ATMOSPHERIC SOUND EFFECTS EXPANDED
An updated Atmospheric Sound Effects 3.0u4 merged with Expanded Sounds 1.3 and cleaned-up.
Version 3.3 now includes Illuminated Windows' ASE Expansion for Tribunal and Bloodmoon.
Version 3.4 includes ESP's compatible with Beautiful Cities of Morrowind (v2.1.4).
Also contains the original ASE if you prefer, and several versions of the EPS's besides.

By Booze (B00ze64) 2021-09

Well, here it is. As I explained in the comments on my older Nexus account's True Light and Darkness MOD page (#39065), I use a tweaked version of Atmospheric Sound Effects 3.0u4 (Duncan) with Expanded Sounds 1.3 (PirateLord) loaded on top. This gives the game LOTS of ambient sounds. While there is a new MWSE Sound Mod out there, probably better than ASE/ExpSnd, it looks pretty buggy for now when I read the comments on its page, so I still use ASE/ExpSnd. As I made my comment on my TLAD mod page, I figured why not make a release'able version of this, so everyone else can enjoy - this turned out to be a lot of work, and the result is many different versions of ASE/ExpSnd to accommodate everyone's needs.

Let's start by explaining the available ASE-Only versions...

This ReadMe stored in 00 ASE Core\Docs

PS: I had to remove MINI.EXE from the package because Nexus thinks it's a suspicious file...

UPDATE v3.3 ->

Now includes Dark Angel's Tribunal/Bloodmoon ASE edits from his Illuminated Windows package. This required exporting cells, activators and custom scripts out of IW's ASE Expansions, cleaning-up superfluous stuff, importing into my own ASE version, editing a little, then re-exporting out of the now improved ASE (now version 3.3) so I could re-import into all the different variants of ASE that I made. Note that even with Illuminated Windows, ASE is still missing StopSounds in some cells and some Interior Weather. Version 3.3 also replaces the insane Ambience Loop in Mournhold with a more reasonable ASE ase_cicada_crks02 equivalent. And finally, there are now "NoMusic" versions of all the ESP's which exclude Juju, the Tavern Playlist and the Tavern Music Activator so that you can use better music systems (the static instruments that were added to the pubs remain there however).

UPDATE v3.3.1 ->

• Removed pathgrid edits in Raven Rock Bar
• Removed SwingRope sound from lamps in CharGen boat (it played during the intro movie)
  

UPDATE v3.4 ->

No changes to any of the previous ESP's (except that I updated their comments). The new v3.4 BCOM ESPs are for use with Beautiful Cities of Morrowind by RandomPal. In that version I've also added town sounds to Hla Oad and Vivec (Molag Mar had them, so why not use that in Vivec? Especially the Plazas which supposedly are full of people.)

UPDATE v3.4.x ->

    - Adjusted for BCOM 1.9.4
    - Moved Juju in Shenk's (Caldera)
    - Added interior weather to BCOM's Welcome Home houses
    - Added interior weather to Danae's Foods of Tamriel dealers' houses
    - Added interior weather and tavern sounds to the Moldy Horker (Taken from NoM)
    - Added interior weather to Mudcrab Island
    - Adjusted for BCOM 1.9.9
    - Tavern in Gnaar Mok
    - Ald-Ruhn, Council Club
    - Lucky Lockup
    - Adjusted for BCOM 2.0.4 (Telvani Plaza)
    - Added one Town-Voices more to all the bridges in Vivec
    - Small tweaks to House of Earthly Delights.
    - As of BCoM 2.0.9 the Seyda Neen Lighthouse is back to original design,
      so I grabbed Seyda Neen (-2,-10) from ASEE 3.3.1 NCA, and put that back
      into 3.4.4. If you use the optional Taller Lighthouse mod, some sounds
      might be off-center a little, but nothing to worry about (the flies
      above stagnant water might be off-center too).
    - Adjusted for BCOM 2.1.4 (FQ Waistworks)

UPDATE v3.5 ->

There was an issue reloading a saved game where Interior Weather was playing when the game was saved; the weather targeted scripts lost their reference to the activator and this generated a harmless error when loading. Hopefully this has been resolved with this version. All the ASEE versions were affected.

UPDATE v3.5.1  ->

I introduced an error in the Thunder script, should be fixed now. I also took out the DontSaveObject, since Thunder requires it.

Make sure you read the CAVEAT (below) before you use ASE-Expanded instead of ASE 3.3.

ASE ReadMe describes what both ASE and Expanded Sounds do ->

This mod adds over ~500 sound effects to Morrowind. There are ~15,000 emission points in exterior locations, ~300 points in taverns for sound effects, 20 for music, and 180 inside Daedric shrines. Most sounds are randomly picked, play at random time intervals, and are controlled by weather conditions and day/night cycles. In swampy areas, at night, you’ll hear crickets only when it’s clear or cloudy. Frogs ribbit in all but thunder, ash, or blight storms. Three types of owls hide in thunder, ash, or blight storms, while three more types of owls come out only in clear or cloudy conditions. During the day, you’ll hear a wide assortment of swampy sounds coming from the ground and trees. You'll hear creaking for wooden plank structures and wooden beams in caverns, water dripping in caves and sewers, and other sounds that give a creepy ambience to caves. Banners outside buildings have the sound of heavy fabric flapping in the wind accompanied by various clinking and clanking. And when you stand outside a tavern, you'll hear the muffled ruckus of what goes on inside. In towns, you'll hear screeching cats, barking dogs, rats, wind chimes, wood sawing, metal hammering, pullies, running footsteps, opening doors, closing doors, locked doors, knocking on doors, and voices. These sounds are most prominent during daylight hours when the weather is clear or cloudy. At night or during adverse weather conditions (foggy or overcast) the sounds are less frequent. If it's raining, thundering, or dust-storming the sounds vanish. As you near a cave entrance, foreboding sounds might make you think twice before entering the cavern. Sewers are much scarier now with sounds that only exist in the imagination. Also adds weather effects inside structures. Thunderstorms are accompanied by random thunderstrikes and random lightning flashes at windows...

Atmospheric Sound Effects v3.0/v3.3

Summary of changes:

-    Juju script stops streamed music while tavern music plays
-    Edited Volume for miss=0.80, SwishS=0.50, SwishM=0.65, SwishL=0.65
-    Ignored several sounds that were too loud (you can reEnable) ->
-        Light Armor Hit/Medium Armor Hit
-        FootBare/FootLight/FootMed/FootHeavy
-        Fire40 (Sounded like a flag)
-    Cleaned-up AMBI/Water sub-records then cleaned with Testool
-    Cleaned-up (Noise Reduction) 382 of the 458 sounds
-    Applied Patch for purist changes to cells edited by the mod
-    Version with no Interior Sound Activators available

Version 3.3:

-    Tribunal/Bloodmoon version includes Dark Angel's ASE expansions
-    Less insane ambience loop in Mournhold public places (Sound_MournEnv1)
-    Versions with no Tavern Music included (Replaces ASE Complete BTB)

SEE The original ASE ReadMe files in 00 ASE Core\Docs

There are several versions of the ASE ESP, see below for details. One of the first things I did when I got ASE so long ago was to adjust the "Swish" sound volumes and Ignore all the footsteps sounds from the mod. The sounds that it uses for the footsteps made it look like Balmora had 1000 people walking around all at once. They were so loud you could hear someone walking from one end of the city to the other. These sounds are still there, with the Ignore flag, so you can put them back using the Construction Set if you want.

Sound Files Cleanup

For the public release, I looked at the ASE sound files. As was noted by Piratelord (Expanded Sounds), the sound files of Atmospheric Sound Effects were pretty bad; very noisy. Playing the game, you wouldn't notice much (I never did), but if you played these sounds alone in a music player, it was immediately evident they were full of static. I believe this came from conversion from ACM compressed sounds and from 8-bit processing. So I decided to clean them up with Audacity. I did almost all of the sounds, sometimes running the Noise Reduction several times in a row. I got better at it as I went along, and even went back over the bird sounds to clean-them-up a little more, but not all sounds are perfect. Some were difficult to clean, and they sometimes sound slightly different from the original noisy ones (the process tends to induce an echo'y kind of effect at the start and end of some of the samples). Also, the Noise Removal routine in Audacity requires that you have a sizable portion of the WAV file that is noise only, so that it learns what the distortion's like and removes it. Most of the ASE sounds had something similar towards the end of the WAV, but that portion also contained legit low level sound. So while the new sounds are very clean, they've lost some resolution, but you probably won't notice. And the way Audacity works also means that there are some sounds I couldn't clean-up - the weather loops for instance, where there is no silence at all, or all of the footstep sounds, where the sound is way too short. I tried a Low Pass Filter for the loops, but I was not satisfied, so I left them alone. I recommend using Expanded Sounds for the weather loops anyway - PirateLord worked on the ASE loops a little for his mod (now included here). Still, I've cleaned-up 382 of the 458 sounds in ASE. The cleaned-up ones are now 16 bits, and I've also re-sampled the Tavern Music to 44K, figuring Audacity does a better job of that than on-the-fly basic sound drivers.

ASE Tribunal/Bloodmoon Version 3.3

ASE 3.0 (update 4) added Tribunal Support, but it is incomplete, and I am not sure the scripts are fully working. So my Tribunal/BM Atmospheric Sound Effects version 3.3 uses the Morrowind-Only ASE Interior sound scripts, not the new Tribunal scripts that Duncan tweaked (it does however include the Tribunal cells from ASE 3.0). And I have not boosted the Interior Weather volumes like he did on his Tribunal version (to accommodate his new scripts). Those new scripts are quite complex (the Sound Activator follows the player around and moves away then closer again, to simulate "Rain Swells") and I am not sure they were ever finished. For version 3.3, I merged with Dark Angel's ASE Expansion from Illuminated Windows. This adds ASE sounds to Mournhold public places, The Winged Guar, and to several Bloodmoon cells, including the bar. I've replaced the custom NPC in The Winged Guar with Juju and added her to the Raven Rock bar as well.

There is an issue that remains with the ASE scripts however: They APPEAR to need a StopSound script in caves and other places where there is no Interior Weather. Duncan's Tribunal ESP is not complete, that StopSound Script/Activator is missing from places. And even my Tribunal/BM version 3.3 with the more basic Morrowind scripts is missing those StopSound scripts in places, and there's just no way to ensure that this script is added to all the cells of all the mods out there.

Which brings me to...

Atmospheric Sound Effects Expanded v3.5.1

Summary of changes:

-    Merged ASE with Expanded Sounds
-    Merged with Dark Angel's Tribunal/Bloodmoon ASE expansions
-    Cleaned-up 63 of the 100 Expanded Sounds files
-    Boosted volume of most of the sounds that PirateLod had volume-reduced
I think this brings balance to the package, they were too low compared to Environmental sounds
-    SwingRope volume reduced to 0.65
-    Edited the Interior Weather scripts: Single volume and better timing (SEE CAVEAT)
-    Edited the Interior Weather sound files (and pitch) to simulate being indoors
-    Lowered Ambient Loops volume 0.50 to 0.40 (they were annoying) for Weather 0-4
-    Applied Patch for purist changes to cells/objects edited by the mod
-    Regions (Weather) from Expanded Sounds rather than ASE ->
Do not worry about Expanded Sounds weather chance changes, they are absolutely minimum
-    Less insane ambience loop in Mournhold public places (Sound_MournEnv1)
-    There's a version with no Creak Activators (the wood structures)
-    There's a version with support for the 3 Seat of Power mods by RandomPal
-    Version 3.4 supports Beautiful Cities of Morrowind by RandomPal
-    Versions with no Tavern Music included

SEE The original Expanded Sounds ReadMe file in 00 ASE Core\Docs

Interior Weather

Expanded Sounds by PirateLord uses a different method for Interior Weather, without the issues that ASE has around StopSound scripts, and it adds sounds to plants for extra ambience. The ASE Interior Weather scripts are superior, but Expanded Sounds are ok too. And so I made ASE EXPANDED by merging an ASE that has no Interior Weather Activators in any cell, with Expanded Sounds (with ExpSnd loaded on top). We get the plants that make sounds, proper Tribunal/Bloodmoon support, and Expanded Sounds' solution for Interior Weather, which is much simpler - Use a fixed sound generator (Activator) near the roof and see how far are you are from it; reduce the sound volume the further you are :-) Alas, this did not work out for me. Every time the sound volume changed because the player moved away (say by going downstairs), the game engine would play the new (lower volume) sound loop at full volume for a split second before settling in on the lower volume. I tried different things to fix this, but it just did not work as it should have (blame Morrowind exe). There was also no way to determine which Activator would win in places with multiple Activators, so it did not always work as intended.

So I edited the Expanded Sounds Interior Weather scripts and made the sound steady at a single volume. Depending on whom I ask, I will be told the Interior Weather is too loud, or too subtle; I tried to make it strong enough for when the music is playing at 3/5 volume, but not too loud that it drowns everything else (i.e. I settled on 75/100 from Expanded Sound's settings; I personally think it's subtle). The WAV loops used for Interior Weather have also been changed: The timing is better, and I've changed the pitch using Audacity to simulate the muffled sound indoors. But they are nowhere near as good as the original ASE Interior Weather (wood and stone houses used different loops in ASE; and wood houses had banging window shutters too, in storms). But I had to settle on something - I did not want to recode ASE Interior Weather, and could not use it as it was, because it needs StopSound scripts added to cells. The resulting ASE EXPANDED is good enough for me.

NOTE that the new Interior Weather scripts still have a distance check in them. So while the original ExpSnd would lower the Weather Sound volume as you walked further away from its source, and stop sound completely when far enough, the new scripts, with a steady volume may, if you get far enough, stop playing sound all of a sudden. I have no idea how far you need to get for this to happen, but I made it further than it was in Expanded Sounds anyway.

Interior Weather Caveat

TLDR: Interior Weather may play 1 loop's worth of sound as you leave the building even if it is sunny outside.

When I fooled around with Expanded Sounds' Weather Loops, I noticed PirateLord was looping mid-sound back to the beginning of the sound loops, and this made this jump pretty audible - i.e. you could tell that the sound had just looped back and that it was not a continuous sound. Expanded Sounds uses PlaySound to play Interior Weather, which plays a sound once and then stops, so its scripts have to run every X seconds to restart the sound. The sound loops that it used were around 6 seconds long, but the mod was forcing a loop back to the start of the sound at 3 or 5 seconds mark, making it audible. So I proceeded editing the timing so you could not hear it loop back to the beginning, so that it sounded continuous. Alas, Morrowind scripts do not run often enough and with a high enough precision to make it possible to time this precisely. The trick I used was to double or even triple the WAV file's length, so that Morrowind's timing fell just at the right spot to make looping inaudible.

I just discovered however that this exacerbates an issue. If you enter a room while it's raining outside, and the Interior Weather script loops the sound just as you go back outside, and it is not raining anymore, you will hear the Interior Weather sound loop play, for as long as it is. I do not know how to manually reproduce this, as changing the weather while you are inside does not work as expected, but this will likely happen to you too. So for rain, not a big issue, up to 6 seconds and the sound stops. Heavy rain? 9 seconds, it's starting to be annoying but manageable. But for Blight and Blizzard, you will be hearing the loop play for up to 20 seconds before it stops. This is because the sounds are emitted by a global script. You'll have the same issue as you move from an inside cells that makes Interior Weather sounds to an inside cells that does not, but that should be far less of a problem. Duncan's scripts (if you decide to use ASE 3.3) do not have this problem because he runs a script in the Player's Object Context that stops the sounds as soon as the player is outside. I'd have to change Expanded Sounds to use the same technique to get this behaviour fixed. but you might as well just use ASE 3.3 instead of ASE Expanded if this is a problem. I'll personally live with it, the alternative is to use the ASE scripts/technique that seem to require StopSound activators added to cells, which cannot be done for all cells...

Sound Files Cleanup

PirateLord mentioned ASE having noisy WAV files, but it turns out Expanded Sounds were noisy too! So I cleaned-up a lot of them (63) with the same process as ASE, with varying degrees of success - some of these sounds have been processed so often that there are a lot of artifacts inside them, if you listen carefully; and I'm no sound engineer, I have no idea how to clean those up.

Creaking Wood Bridges

Something else that's cool with Expanded Sounds are the creaking sounds that wood bridges make. ASE adds creaking sound Activators placed under a lot of bridges, but they play sound randomly. Expanded Sounds author PirateLord had the brilliant idea to turn these bridge pieces into Activators, that play sound when you walk on them. This works great! But of course there is a problem - any other mod changing these wood pieces will conflict, and there are a lot of them out there. So I made "NCA" versions ([N]o [C]reak [A]ctivators) of the ESPs, and this is what I use myself. We loose the cool creak-when-walked-on, but ASE has Activators underneath many of those pieces, so not all is lost.

Plant Sounds

Another cool thing about Expanded Sounds is that it adds sound scripts to plants (i.e. Containers, whereas ASE only does Activators placed manually in the world). But just like the bridge pieces I mentioned above, this can conflict - it won't cause trouble like the bridges, but it only works so long as you do not have another mod replacing those plants (if you use MWSE Herbalism you're ok). This complements ASE nicely, and adds to the atmosphere. This WILL make MWSE Herbalism NOT open the plant container automatically for a FEW plants, but you can WhiteList them as you find them. Here is a note from the MWSE Herbalism Mod Comments:

Q: Playing the game, I've run across one or two plants that default
to MW original plant container behavior. Why does this occur?

A: If it's defaulting to regular container behavior, that means some
mod has either added a script to it or accidentally unchecked the
organic flag. You can click on the plant in the console and type SV to
see if it comes up with local script variables. In such cases,
whitelisting the container in the mod config menu will probably fix it.

Lights

Load True Light And Darkness AFTER ASEE because ASEE adds SwingRope script/sound to some lights, thereby changing the light radius back to Morrowind defaults. I uploaded a version of Necro's TLAD edit that keeps those scripts, for use with ASEE, on the TLAD page.

Seats of Power version

Those ESPs have extra Interior Weather Activators for the cells added by the SOP mods from RandomPal, and some exterior ones placed differently/extra. I've gotten rid of the SOP ESM requirements for my ESP's, but they are meant to be used with all 3 of the following mods:

Balmora Seat of Power of House Hlaalu
Ald'ruhn Seat of power of House Redoran (RR Skar RMR version)
Sadrith Mora Seat of Power of House Telvanni (Purist Version Open City)

Beautiful Cities of Morrowind (BCOM)

Like the SOP versions, the BCOM version adds interior weather to the BCOM cells, and fixes some interior/exterior cells sound placement when needed. I've also added town sounds to Hla Oad and Vivec in this version. And I made the banners in Vivec Hlaalu Plaza move with the wind, since in BCOM the plaza is outside. The BCOM ESP's are implicitly excluding the Expanded Sounds Creaking Wood Bridges, so there are no separate "NCA" ESP's (as with the other NCA ESP's, it uses ASE Creak Activators instead of Expanded Sounds'). Note that this is currently built for v2.1.4 of BCOM, and will likely need updating as BCOM evolves.

Beautiful Cities of Morrowind by RandomPal

Expanded Sound INI Loops

I made a MINI file for Expanded Sounds, but here are the loops you need to add to your Morrowind.ini ->

[Weather]
Minimum Time Between Environmental Sounds=5.0
Maximum Time Between Environmental Sounds=15.0
[Weather Clear]
Ambient Loop Sound ID=plx_WA_clear
[Weather Cloudy]
Ambient Loop Sound ID=plx_WA_cloudy
[Weather Foggy]
Ambient Loop Sound ID=plx_WA_foggy
[Weather Overcast]
Ambient Loop Sound ID=plx_WA_overcast
[Weather Rain]
Rain Loop Sound ID=Rain
Ambient Loop Sound ID=plx_WA_rain
[Weather Thunderstorm]
Thunder Sound ID 0=plx_WE_thunder0
Thunder Sound ID 1=plx_WE_thunder1
Thunder Sound ID 2=plx_WE_thunder2
Thunder Sound ID 3=plx_WE_thunder3
Rain Loop Sound ID=plx_WE_heavyrain
Ambient Loop Sound ID=plx_WA_thunder
[Weather Ashstorm]
Ambient Loop Sound ID=plx_WA_ashstorm
[Weather Blight]
Ambient Loop Sound ID=plx_WA_blightstorm
[Weather Snow]
Ambient Loop Sound ID=plx_WA_overcast

The BAIN Installer

00 ASE Core

The ASE sounds and the dragonfly meshes/textures

01 ExpSnds Core

The sounds for ExpSnd, you only need this if you use ASE+ExpSnd

And then ONE ESP from ALL of these choices:

02 ASE 3.0u4 Cleaned (Use 1 esp)

Custom version has the Swish changes, the ignored sounds and the Juju
that stops Morrowind Music when Tavern Music plays. Otherwise these are
the original ASE 3.0u4 ESP's (cleaned).

AtmosphericSoundEffects-3.0-Clean.esp
AtmosphericSoundEffects-3.0-Custom(Ignored)-Clean.esp
AtmosphericSoundEffects-3.0-Tribunal-Clean.esp

02 ASE 3.3 (Use 1 esp)

This is the version I made to prepare for the merge. Includes the Patch for
purist changes. Tribunal uses the Morrowind ASE Scripts with the ASE Tribunal cells.
Version 3.3 includes Dark Angel's ASE expansions for Tribunal/Bloodmoon.
Version 3.1 is for Morrowind without the Trib/BM expansions.

AtmosphericSoundEffects-3.1-Ignored.esp
AtmosphericSoundEffects-3.1-Ignored-NoMusic.esp
AtmosphericSoundEffects-3.3-Tribunal-BM-Ignored.esp
AtmosphericSoundEffects-3.3-Tribunal-BM-Ignored-NoMusic.esp

02 ASE 3.3 No Interior Weather (Use 1 esp)

Same as above but without Interior Weather Activator references. In case you have
your own Interior Weather mod. I needed that for the merge. NOTE That the flashing lights
in the windows to simulate lightning flashes are still present, only Interior Weather Sounds
were removed.

AtmosphericSoundEffects-3.1-Ignored-NIW.esp
AtmosphericSoundEffects-3.1-Ignored-NoMusic-NIW.esp
AtmosphericSoundEffects-3.3-Tribunal-BM-Ignored-NIW.esp
AtmosphericSoundEffects-3.3-Tribunal-BM-Ignored-NoMusic-NIW.esp

02 ASE Expanded 3.5 (Use 1 esp)
The merged mods with the ExpSnd interior weather, this is ASEE.

AtmosphericSnd+ExpandedSnd-3.5.esp
AtmosphericSnd+ExpandedSnd-3.5-NoMusic.esp

02 ASE Expanded 3.5 No Creak Activators (Use 1 esp)
Same as above but without the wood bridges changes (because those conflict a lot).

AtmosphericSnd+ExpandedSnd-3.5-NCA.esp
AtmosphericSnd+ExpandedSnd-3.5-NoMusic-NCA.esp

02 ASE Expanded 3.5 Seat of Power (Use 1 esp)
For use with the Seat of Power mods by RandomPal.

AtmosphericSnd+ExpandedSnd-3.5-SOP.esp
AtmosphericSnd+ExpandedSnd-3.5-NoMusic-SOP.esp

02 ASE Expanded 3.5 Seat of Power No Creak Activators (Use 1 esp)
Same as above but without the wood bridges changes (because those conflict a lot).

AtmosphericSnd+ExpandedSnd-3.5-SOP-NCA.esp
AtmosphericSnd+ExpandedSnd-3.5-NoMusic-SOP-NCA.esp

02 ASE Expanded 3.5 BCOM (Use 1 esp)
For use with Beautiful Cities of Morrowind; it does not have the ExpSnd wood bridges.

AtmosphericSnd+ExpandedSnd-3.5-BCOM.esp
AtmosphericSnd+ExpandedSnd-3.5-NoMusic-BCOM.esp


REFERENCES

ASE Original
https://members.tripod.com/duncan_cairn/
Expanded Sounds Original
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/44787
Illuminated Windows ASE Expansions
https://mw.modhistory.com/download-87-15155

LICENSE

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0