Difference between revisions of "Soundbanks (first generation, Amiga)"

Revision as of 00:59, 26 July 2020

The Worms series of games has a notion of "soundbanks", which allows players to customize their worm teams by assigning them a set of sounds (called a "soundbank"), either from a collection included with the game, or creating a custom soundbank from player-specified sound files.

Worms and WormsDC on the Amiga use speechbanks made up of individual files for specific instances, as opposed to the MS-DOS versions which use a single file containing multiple samples. Each sound file must be in the IFF sound format. Frequency and size does not matter, although the game will crash if it runs out of memory while attempting to store a soundbank that is too large (this obvious varies depending on the memory capacity of the Amiga).

In Worms the only soundbank options available are for English, German and French (stored in "TWENGLISH", "TWGERMAN" and "TWFRENCH" respectively). Fans of the series would often delete the two "redundant" languages and replace them with custom speechbanks of their own, or that they had downloaded from AmiNET.

WormsDC formalized the use of custom soundbanks by removing the limit of speechbanks available (although the German and French banks were removed from the game to save disk space). Soundbanks are stored in the "TWSAMPLES" drawer and are named for the drawer they are then stored in (e.g. the default English soundbank is stored in a drawer named "DEFAULT").

If a file is missing from a soundbank, the game will load the corresponding sound file from the default bank ("TWENGLISH" for Worms, "DEFAULT" for WormsDC).

WormsDC soundbank logic

Where the Amiga version of Worms used sound files with fixed names for specific occurrences, WormsDC groups related sounds under one name and appends a numerical suffix as the file extension. For example where Worms uses "ByeBye" and "OhDear" for Worms who terminate themselves after reaching 0 HP, WormsDC instead uses "ByeBye.1" and "ByeBye.2".

This makes it possible to have more sounds for a particular occurrence, so you could hypothetically have as many "ByeBye" sounds as you like by simply adding more files with higher-numbered extensions ("ByeBye.6", for instance). However you are limited by the memory capacity of the Amiga you're playing the game on.

This feature is not documented in either the game manual or the on-disk ReadMe.

Sound references

Filenames marked with a * also include an alternate lower-quality "2M" file in WormsDC for computers with less than 2MB of RAM. These files are usually named "{sound name}2M" or "{soundname}2M.{number}".