Play Sound

A sound from a point on the map or straight into the player's ears — with every knob the engine has

mediumYou need: What a world processor is, An effect on the map

playsound true @sfx-explosion 1 1 0 10 10 true

Field	What is in it
first	whether the sound is positional
second	which sound: an @sfx-… constant
third	volume
fourth	pitch
fifth	pan: further left or right
sixth and seventh	the point, if the sound is positional
eighth	whether to limit overlapping

Positional and global

A positional sound is tied to a point on the map: the further the player’s camera is from it the quieter it gets, and it is heard from the side the point is on. That is how shots and explosions sound.

A global one sounds the same for everybody everywhere — it is how you say an event happened, not that something knocked somewhere. Volume and pan work on it; coordinates are not needed.

Where the sounds come from

Every sound in the game is available as the constant @sfx-<name>: @sfx-explosion, @sfx-shoot, @sfx-pew, @sfx-place. The list is the same as the game’s files, and the editor’s picker shows all of it.

Note

The game caps volume at two: making one sound ten times louder than the rest will not work. Pitch changes a sound beyond recognition — that is how “new” sounds are made out of old ones.

Silent failure

The eighth field is protection against mush. With it, the game will not let the same sound pile on top of itself a hundred times. It is switched off rarely and deliberately: without the limit, a program playing a sound every iteration turns the game into a screech.

Note

The course sandbox has no sound, so there is no example for this lesson. In the game the instruction works as usual.

Remember

• playsound plays one of the game’s sounds: positional from a point or global for everybody.
• The sounds are @sfx-<name> constants.
• Volume is capped at two, pitch is free.
• The last field stops a sound piling on top of itself.