very cognizant when saving this archive, because we want to save it as a PK3 file, not a standard ZIP file! The screenshot below shows me saving the file with the name v6b-HonkingPenguins-v1a and a file extension of .pk3 so that we create a PK3 file.
Don’t forget this step!
Now that we have a PK3, we can begin adding our sounds into it. We’ll be adding some funny honking sounds to the Penguin Bombers in Gemini Man’s stage.
A simple way to add files into the PK3 via SLADE is to first click the folder where you want files to end up in, then to click the Import Files button. This will bring up a file browser where you can select all of the files to import. Select all the files in there, then click the Open button to bring them into SLADE.
<aside> 🚨 The filenames for all sounds generally should only be 8 characters or less (not including the file extension itself). If it is longer, it can cause insidious errors which may be difficult to track down and correct!
</aside>
You’ll then be able to verify that it was put into the desired location and if the sound format allows for it, you can even preview the sound.
