Guidelines for Audio Assets

[This page is outdated. See instead the PTR wiki: https://wiki.project-tamriel.com/wiki/Audio_Asset_Guidelines]

Tamriel Rebuilt makes use of a variety of audio assets, though we are not very active in developing them. This page contains some brief guidelines for making audio assets. If you are someone who is looking for help or would like to make audio things for Tamriel Rebuilt (such as animal or ambient sounds, voice acting, or music) please head over to the forums and make yourself known there. The asset browser is where to post any audio you’d like to submit to the project.

What are audio assets?

Audio assets are the sounds and music of the game. Any time you hear something, that’s an audio asset. Morrowind uses a variety of audio assets, including things like:

  • Idle and combat sounds of creatures
  • Ambient environmental sounds, like wind or creaking wood
  • Sound effects for magic, weapons, combat sounds, footsteps, potions, menu clicks, level ups, etc
  • Voiced dialogue greetings, combat greetings, and npc dialogue
  • Voiceovers and narrations for video content
  • Music for exploration, combat, and special events
     

Guidelines for Audio Assets

Audio for use in the game should be created or recorded cleanly, without static or background noise. Assets should also be free of copyright and royalty issues.

Not all sound formats that play in the construction set will play in the game. The vanilla engine has specific requirements, and if they aren't met the sound will be silent.
NPC voices must be exported at 64kbps mp3, 44100 KHz Mono, and must be in a "Vo/" folder or a subfolder of it - it doesn't have to be the first folder after Sound/, but it needs to exist, otherwise voices are silent or crash.
The format Bethesda uses for Sounds and creature Sound Gen is .wav 22050 kHz, 16-bit, Mono. MSFD reports that lower qualities work as well.

Stereo isn't attenuated with distance (with hardware acceleration) and shouldn't be used for any sounds that play in the worldspace. Exceptions are music, weather sounds, or other sounds played directly "in the player's ears" or with PlaySound instead of coming from a source in the world.