SSE Struggling to apply footstep sounds to NPC

[cumbrianlad]

Hi.

 

It's my dwarven spider pet again. I've got it totally stealthy and the voc files used for its replies to the player are nice and quiet, but I can't seem to get its footsteps to be any quieter than vanilla. I realise that its animation sounds like fighting and picking at walls are untouchable... tied into havok behavior animations. I thought the footsteps should work, though, since there seems to be a clear pathway to applying them, ultimately in the armour add on.

 

I've taken duplicted vanilla sound descriptors for the footsteps and applied a larger attenuation to all 4 of these. Then I trailed through the process of assigning all these sounds to the impact forms, impact sets, footsteps, footstep set and finally applied the footstep set to both armour addon forms for my spider. I've checked through all of the forms a few times but can't see anything wrong.

 

Is there more than this to get the quieter sounds to work? Or are the footsteps also somehow tied into the havok animation files, too?

 

Edit: I should add that the spider has its own race with no morph data. It has its own skin and FXskin with their own armour add-ons. It has its own Movement Data and an actor as an audio template. The only thing it shares with a vanilla dwarven spider are the behaviour graph, skeleton and body part data in the race.

[cumbrianlad]

Solved!

 

The proces was as I thought but I'd missed one step (no pun intended!)

 

FYI this is the process:

 

1. Duplicate the relevant footstep sound descriptors for your actor. Rename with unique IDs as normal.

2. Alter the static attenuation, dB variance, Frequency Shift and frequency variance to suit. You can also edit the sounds in an external program such as Audacity and point the filepath(s) to your new file(s).

3. Duplicate all left and right ImpactData forms that use these sounds and point them to the SoundDescriptor forms from step 2.

4. Duplicate and edit all ImpactDataSet forms that use these sounds and point every material type listed to your new ImpactData forms from step 3.*

5. Duplicate both Footstep forms (Left and Right) that use the sounds and point these to the relevant ImpactDataSet from step 4.

6. Duplicate the FootstepSet that uses the sounds and point each relevant 'Movement State' to the left and right Footstep forms created in step 5. *2

7. Edit any armour add-on form where the sounds are applied and point the 'Footstep' drop-down at the bottom to the FootstepSet made in step 6.

 

* You don't have to stick to the format Bethesda used here. I didn't. For instance the dwarven spiders make the same loud clanking on snow that they do on stone, rather than the quieter sound that they make on grass or dirt. I altered these to the quiter version on snow, cloth and any other soft/yielding material type. If you are creative with sound editing externally, there's nothing to stop you making additional footstep sounds for wood, snow, stone, cloth, etcetera and assigning them here but it's a lot more work.

 

*2 This is what I missed. When I duplicated the forms I didn't notice the movement types drop-down menu for walking, running, sprinting, sneaking and swimming. You need to alter what's in each to point to your new Footstep forms. My spider was quiet but only when walking. Since it was almost always running, it was using the vanilla footstep sounds because I hadn't changed them!

 

Now that I know it all works I'll use the sound files edited in Audacity which have a classic 'muffle' filter applied to them.