Problems adding ambient sounds to new areas

[Darios]

I am finishing off a group of new areas for the mod I am working on, and when trying to add ambient sounds to some of them, I encountered rather unexpected but all the more persistent problems with the area crashing the game whenever ambient sounds were present. I tried adding the ambients both with IETME and DLTCEP, but the results were just the same (ie. area works without ambients but  adding an ambient sound somehow breaks it).

I don’t think I have made any obvious errors, and I even tried copying the ambient directly from an original area (changing the coordinates to fit the new area, obviously) using DLTCEP. The strange thing is, that in some of the new areas, adding ambients caused no problems even though it was done exactly in the same way. Those of you who have done more area editing could probably point out the pitfalls involved in adding area sounds that I have missed and that might be causing the problem.

-Darios

[Ghreyfain]

Are you sure the .wav file for the ambient sound is in the override folder?  I've ported a few IWD areas to BG2 and whenever I missed an ambient, it would crash the game.

[Caswallon]

Ambient sounds only work if they are located
- in the same BIF file as the area WED
- in the Override
- probably in ambsound.bif or 25ambsnd.bif, maybe also sfxsound.bif.
If you add ambients with NI, it lets you choose from these sources only.

[SimDing0™]

They don't work in compressed BIFs. Or something.

[Cuv]

As Ghrey said,  the sounds have to be in the override to prevent a crash.   You can use WeiDU to extract them to the override upon install though.

Cuv

[Meira]

Yep, placing the sounds to the override solved the crashing problem. I don't think that I or Darios ever saw, that sounds must be in the override instead of the BIFs, being mentioned in any of the tutorials, but maybe we just missed it. Thanks for the help. 

-Meira

[Avenger_teambg]

My vote would be: either in an uncompressed bif or in the override. The fact they work in a compressed bif is due to it gets uncompressed when the area is first loaded. So it is safe to put them in the same bif as the wed. Btw, the tileset should be handled similarly. It could be that only weds trigger bif uncompression.