Swayed by the popular request, I hacked together a little tool to control the game volume in the Windows version of the game. You can grab it here: World of Goo Volume Control v1.0.zip.

To install:
Find your World of Goo installation directory (usually something like C:\Program Files\2D Boy\World of Goo) and then:
- rename irrKlang.dll to RealIrrKlang.dll (this name is required!)
- copy the hacked irrKlang.dll in its place

If the game complains about a missing DLL (msvcr90.dll) then you need to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package as well. This shouldn't apply anymore since version 1.0.

How to use:
Run the game as usual. You can click the icon in the notification area to pop up the volume control dialog, or use one of these hotkeys:

    Ctrl O/-: decrease sound volume
    Ctrl P/+: increase sound volume
    Ctrl M: toggle sound mute
   
    Alt O/-: decrease music volume
    Alt P/+: increase music volume
    Alt M: toggle music mute

    Ctrl Alt O/-: decrease both sound and music volume
    Ctrl Alt P/+: increase both sound and music volume
    Ctrl Alt M: toggle both sound and music mute

Please note that this is an unoffical and completely unsupported hack. There is absolutely no guarantee that this will work on your computer. If it doesn't work or you mess up your installation, feel free to post in this topic, but do not bother 2D Boy about it. They are busy enough as it is, and this is not a supported game feature.

If this turns out to work reliably I might wrap a nice installer around it, but I'd like to have some feedback on whether it works correctly first.

Thank you thank you thank you!!!!  :D :D ;D ;D
Works great!! I didn't need C++ 2008 Redistributable Package, but I don't know about others.



EDIT: Just one thing, I play on laptop, don't have a numpad (I hook up keyboard for the test), so can you instead +, -, make PgUp, PgDn or something like that, thx.

Wow that's awesome Maks! Can I add it to GooTool's options pane for automatic installation?

I was previously going to have it write out some blank oggs but this is way more useful (I already have platform-specific code in there for the Linux feature so it's easy to add).

-davidc

Awesome. Thanks for making this.

Actually I was thinking about making a goomod that deletes all the music out of the level files, so that only the sound fx (and maybe soundloops) would be played.
but that would only kill the music of the original game, not custom made levels.
you'd need a script that automaticlly searches through all levels and deletes the music and/or soundloop elements... but i guess there are better ways...

could your volume-mod somehow be tweaked to know the difference between music, soundloops and sound fx?

[quote author=XDboy link=topic=1710.msg11190#msg11190 date=1238426682]
could your volume-mod somehow be tweaked to know the difference between music, soundloops and sound fx?

Now that is something we REALLY need!!! :D In fact I hoped that was what you had actually done... ;)

On Vista you don't need the volume-mod, in it's current form, cause there is already a volume per application thingy.

unless you want to be able to control the volume with ctr alt +/- in the game.

edit:
wow.  ;D

Controlling music and sound effects separately would be cool, although I'm not sure if I can make that work with my current approach.

I think the controlling the combined game volume is useful on itself; many people still use Windows XP after all.

Still a mighty usefull little tool. :D

Ok, I changed a few things around, and now you can control the sound and music independently. :) It's a bit of a hack (sounds are considered music if they are loaded from the /music/ folder; not sure if this is correct for all custom levels, although it worked for Jingle Balls) but it seems to work. Give it a try; the updated link is at the top of the thread.

I also added O/P hotkeys in addition to -/+ for easier use with laptop keyboards that don't have normal -/+ keys.

[quote author=davidc link=topic=1710.msg11169#msg11169 date=1238367993]
Can I add it to GooTool's options pane for automatic installation?

Of course! But maybe you should wait a bit to see if it works well first.

[quote author=Soultaker link=topic=1710.msg11200#msg11200 date=1238451313]
(sounds are considered music if they are loaded from the /music/ folder; not sure if this is correct for all custom levels, although it worked for Jingle Balls)

great, you figured it out! :)
for the custom levels that don't have their music files in res/music/, you could consider .oggs in the res/levels/ subdirectories as music also, because it's only natural that level-modders want to put everything in their own level folder ;)
for instance, "Sandbox" has it's music in res/levels/sandbox/

another solution would be to make it an offical goomod standard to put music in res/music/ (well, duh! :D ) and to bring the authors of "wrong" goomods to change them accordingly.

[quote author=XDboy link=topic=1710.msg11203#msg11203 date=1238458413]
great, you figured it out! :)
for the custom levels that don't have their music files in res/music/, you could consider .oggs in the res/levels/ subdirectories as music also, because it's only natural that level-modders want to put everything in their own level folder ;)
for instance, "Sandbox" has it's music in res/levels/sandbox/


I disagree. The standard in the game, which we followed for Jingle Balls, is for music to be in res/music and ball-specific sounds to be in res/balls. Oggs in res/levels/ would be background loops, not music. So if Sandbox has its music inside its level directory, I suggest it be moved in the next release. Yes, it's nice to encapsulate everything about a level together, but on the other hand it's not that hard to ensure unique filenames (nobody's going to be using res/music/level_sandbox.ogg after all....)

[quote author=Soultaker link=topic=1710.msg11200#msg11200 date=1238451313]
[quote author=davidc link=topic=1710.msg11169#msg11169 date=1238367993]
Can I add it to GooTool's options pane for automatic installation?

Of course! But maybe you should wait a bit to see if it works well first.


Will do. Gootool 0.10.3 will be a few days off anyway, I need to integrate voting and the new tower stuff you sent me :-)

-davidc

[quote author=davidc link=topic=1710.msg11204#msg11204 date=1238463318]
I disagree. The standard in the game, which we followed for Jingle Balls, is for music to be in res/music and ball-specific sounds to be in res/balls. Oggs in res/levels/ would be background loops, not music. So if Sandbox has its music inside its level directory, I suggest it be moved in the next release. Yes, it's nice to encapsulate everything about a level together, but on the other hand it's not that hard to ensure unique filenames (nobody's going to be using res/music/level_sandbox.ogg after all....)

i see, so it would be wrong to consider the res/levels/ oggs as music. Back to plan B then: enforcing the music into /music/ standard.  ;)

very well done

Ok, I updated the volume control to version 1.0. Not too many changes though; I removed the MSVC v9 library dependency, simplified the hotkeys (dropped the Shift modifier) and a couple of other minor things that bugged me. I'm satisfied with the result, so I think that this is going to be the final version, unless someone reports a serious bug.

davidc: if you're still reading along and want to make this available through GooTool, you have my blessing. :)

Thank you for your time and effort!!  :)