LE The generic lo-fi impact sound

[lazyskeever]

I've always been bugged by this particular sound called wpn_impact_generic_lofi. Basically it's a very dull sound with a neutral character that you hear very often when hitting stuff in the game (any object with any type of weapon), even though there is a rich variety of different impact sounds available.

 

Figured out that this sound will play once when you hit a surface different from the last one you hit, and after the initial impact any subsequent hits will start playing the sounds appropriate for the havok material. This is something I've been wanting to adress, so it just plays the proper impact sound straight away, but I couldn't figure out how to do it.

 

At first I thought it was something hard-coded or embedded into the havok data. But when I look at the Sound Descriptor settings for the impact sounds in the Creation Kit, I see that they all have wpnimpactgenericlofi listed as an Alternate (the arrow impacts do not, and aren't affected by this issue so that makes sense). But this is set up in a weird sort of way so you can't change the alternate sound from the Sound Descriptor in question, you have to go to the Sound Descriptor for the alternate sound you want to use and assign it to the chosen sound.

So I guess the solution is to just erase the Alternate data from the Sound Descriptors somehow. Only I can't figure out if there is any way to do it in the CK. And yeah, I've tried assigning the same sound as an Alternate for itself, but that didn't seem to do anything.

 

Then there's of course the question of why Bethesda even made impact sounds behave this way in the first place...