The ambient_generic is one of the most difficult things that new mappers find hard to set up, however with a bit of common sense and knowledge of the file structure, they are very simple and easy to master.
First of all, there is no need to extract these sounds outside the pak file, any mod or map can use these sounds. Say for example we want a sound file inside the pak0 file to play in our map, lets just pick any random one: ambience/boomer.wav. This is what we enter into the ambient_generics file name field, there is no need to enter: c:/sierra/half-life/valve/sounds.... because the game knows where the sound folder is and it will assume that everything you type in the file name field is is inside the sound folder.
If you want the sound to play when you trigger it, than you must check "start silent" in the flags because ambient generics are an on/off kind of entity. When the start silent flag is ticked, this means that the entity will start off in its off state, triggering the ambient_generic entity will cause it to toggle into its on state and play the sound.
Depending on what type of sound it is, you may want it to be playin in a small radius or across the whole level, this is done by the "Play everywhere, small radius, medium radius and large radius" flags, you should only have one of these flags ticked and they are pretty self explanatory.
The only other field you need to worry about is the Volume field, just remember not to put the sound louder than 10, otherwise half-life will crash.
So lets do an experiment, create an ambient_generic with the following settings:
Name: sound01
WAV name: ambience/boomer.wav
Volume: 10
Flags: Play everywhere, start silent
Now create a trigger auto with the following settings:
Target: sound01
Delay before trigger: 2
Trigger to send: on
Now compile the map and the sound should play. And now you know the basics for sound in a map.
Just a final note, and this note applies to models, sounds, sprites and maps. Say for example you have a sound, ambience/hello.wav in a map that is part of a mod. The engine will search 4 areas for the sound:
1) sound/ambience/hello.wav ( in the mod folder)
2) sound/ambience/hello.wav ( in the mod's pak0 file)
3) valve/sound/ambience/hello.wav
4) sound/ambience/hello.wav (in valves pak0 file)
It will first search 1, than 2, 3, 4 and if it dosen't find a sound in those 4 locations, than an error will be produced.
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