Hi all,

Not sure anyone has noticed, but in the original SC3K games, both vanilla and unlimited, your city was brought to life by randomized audio playing depending on where you had the camera centred. What I mean, for instance, is when you were in an industrial zone, you would hear machines and valves and trucks and mechanical noises. It was generally when you were more zoomed in, but playing on Windows 10 with the GOG version, it appears these ambient sounds don't play.

Unfortunately, this takes a great deal of the immersion out of building the city and hearing it thrive. It just doesn't feel alive without the ambient sounds.

Anyone know what could be changed in the audio.ini to fix it? I have all sound options enabled and can only hear some ambient sound, but none associated with ZONES.

I'm on Windows 10 and I get the audio. Are you sure your sound drivers are working properly? And that 3D sound is checked in the options menu?

This is odd, because I deliberately downloaded a disc image version ( .iso) of vanilla SC3K and the background ambient audio works fine! (also odd is I can't install it, I just run the game.exe directly from the disc and it works...) Also, in vanilla 3D sound was off, just ambient sound on and I could hear the randomised sound effects of buildings etc.

So, im not sure now if it would be my drivers. I'll try obtaining them and reinstalling them anyway though. And ill also try different combinations of zoom and settings in the sound menu for SC3KU.

Do you mind telling me what your sound driver is? I see 3 different drivers in my Device Manager for drivers:

NVIDIA High Definition Audio
NVIDIA Virtual Audio Device (Wave Extensible) (WDM)
Realtek High Definition Audio

Something to add of interest.

In the main menu and in preferences, when you change the slider for the audio sources, it makes some kind of noise to let you know its been changed. You can hear the audio volume going up or down.

Now, for the ambient volume slider, if I do this on Vanilla SC3K from the ISO, I hear the sound of pipes dripping water.

If I do the same thing in the audio slider in SC3KU, I hear nothing. Can you confirm if you can hear the dripping pipe? Because then if you don't, I guarantee you are also not hearing all the audio you should be hearing in your city.

Somewhere in the config, something isn't being referenced in the GOG version. Further to this, if I query a building, its specific audio track DOES play. Just not randomly in the background as ambient sound.

This was after reinstalling the latest version of my audio driver. I have no issues with other games audio - even other really old games like C&C.

Even further information:

I downloaded and installed an older version of my driver.

I was able to hear the audio in the slider for ambient sound in the main menu, but then when I went into a city and opened the preferences and toggled the slider, the sound was gone again.

This is really quite strange. Keen to know what driver you have installed, but I will keep playing around!

So. I got it working (EDIT it seems its sporadic. I had the game crash on me and then when I got back in the ambient audio was not working again. Not sure how it kicks off...) I have downloaded and installed a realtek driver from 2013, but now im not sure that is what fixed it.

You see, I thought it hadn't worked, because the same thing happened. But then, all of a sudden after about 5 minutes, the ambient audio sprang to life and started working!

My only idea is that the audio files needed to be located by the game, or loaded into the game as I was playing it. If you think about it, its possible because the old game worked by having all the audio pre-loaded from the game disc.

Still strange, but I am so happy! Now to get SIM Broadway and Concrete Jungle in there and I am done!

Glad you got it working! I have an upload of the Sound folder with all stereo songs from both Unlimited and the original with an edited .ini file so the game recognizes the tracks.

https://mega.nz/#F!IdMEBKSb!QG7ln345nvKC1UBd9kSFdg