3-The SND
Programs required:
-Elecbyte sndmaker
-Microsoft Sound recorder (Sndrec32)
>
-Wordpad
The SND file will contain all of the character's audio information, that is his voice, super atack noices, hitting sounds or even background music, if you decide to give him any. Apparently the easiest way to do this part is using the SND feature of the MCM2. Unfortunately I've never been able to run it on my crappy old system without it breaking down, so I can't get to talk about it. I use the sndmaker contained in the oficial elecbyte mugen tools. It's a primitive DOS program, but works alright if you know to drive it.
But before getting to compile the sndfile itself, you should get the sounds. You can record yourself using the Microsoft sound recorder which comes in the default Windows package. Sound fx you can download from the web or rip from games like Starcraft or Street Fighter, I won't detail much on ripping cause I know few about it myself.
When downloading mugen chars, you may have noticed the SND file always ends up being the heaviest part by far, covering several megs. The size of the SND, however, depends on which sounds you pack into it. Yes, wave files are the only format it accepts, yet not all WAVs need to be as inmensely heavy as you may think. Open the wave file of your preferance with sndrec, then select "Save as..." from the "File" menu. In the uppopping dialog you'll see a line a the bottom sayin "Format:", followed by a line of numbers you probably don't understand. Next to them is a misterious button saying "Change...". Click on that. What you'll see next is another dialog called "Sound selection". I don't know what the stuff under "Format" and "Attributes" mean either, but on the upper left of the box there's a field entitled "Name". In that field the option selected will probably be "Radio quality", if not "CD quality". Change it to "Phone quality". You'll see the format is now 8 bit mono, which means the quality is somewhat lower. However, the file size will be 50%, making your SND notably smaller and your char much more downloadable. Press "OK" in the "Sound selection" box and you'll be back at "Save as". You may want to change the name, just in case, to compare the quality of the new and old format. Anyway, in my personal experience, the difference has never been much and if it sounds while you're in the candor of battle, you most definitely won't notice.
Once you've brought all of your sounds to a reasonable size, it's compiling time. Put the sndmaker file into your mugen directory and create a specifical sub-directory to store your new char's sound in. Now you'll create a txt file to be used by the sndmaker. This may sound a little abstract, but once you get it it's really easy. In the ifrst line, put the name of the SND file you want to create, along with the directory you want it to be in, starting from the mugen directory itself. That is, if you want the file to be called "Popo" and to appear in the "C:\Games\mugen\chars\popo\" directory, you just need to put "chars\popo\popo.snd". The sndmaker itself is already in the "C:\Games\mugen\" directory, so that's where all referance of it will start from.
From the second line on everything goes in three-line groups. The first of them indicates the location of the wave file you want to add to your SND. This works exactly like the location system explained above, starting from your mugen directory. The second line is the group number and the third one the sound number. These last two parameters work just like in the SFF and you can arange them simmilarily. To give an example, if you want to include "popo_hit.wav" from the "C:\games\mugen\Poposnd\" directory as sound 3 of group 19, the syntax would be:
Poposnd\popo_hit.wav
19
3
Create a group of that kind for each file you want to include and finish the txt file without leaving any extra space or line. Remember to put it in the root mugen directory too.
Now your list is complete, proceed to run the sndmaker. You'll have to acces it from DOS, necesarilly. Do you still remember how DOS went? To get into a directory undre the one you are type "cd" followed by the name of your directory, and to move up a dir, type "cd..". If you need to know what files are inside the directory you're in, type "dir". That should be enough to get up to your mugen directory. Once you're there, type "sndmaker <", followed by the name of your txt file and press enter. The sndmaker will run and display a lot of numbers untill it stops. Don't mind that. Just know that your SND file is ready to use.
Once you're done with this operation, DON'T delete the raw sounds or the txt file. You'll need them whenever you want to edit your char's SND again. The
sndmaker can't edit already existing files but only create new ones. So, if you want to add new sounds to your char you'll have to do the entire process again, but now including the extra sounds. Only once you're sure your char is absolutely finished and you won't update it ever again you can eliminate the raw files.