So after creating my very first map with Hammer I just wanted to let GLaDOS speak although this should be done at the very end but you surely know how excited I am about making such progress

I just inserted two ambient_generics with DingOn and DingOff sounds which announce GLaDOS and then two ambient_generic entities with her text at the entry and at the exit. However my sound are ingame very silent OR the environment is way too loud. Playing the WAV I created with Melodyne and Audacity in either VLC oder Windows Media Player works fine everything is loud enough (maybe a bit too loud) but ingame (after setting up the WAV files and after the rebuilt sound cache) it's a bit off... here I have created a test recording (I do hope I am allowed to post YouTube links ).

Can you please explain me, what is the most widely used approach to play voices and background music and so on?

PS: I noticed, that although I have selected Play everywhere the sound of the ambient_generic entities will be influenced by their positioning (big rooms with reverb or small hallways) which you can hear in my map too...

GLaDOS doesn't use ambient_generics, since they have several bugs and are meant to play music or background noise. The best way to do it would be a logic_choreographed_scene (remember to put a choreo/glados_gen_actor instance in your map), or use a script (which is harder but is how Valve did it--the script makes the choreographed scene entity for you).

I would like to use the logic_choreographed_scene you mentioned, so I set up a bit and I succeeded in letting the announcer speak a bit, though the subtitles hang somehow as the do not progress... could you please elaborate on how to create a custom scene so I can use my own voice files and texts?

EDIT: Chicken compiled a very good tutorial which one can find here; and it works for me! Now I would like to know how I can write my own scene (basically consisting of voice and these subtitles which I have to write in the basemodui I already know) and call it like that. To make things more difficult I am interested in how to do so out of the sourcemods folder where I have my mod - so can I just write a small .nut-file which just extends the definitions or the VCDs?

EDIT2: Edited the link above to the tutorial which didn't work in the first run...

Sorry for doublepost, but I was able to include my own wav files and to create my own VCDs which are played without issues ingame! Using nut scripts based on the glados.nut file I can handle vcds via calls to my logic_script. This was only possible with Chicken's old post I already linked... after four hours of angry outbursts (as it did not work in the beginning...) I will take a break and probably come back to post a short HowTo on this topic.

If you want to add subtitles check out VCD PAGE HERE. I believe they should automatically play if you are playing the 'soundscript' instead of the raw path. So you can skip the cc_emit steps and just play the scene file.

Since you are making a mod, you can create your own subtitles_english.dat (or subtitles_<language here>.dat)

Yup already done, searching the forums for the same issues I found one old thread of Nyk (creator Portal: Prelude) which helped mme out getting the subtitles to work. Thanks though for mentioning it

Once you get it working Liam, it would be great to make a tutorial somewhere. I think some people would appreciate it.

No problem, i will need to test some things as I do not fully understand whether e.g. my scenes.image must be in my scenes folder AND my vpk or not and so on. But for a logic_choreographed_scene I will make a video tutorial and maybe for the NUT scripts, too, though I have just to edit some things as I manipulated too many files

However I am having issues with Face Poser which crashes when I try to open the wave panel to insert a wave file into my scene, so I will do it manually in Notepad++. Nevertheless it works

When I'm done, I will create a new thread with a link to the video here in the subforum.