What's with all these sound folders?

[Caru]

So I was looking through the original Doom 3's pak003.pk4 (the one with all the sound files, or most of them anyways), and I noticed something a bit odd. These sound files are organized in the strangest way -- about half of them appear to be organized in the typical manner of putting them in folders that have something to do with their use in the game (weapons sounds, monster sounds, etc.); but then the other half appear to be organized by what I can only assume is which id employee compiled them? I think? There's a "chris" folder, a "dane" folder, a "xian" folder, a few others I've probably missed -- and within those folders the sounds are organized by type, as the others are. Now what I find weird is that many of these sounds I have definitely never heard in the game, and many more are redundant -- yes there are multiple chaingun sounds per source, that makes sense because you want slight variation per shot, but then there are different sets of chaingun sounds coming from different places in different folders that sound nothing alike. And this happens all over the place -- I have different sets of wraith sounds (one of which is very bestial and I think is the one that got used, and another of which is much quieter and spooky), there's a folder called "44" that contains a series of nested singular folders that ultimately contains just one sound . . . it's frankly the kind of organization I would expect to find on an old person's desktop.

 

In fact, it's such a bizarre setup that I'm actually wondering if maybe I downloaded a mod (or a bunch of mods) years and years ago that added stuff to the pak003 folder (which is basically just a renamed .zip folder). Am I right, or does everyone have a pak003.pk4 that looks like this? And if so, is there a story here? Because I've never heard of a studio leaving this many unused assets in the game files on release. If I wanted to replace a sound, how would I even know which file to replace?

 

EDIT: It gets weirder, now I've found what are definitely the zombie sounds from Brutal Doom, though I'm guessing they were here first. Did id seriously leave all their testing sounds in the final release? I'm definitely not complaining, it's actually kind of awesome to have a record of the iterative process of Doom 3's sound design, if indeed that's what this is.

 

EDIT EDIT: Okay, apparently those were the default zombie commando sounds. I have no idea how I've never noticed this before.

Edited October 11, 2020 by Caru

[Xyz]

You are not guessing. Brutal Doom uses Doom 3 sounds. 

 

They have a messed up folder structure. Maybe they didn't care. It's hard to track all those sounds at some point. 

[Gez]

It's probably just how it was during development, and they zipped up their development folder. I suppose "Chris" is for Chris Vrenna.

[RonnieJamesDiner]

22 hours ago, Caru said:

Am I right, or does everyone have a pak003.pk4 that looks like this?

 

Having scrounged around in that thing myself over the years, that's exactly how my pak003.pk4 looks, as well. I've always assumed it was like Gez said -- it probably came time to package everything up, and there was no point in spending the time/energy to organize it. 

[Tetzlaff]

Doom 3 has a very rich sound design (especially regarding the ambient sounds) and they had more than one designer working on it, so it comes at no surprise that you have many different folders.

 

As already mentioned, some folders are named after designers.

 

xian: Xian is the nickname of Christian Antkow

chris: Chris Vrenna

dane: Danetracks Inc.?

patd: Patrick Duffy?

e3: probably made for a presentation for the Electronic Entertainment Expo?

ed: editing?