Sound scenery are a type of object, typically invisible, used to play localized ambient looping sounds. They can be found along shorelines and rivers, at the base of waterfalls, and near noisy machinery. These objects complement the "background" sound_environment used for BSP clusters.

Attaching sounds

When creating a sound scenery tag in Guerilla or other tag editor, simply add an attachment in the attachments block with type sound_looping, referring to the desired tag. It is not necessary to specify a model marker.

Sound distances are determined by the actual sound tag rather than the object's bounding radius.

Difference from scenery

In terms of tag data, sound scenery do not differ from scenery in any way; both are simple extensions of object which do not add any additional fields. Both can play sounds if attached, and both can have render and collision models. However, sound scenery collide with projectiles but not units and are thus similar to device_light_fixture.

Known issues

You cannot have a sound scenery and background sound at the same time if both are playing a sound tag that is classed as "music". This will crash Sapien when you enter the audible radius of the scenery object, and will crash the game immediately.

Related HaloScript

The following are related functions that you can use in your scenario scripts and/or debug globals that you can enter into the developer console for troubleshooting.

(debug_sound [boolean])

Structure and fields

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the following individuals for their research or contributions to this topic:

• Conscars (Testing collision behaviour)
• Kavawuvi (Invader tag definitions)
• MosesOfEgypt (Tag structure research)
• Neo (Discovering the music bug)