Computer games with accessible sound libraries (WAVs and such)

McKinsey

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Nov 14, 2011
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Hello, my fellow Escapists.

I would like you to delve into your vast knowledge of computer games to help me to accomplish something. I'm working on a personal project for which I need to acquire a lot of sound effects of the "warfare" variety: gunfire, bullet impacts, explosions, things breaking and such. I've figured that since this is a non-commercial project and I don't intend to distribute it among general public, there would be no harm in utilising sound libraries from games.

Unfortunately, most games these days store their sounds in large encoded databases, making it impossible to extract anything. My goal is to find games where sounds are presented in simple WAV, MP3 or OGG formats, and this is where your memory may come in handy. For example, Valve doesn't bother to use encryption, and I was able to obtain a couple of neat samples from Left 4 Dead (and am looking forward to butcher Counter-Strike), but it's not nearly enough. What other games would you suggest?
 

TheYellowCellPhone

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Sep 26, 2009
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I know for certain every sound in Battlefield 3 is up for download on the Internet. (Not sure if it's offically released by EA or DICE, but I don't think they've opposed it yet. Also, I don't think you need to own the game to get it). Something like 8GBs of unadultered soundbits of high quality voice commands and high quality gunshots, most of which in (I think) .mp3 files.

Battlefield 3 has easily the best gunfight ambience too. Guns sound beefy and the sound they make changes depending on range and what environment you're in (louder indoors, spaced out in the open), instead of most FPSs where guns sound the same, and similar to a blender.
 

Bad Jim

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Try Fraps to record your gameplay. The free version lets you record up to 30 seconds which is fine for most sounds. You can set it to record at 1 fps at half size so you don't end up with massive files.

Then you need games where you can hear the sounds in isolation, with no music and not too much going on at once. COD is rather bad for this, but in a game like Half Life you can just clear the immediate area and fire your weapons and do stuff on your own.

Then you extract the audio from your recordings with Virtuadub.

Also, do google "extracting sounds from whatever" for all your games. Especially the ones that are known for moddability.
 

Esotera

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I'm fairly sure Civilization III used sound in an accessible format, the other games in the franchise are probably the same. I guess older games would be a good bet as no-one really cared about obfuscating assets back then.
 

Generalissimo

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Hearts of iron 3 has a very accessable sound library in a convenient named folder, very convenient for making ringtones out of :p
 

Jimmy T. Malice

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Dec 28, 2010
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Valve games have accessible sound libraries if you use a program called GCFscape to open up the .gcf files.
 

McKinsey

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TheYellowCellPhone said:
I know for certain every sound in Battlefield 3 is up for download on the Internet.
This would have solved all of my problems, but, sadly, I wasn't able to find these sounds.
 

TheYellowCellPhone

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McKinsey said:
TheYellowCellPhone said:
I know for certain every sound in Battlefield 3 is up for download on the Internet.
This would have solved all of my problems, but, sadly, I wasn't able to find these sounds.
I know this because the guys who found a really difficult easter egg in BF3 recently only found it by downloading this file.

The video in question.

They don't seem to paste the link for the download. Try watching the video or following some links in the description, I honestly didn't listen to it when I fetched this link for you.