Suggestion regarding station sirens

[PhillipeEchtebaise]

Hello, I have been using your script since its release, and I tell you that its recent update made me extremely happy, and I am overflowing with ideas but I especially wanted to share this one

In fact, your recently integrated system concerning fire station sirens made me think that I also use a siren script which has not been updated for easily 5-6 years. . .

I would have liked to switch to your siren that you had, but I am encountering a problem,
the suggestions are as follows

Customize the distance of a specific siren,
I would have liked to have the possibility that when I place a point or sound the siren, to be able to increase its distance to the point where it can be heard without having to place several.

Customized song,
On the system I used, I had the possibility of being able to put several sound files, and thus call up different siren songs, depending on the name of the one selected. for example, put a different siren at point A and another at Point B etc etc. It would have been great to have this possibility of integrating our ringtones too.

Siren triggering
And finally, to finish regarding the sirens, it would be nice to be able to manually trigger the sirens of a specific barracks, without necessarily needing a fire to be triggered, thus allowing you to connect your script to a very distinct command which would be triggered at another event.

Likewise, your script has taken a very professional turn since its last update, between the quality of the lights, difficulty, siren, but I ask myself a question, I am not a very good dev because I am helped by more competent friends than me, but I would have liked to know if it is possible to find a solution allowing the creation of larger fires, or smoke visible from higher up, as with the difficulty created for example in addition to the TYPE of fire, who would have reactions different, thicker smoke, higher, or creating clouds of smoke as if it were indoors allowing visibility to be blurred?

Or for example creates larger, imposing flames? Or placed more than 20 without it becoming invisible? These are ideas that I put to you here, aware that you probably had other things to do etc., but I particularly appreciate your work and I am impatient to see what you would do in the future.

I thank you in advance and apologize if I wrote something wrong, I use a translator to communicate here. I wish you a pleasant day.

[gimicze]

Hello @PhillipeEchtebaise,

Thank you for your suggestions. I will try to react to every point in detail, as I've already thought about many of them months ago.

Distance, from which a siren can be heard

I've played around with this when programming the sirens, but unfortunately haven't found a way to increase the strength of the sirens (there is a parameter in the native playing sounds in the game, but I guess it is just limited to a certain max value, which cannot be exceeded).

Customized sounds

When I got the idea to add the fire alarms, I did some research on scripts already supplying custom sounds into the game. However, I've found that the only way to stream custom sounds (wav/mp3 or similar filetype) without them being baked into a game asset, was to play them using FiveM GUI. This unfortunately doesn't allow for spatial (3D) sound emulation and would probably sound weird (along with not corresponding to game volume settings etc.). You can edit the awc files using OpenIV and replace the sounds with different ones, but then you also have to edit the appropriate attributes (such as duration of the sound).

Triggering of the sirens/alarms

This is a nice idea that could probably be easily implemented, with some changes to how the siren coordinates are listed.

Larger fire / types of fire / smoke etc.

As for this, the script would need to be heavily modified - the original design is flawed in a way that it doesn't allow for multiple fire types (along with multiple possible visual/sound effects). I have thought about this before (as some people had already asked for spawning smoke) and there are many ways in which it could be improved, for example:

• white smoke for some time after you extinguish the fire
• "extinguishable" smoke to allow for very small localized fires (e.g. mailbox, bin)
• smoke that extends to a greater height to be seen from distance (although here I have no idea how it is with levels of detail regarding particles - there must be a reason why the effects don't really go much up)
• different visual effects based on whether the fire is spawned in an interior or outside (to spawn denser smoke inside and avoid effects "leaking" through the building)

All this would mean lengthy modifications and new sync issues and although these changes would be possible within LUA, rewriting the whole script into object-oriented C# would probably be more appropriate.

This would also bring performance challenges - you already see that the game is incapable of rendering large amounts of particles. You mention having problems with 20+ fires being displayed - when originally designing the script. I also encountered this. I am still not 100% sure what causes this, but since it was dependent on the PC used and graphical settings, I would say it has to do with LOD/particles and GPU capabilities.

Additional improvements I had planned...

Throughout the time I had many other ideas:

• add an in-game menu to manage scenarios / active fires / whitelist / firefighters, with visualisation of the scenario so that it could be prepared on a live server without anybody noticing
• redo the notification system (you can have a look at dispatch-update branch which should work, but is not nearly finished) so it uses the in-game alerts, the dispatch messages can be recalled etc.
• implement area of patrol (fire scenarios would be spawned and assigned to specific station based on location; this could benefit from OOP principles as well - each area would have its own separate dispatch etc.)

Conclusion

Everything listed above (including your ideas) would be a great addition. However, I do not have the time needed to implement these funcionalities. I am a part-time working university student pilot and almost every idea would take hours to get to work, let alone test and debug. It is one of many reasons why I published the script as open-source. Anybody can contribute, but as you can see, not many have.

I am very happy that this script can bring joy to some that use it, but I can no longer develop it.