I've been experimenting with sound effects and thier alternates and I was wondering if anyone has any insight into how the alternate sound effects work. For weapon effects the sound count defines which sounds will play on that event and that references the sounddata entry. However some effects do not have a sound count (for example some interface sounds or those in buffs)

I've also run into MAXCOUNT errors when specifying additional ALTS (usually more than 3 causes this) but for the most part the sound # with alts works fine, I'm more interested in the ability of the sounddata to automatically load in alternates if this is possible.

now there is a line in sound data called     alternateGroup ""  but then at the same time these sounds have the _ALT explicitly defined... how does this work? this would be really usful in cutting down the number of sound lines in ship files.

anyone know how alternates actually get called in the sounddata or why both ways of doing this exist??

btw it would be really helpful if IC added a volume control to each sound entry, beats having to resample every sound file and no adjusting the attentuation distances is not what I am looking for.