SAMPLING YOUR OWN SOUND SETS
----------------------------

Here are a few useful tips for sampling your own
sets of Worms sound effects.

Generally, when sampling you should of course try
to achieve the best sound quality possible, but
don't despair if your samples sound a bit hissy
and rough, after all, you will be working with
8bit samples and fairly low sampling frequencies.
Chances are you will be surprised to hear how well
your samples work once they are in the game, even
if you thought they sounded gritty and "off" when
played on their own.

Sampling frequency
------------------
First of all, you should keep in mind that once in
the game, all the samples will be played back at
exactly 15000 Hz. This means that anything sampled
at a lower frequency than this will be higher
pitched when it plays from within the game; and
anything sampled at a higher frequency than 15000
Hz, will play back slower and with a deeper voice
than your original sample. If you sample something
at, say, 11 KHz, it will sound "Donald Duck"'ified
when it is played inside the game. We have indeed
used this method to create cute and cuddly sounds
for some of the worms in the custom sound effect
sets provided on the Worms CD

Sampling at these fairly low frequencies may cause
certain sounds to distort slightly; you will find
that you can only go as low as about 11-12 Khz
before sounds such as "s", "f" and "t" start to
distort. However we do not recommend that you
operate with different sample frequencies within
the same one sound-set, that is, if you want your
sample-set to sound consistent and sound like the
same team of worms. So once you have decided on a
frequency to use for your sample-set, we recommend
that you stick to it throughout that set.
Commonly, we used effects sampled at 12Khz.

Volumes
-------
Try to keep all your samples at approximately the
same volume. We have found that somewhere between
60 and 80 percent of peak volume gives you a nice
volume balance inside the game. If you get samples
that "flatten" out at the top or bottom of the
sample-display, then you are using a too loud
input volume, and your samples will "clip", i.e.
they will distort.

Saving space
------------
You've got a total of 760 Kb for all the sounds in
your sound set. This means that you will have to
try to be economic with the space each sample
takes, so it's important that you cut off any
unused space at the beginning or end of each
sample.

You will find that some of the sounds in the
default sample-set are quite long, in particular
the "airstrike", "teleport" and "blowtorch"
samples. In some of our custom sound sets, we have
shortened these sounds and thus saved about 100 kb
of space, leaving those 100 kb free to use for
more/longer speech samples instead. 

So if you are experiencing trouble with fitting 
all your samples inside the 760 kb limit, it may 
be a good idea to load up one of these custom 
sets and use that set as a basis to put your 
own samples into. One such sound set is 
"Scots", this one has a lot of speech
and quite short "teleport", "airstrike" and
"blowtorch" sounds.

So if you need a lot of space for your speech,
start the bank editor, load the set "SCOTS.SFX"
and replace all the speech bits with your own
samples. You will notice that you get about 100 kb
more speech into this one, than what you would
have done if you started off with the
"default.sfx" file.

Saving time and effort
----------------------
If you are setting out to create a complete sound
set in one go, as quickly and effectively as
possible, then you should do things
systematically, i.e. first get all the samples
done and stored, then convert the whole batch to
raw files in one go, and finally start up the bank
editor and insert all your samples. True, this
will not allow you to hear each sound inside the
game as you capture the samples, but it will save
you a lot of time by not having to change between
the different programs, converting the samples to
raw-format one at a time, and so on.

Also, you may also find that a good way to sample
sounds for Worms is to start your sampler-software
recording, then go through the list of samples
needed and do several of them in one go, into one
single sample-file. Afterwards, you can easily and
effectively split this big sample into smaller
ones. Another good reason to "mass capture"
samples like this, is that your voice will be
consistent throughout the different samples,
whereas if you sample one word/sentence and then
come back for another one half an hour later, your
voice or expression may not be able to pick up on
that same sound.

If you're not in a hurry though, and you just want
to have a jolly good time making the funniest
Worms sounds ever, feel free to sample one sound
at a time and try them out in the game right away!

Happy sampling!!! And please share your funniest
sound sets with other Worms players by uploading
your sets to our FTP site, so we can make it
publicly available.

<End of Document>
