Plasma Rifle sound cut out (PRBoom+)

[Darch]

In PrBoom+, if you shoot the plasma gun near a wall, the firing sound (DSPLASMA) gets cut out by the plasmaball death sound (DSFIRXPL). I've tried changing sound priorities with dehacked, but it didn't work. Anyway to fix this?

[Aurelius]

One way to do it is to clear the plasma projectile death sound, set the BrainPain codepointer on its first death frame and replace DSBOSPN with DSFIRXPL. It only seemed to work with full volume sounds and only when it's not set explicitly as the death sound. The full volume aspect might be a downside, especially in coop/multiplayer It also makes each individual projectile death sound audible instead of cutting them off, which could end up sounding jarring if the vanilla sounds are used.

 

In MBF you can use the PlaySound codepointer for similar effect without using existing sound related codepointers, but it still seems to require the full volume. However, in MBF21 you could set A_WeaponSound for the plasma gun itself so it wouldn't get cut off by the projectile death sound, and no full volume sounds would be needed.

EDIT: Off the top of my head, if you were in MBF you could try using Spawn to create an instantly dying invisible dummy thing on fire that would then have the desired sound as its death sound, but I don't really know if it'd work that way.

Edited March 8, 2022 by Aurelius

[Darch]

@Aurelius I didn't know about MBF21, thank you. Looks like a "clean" solution for me, but according to the Doom Wiki. it's not supported by PRBoom+, I'm afraid

[Aurelius]

DSDA-Doom is an actively developed fork of PrBoom+ that can be considered as the de facto successor to PrBoom+. It has full MBF21 support. Many other commonly used ports also support it (or plan to support it in the near feature), such as Woof!, Eternity, GZDoom and Doom Retro to name a few. Granted it is not quite as widely supported as Boom or MBF, but it is growing in popularity and is a recommended alternative if you want to extend the dehacked capabilities a bit further, without moving away from the way PrBoom+ feels to play.

 

Here's the full specification. You can take a look and see if any of the other stuff is of interest. I wouldn't necessarily jump over to MBF21 just to prevent sound cutoff, but there's other interesting stuff that you might find worth looking into.

[Lippeth]

The funny thing is, I made a file for GZDoom to revert the plasmagun back to its original sound behavior because I always thought it was a bit too much to have them both play over each other even though it's probably more technically coherent.