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

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

Generally, when sampling you should of course try to achieve the best
sound quality possible. 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. 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, for example, 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 Reinforcements 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.
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, 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.

You may also find that a good way to sample sounds for Worms
Reinforcements 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 consistant
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.

The website can be reached at            http:\\www.team17.com
The FTP server (anonymous connection)    ftp2.team17.com\incoming\
