Sometimes you just want a custom sound instead of using one of the defaults. Making a plugin just to add one sound effect is a bit much. That's why you can now (version 1.7 and up) use Vehicle Effects' build-in sound effect loader to create a custom sound effect with a simple xml file. These xml files can be included in either a mod or asset directory and Vehicle Effects will load them automatically. All you need is a text editor and a sound file in a suitable format (.ogg always works, check the Unity documentation for a proper list).

A file containing sound effects should be called SoundEffects.xml and must be placed in a mod's or asset's root folder, same as with VehicleEffectDefinition.xml. Below is the contents of VE's own SoundEffects.xml file, showing 6 of the sound effects included in the mod.

The important thing here are the SoundEffect tags, which have a few required attributes: name, base and file. The rest of the attributes are optional and can be used to change the sound settings. An important attribute is type, this determines the type of sound effect that will be created. It defaults to SoundEffect, but for vehicle movement (engine) sounds it must be set to EngineSoundEffect to allow for speed and acceleration dependent pitch and audio range.

Here's a list of all attributes and what they do. A * indicates that it can only be used with an EngineSoundEffect. All numbers are floats, so you can use decimal values.


There are some things to keep in mind about the loading process that Vehicle Effects uses for custom sound effects. To start, mod folders are always loaded first before it checks and loads from asset folders. When it detects that another custom effect already exists with the same name it won't load any other with that same name. Error messages for duplicate effects are only displayed when loading from mod folders. This means that you can include the same effect config and sound in multiple assets without having to worry about the mod complaining or loading duplicate effects.