In case anyone is interested, the announcer can be selectively or completely disabled by moving or deleting some of the .wav files in the /data/sounds directory inside the game's folder.

Doesn't work for me. First of all, they seem to be OGG files, not WAV. Secondly, well... Yup. That's what happens when I ./start.sh. Seems there's a sanity check to ensure the file is there. I tried 'touch gameover.ogg' to create an empty, 0KB file named gameover.ogg but that didn't work either, it seems to know it's not an OGG file. Probably since OpenAL can't make sense of it. :)

However, you may be onto something. I'm going to try generating a short, small, silent OGG file (1 second or less in length) and see if it works to replace the unwanted sounds, since (re)moving them doesn't seem to do the trick. I'll post back here later with my results.

Did it work? :)

Gah! Sorry, I get so easily distracted sometimes. Thanks for the nudge, I'd completely forgotten about this thread.

Anyway, you'll be happy to know it works! I just tested it out. Here's how you create the empty .ogg file using ffmpeg:

$ ffmpeg -ar 44100 -t 1 -f s16le -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 2 -i /dev/zero -acodec libvorbis -aq 0 gameover.ogg

Just do that and replace game/data/sounds/gameover.ogg with the newly-created file.