[enhancement idea] Higher quality and/or alternative sound effects

[Laurie Chilvers]

I hope no one minds me opening this issue for something that technically isn’t broken. I mean it only in hope to spark a discussion really.

This project already does amazing work helping to save Daikatana from its rather unkind fate, and it is great that it fixes up the AI, maps, and gives option the best version of the textures and music.

When I play it again though, I feel like in hindsight, none of those parts of the game were as terrible as everyone at the time made them out to be, and they weren’t really what turned me off the game when I finally played it. It just came at the wrong time. It’s not exactly as if Sin or Kingpin or Heretic II completely outclassed it, and despite how green the first episode is, at least it wasn’t as brown as Quake II.

The thing that always gave me the worst impression of the game though was the sound. I feel like it was the final straw, because you don’t even get to walk 10 feet at the beginning without being subjected to that awful, sloppily looped, FM quality obnoxious fly buzzing sound, which continues droning on unsympathetically for pretty much the first hour of the game.

While I was enjoying this experience, I was reminded of a really awesome non-invasive mod for Doom by a guy called Per Kristian, its a tiny little addon but it makes the game so much more pleasant on the sound front https://www.perkristian.net/game_doom-sfx.shtml .All of the sounds from Doom came from commonly used sound libraries or were .. erm… “sampled” from popular movies and it would have only took time to track them down and bundle them together.

What do people think of this kind of idea for Daikatana?

What if it were just a partial mod, eg for sounds that are sort of generic ambient noises (there's plenty of nice royalty free stuff if you dig hard enough)?

What are the chances John Romero remembers some clues about how the sounds were sourced / produced?

What haven’t I thought of that makes this idea hard or dumb or pointless?

[Frank Sapone]

Personally I think the sound quality is OK for the era of the game.  The music sounds just fine.  If someone wants to make a sound pack they are welcome to go as ridiculous as they want. However, the scope of the project and the little interest in this game it's unlikely it would ever come to fruition, let alone a complete, polished state.

[Laurie Chilvers]

Interesting input, although, lets say for the sake of argument, if someone were to have an interest and were willing to put the work in, would you be against them doing that? (*just asking for a friend)

[Frank Sapone]

If you were somehow able to hire professional people and record it professionally then maybe. But I’d be amazed someone would go to this length for Daikatana. Never say never; but I highly doubt anyone at any time, anywhere would do this for this game.

[Laurie Chilvers]

I’m not sure if that’s meant to be ironic or not… I mean, there’s this guy I heard of on the internet that put the time in to rework the source code and make the game playable, I don’t know if you have heard of him :)

Joking aside, my general idea of this patch is probably a lot more frugal and subtle than what I might have made it sound like. The Doom example I gave was a bit of a red herring, there isn’t the same overriding need to re-record or resample anything here because the original sounds aren’t stored in the less than radio quality sample rate used in 1993. In fact there really isn’t actually anything drastically wrong with any of the sound effects in the game taken on their own, and the music is pretty much faultless, but there are some simple weaknesses in the execution of the whole thing that really let it down.

I don’t know if I can really explain my position that well. It might be best if I just come back with a prototype.

[Frank Sapone]

Pending a demo/proof-of-concept from user.