> Monsters do not make different death noises at different times; only one is played for each category of monster.
This, BTW, is a really interesting trick that Doom pulled. There's actually only a single death sound for each type of monster.* But for some monsters, the game plays it back at a random speed--also changing the frequency, like an audiotape on fast-forward--so it becomes a brief shriek, a drawn-out groan, or something in between. This gives an impressive variety of sounds without adding extra memory-heavy samples.
Hardly anyone was aware of this as far as I can tell, which is a testament to how well it worked. I only noticed it when playing a goofy little mod that turned zombie sergeants into Energizer bunnies and played the "still going" clip when you killed them. The effect is obvious when there's actual speech involved.
*Not counting the "splatter" sound when you gib any of the gibbable critters.
On further consideration, I think it only does this with imps and the various zombies, which are the only monsters that you're likely to mow down at a rate of several per second--it might have been specifically intended to stop zombie fragfests from sounding like an echo chamber.
Hi, article author here: it was the pitch shifting behaviour in particular that I wanted to explore when I modified the random table. Early versions of doom (<1.4) did it, but they accidentally removed that feature with a rework of sound code in 1.4 and onwards (including all versions of doom 2). It was originally applied to all but two sound effects, with special casing for chainsaw sounds (less variance afaik).
There were, however, three distinct zombie death noises, independent of pitch shifting.
Interesting! Are the three zombie death sounds perhaps speed-shifted versions of the same original? My recollection (it's been a while) is that zombies made dramatically different sounds on death but--once I started looking for it--they all seemed to be speed-shifted versions of the same sound, while pitch-shifting in other sounds was subtle enough that I never noticed it. If pitch-shifting normally applied equally to most sounds, that implies that there was something else going on with the zombie noises I recall.
Or maybe I'm completely confused because I haven't played it since the '90s. Might be time to give it another try...
This, BTW, is a really interesting trick that Doom pulled. There's actually only a single death sound for each type of monster.* But for some monsters, the game plays it back at a random speed--also changing the frequency, like an audiotape on fast-forward--so it becomes a brief shriek, a drawn-out groan, or something in between. This gives an impressive variety of sounds without adding extra memory-heavy samples.
Hardly anyone was aware of this as far as I can tell, which is a testament to how well it worked. I only noticed it when playing a goofy little mod that turned zombie sergeants into Energizer bunnies and played the "still going" clip when you killed them. The effect is obvious when there's actual speech involved.
*Not counting the "splatter" sound when you gib any of the gibbable critters.