A couple of days ago I had received a mission for beta testing from famous level author Pumo, who is fearlessly trespassing realms of Descent level building no man has ever seen before, and when I was playing through the levels I was completely dazzled by the way he had created sound ambience using sound triggers and custom sound effects. I have never ever experienced Descent like that before, not even when playing Descent 3: These mines felt like a live and active mechanism, doing all sorts of things behind their walls and panels. Pumo has created a whole new sense of immersion here.

Now I had been thinking about adding sound effect objects to D2X-XL for a while already, and when I saw what you could achieve with a few simple sounds, I just had to sit down and hack this into DLE-XP and D2X-XL. Since both programs already support effect objects, adding another effect object type and the data structures required for it was a simple task. Sound objects are much easier to handle than sound triggers and are perfectly suited for creating permanent sound effects. You simply add the name of the sound's wav file and set a sound volume between 10% and 100%, and that's it.

The first thing I did when the feature was done was to shamelessly rip some of Pumo's sound samples and put them into a few of my levels. I found the result just awesome, and particularly impressive in conjunction with water levels, which you can equip with the sound of rushing water, gushing and rumbling water falls and drops of water splatting on the ground with the typical echo of a huge cave. Level no. four 'Nautilus' from my mission 'Warp Shockwave' is a perfect example for this. I even had the sensation of breathing cool, humid air when cruising through it.

Here is a list of levels you can try out to experience what a difference ambient sounds make. Extract the archives to your D2X-XL main folder, including the folders stored in the archives. When you look at the single player missions, turn robots off (d2x.ini: -nobotai) or kill them ('delshiftb' cheat).

Singleplayer missions (find them in files/missions/single):

Boiling Point
Warp Shockwave
Lunar Outpost Reloaded


Multiplayer missions (find them in files/missions/diedel):

Styx (D3)
TombZ of D3ZtruKtion
Diedel's Playground (D3)

Here is a movie I have created to demonstrate ambient sound in D2X-XL: