Sound effect volume/disable through INI file

A recurring issue is vexatious (to some people, not others) sound effects, either through use beyond sound design parameters (insane attack speed or projectile count), player behaviour which wasn't anticipated (hot swapping Ralakesh's Impatience pre-patch), or lighthearted but persistent griefing by players with audio MTX in town (ewok band), etc.

This is a low effort "one and done" solution which can rely on community tools to provide the UI. Every subsequent "please disable X sound effect because it's annoying under Y circumstance" post can be answered by the community with instructions.

I suggest adding production_SFX.ini alongside production_Config.ini. Separately since community tools may modify it and to avoid corrupting the main INI file.

[VOLUME]
some_bank/some_effect_name=disable
other_bank/some_effect_name=disable
third_bank/another_effect_name=50

Effect paths are published somewhere unintrusive to avoid community reverse engineering breaching TOS. They don't have to be documented, just listed, as people will figure it out.

Prior to FX playback, this registration is checked (via a hash, or otherwise not slowly) and disabled sound effects are not played. Volume is multiplicative, so the 100 max INI volume is the designer-intended volume.

In other games trivial write-one-before-lunch mods might provide this, but TOS prevents that. There is no other one stop TOS-friendly alternative I can think of other than protracted ones omitted here.
Last edited by Genstein#2693 on Jan 15, 2024, 7:33:43 PM
Last bumped on Jan 15, 2024, 7:32:42 PM
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