They make a big difference so you should always consider what sort of ambient noise might be applicable at various places in your map.

You're going to need PakScape sooner or later , so you might as well get it now.

It doesn't need installing, just unzipping.

Plonk it in your ET folder or anywhere you keep utilities.

Use Windows Explorer to navigate to the etmain folder.  Right click pak0.pk3 and associate PakScape with the pk3 file type, and open pak0.pk3.

You'll see a windows-style view of the insides of the pk3.

Open the sound folder, and the world folder within it.

Double click on any of the WAVs to marvel in the audio possibilities open to you.  It is possible to make your own WAVs, but using some of these standard ones is a good start.

I will use war.wav for this demo.

So, run ET and /devmap <yourmap> - then stay in Spec mode when it starts.  If you haven't tested recently, you will see your map description  text as the map loads, and you now have a respawn time of 10 secs, which is better for testing.

Glide your viewpoint to somewhere high up around the middle of the map, and bring up the console.

Enter \editspeakers to enter speaker editing mode.

Then enter \dumpspeaker to create a speaker in front of you.

Then enter \modifyspeaker to edit the speaker you've highlighted (it will be pink) by looking at it.

(You can use / instead of \ if you prefer.)

Exit the console, and enter these values in the boxes:

Move your 3D view around so you can see where the speaker actually sits.  For a broadcast global speaker roughly the middle is fine.  If you wanted, say radio static, you'd put the speaker near the radio brush and make the range smaller.

Practice moving the speaker, by looking at it so it goes pink, then going back to the console and entering \modifyspeaker (just use the up arrow to get back recent console commands) and come back out of the console.  This time drag on the coloured bars sticking out of the speaker and move the speaker to where you want it.  Put this one near the map centre.

Click on OK to end the modifying.  Go back to the console and enter \editspeakers to end the editing session.

Join a team and run around a bit to see how the sound comes across - is it too loud/quiet, in the right place, etc?

When you add speakers to the map in this way, ET creates and modifies a file called <yourmap>.sps which it puts in the \etmain\sound\maps folder.  When the time comes, we would need to include this file in the PK3 you'll build to distribute your creation.