A Call for Better Sound FX!

For collaboration between the different artists creating music and sound for vegastrike.
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A Call for Better Sound FX!

Post by Accu-Accelerated »

I think that Vega Strike's sound falls behind its music, gameplay, and graphics. Most of the laser/weapon effects are just cheesy, wierd, and sometimes really annoying. The sound effect when there's a collision doesn't sound realistic at all. The explosions just lack oomph and are often too short. In fact, I turn off sound when I play Vega Strike because it detracts from the game for me. There is lots of development in terms of making models for ships and taking screenshots, and making more music, which is all valid and good work, but I think that re-doing the sound effects deserves more attention. I'm not experienced in making sound effects, but I don't think it's very hard to provide a simple, but better-sounding laser or better explosion effects. I hope some more progress will be made in sound.
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Post by Halleck »

Good sound work is harder than it seems. We might try scrounging the freesound project to see if there are any samples that could be used as a base.
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Post by Guest »

If there is interest in new sound I am active in home audio production and can probably come up with some.

I am also getting into photography and videography and can supply cargo images too if they are needed. I may even be able to do vidcoms with actors too as they're always looking for something... but I think there's still work on developing the factions...

I was just wondering where would I submit this stuff... just post it to the board?
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Post by zekthedeadcow »

opps... forgot to login :)
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Post by klauss »

For sounds, yes... just post them. I'll download, archive and even put them ingame (if applicable).
Previews may be compressed, but if you could upload uncompressed final versions, that would be much better. That, or high-quality compression (256kbps minimum).

As for the rest... I don't know, you should coordinate with the ones in charge of that department (look in the artwork forum).
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Post by Oblivion »

Just like Zeog's cargo images, but if they are ready, can we get the new sound files as a zip/rar file download?

I really really don't like current sound effects ingame. :roll:
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Post by Zeog »

Oblivion wrote:Just like Zeog's cargo images, ...
Credit goes to Silverain. I'm just including them.
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Post by Oblivion »

Gracias Silverain. :)
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some hull collision sounds

Post by glarbl_blarbl »

I had nothing else to do today so I recorded the front panel on an old furnace in my studio today. Some of these are kicks, and some are slams... I didn't want to do any signal compression - except a bit of eq since I had to try out my new graphic... :D

My firepod was being stubborn about doing 96kHz, and I figured that mono 44.1 would do for a first run.. Plus, once I was editing down the master I heard a bit of low freq hum I didn't notice earlier so I plan on redoing this once I fix it all. So I would appreciate constructive criticism on these, the first foley work I've done in 10 years.

http://www.diph.org/~g/vegastrike/

It totals about 4mB in mono 44.1k wav .. if anybody needs it I can totally oggify them.
-g
Last edited by glarbl_blarbl on Tue May 23, 2006 7:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Halleck »

Cool!

These would be great additions to the Freesound project, if you're willing. ;)

Sorry if I can't provide any constructive feedback, but I'm a relative novice when it comes to foley and sound design. The quality of the recording is very good, though... at least compared to anything I've done. :D
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Post by glarbl_blarbl »

Right on... I'm surprised I haven't run across the freesound project before, it's gonna take me awhile to go through it.. I'm gonna have to show it to my DJ and keyboard playing friends.

Probably need to rename the files to something more descriptive.

On another note, I've been lurking around these forums (and the wiki) for a few weeks now and I'm not sure I've found an up-to-date list of which sounds need to be recorded. Who is in charge of the audio/music aspect of the game? It does seem that there are some very knowledgable audio people in some of those threads from a year ago. It's been awhile since I found audio stuff which I found hard to understand ;)

I'm pretty busy with my band right now. We're recording a full-length album in my studio, and I'm recording another local band's EP. Then there's the Oingo Boingo tribute band... I do have days off where I can do some more foley work for VS- but I would be much more efficient with a list of what needs doing. Obviously anything I do for VS would be on an open-source or creative commons license, so it would be right at home on freesound ;) ..

-g
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Post by Halleck »

Cool.

The music was done by ken suguro and peteyg, both of whom are not very active around here anymore. Zaydana has made a few tracks too, he's still around (working on the new website layout at present.) I don't know who did the sound effects, that was way before my time.

The last I heard of any sound work was between klauss and chuck_starchaser, who were trying to create a more realistic sound engine. That was also a long time ago, I think they are occupied by other things now.

So, I don't know that anyone is really in charge, in terms of orchestrating any sort of effort to work on music/sound.

Sounds like you have a lot on your plate, glad to hear you have set aside some time for VS. :)

I think you'll enjoy Freesound... everything is published under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license, allowing it to be freely copied and used as a portion of a new work as long as it's properly attributed.
If you're interested, here are my sounds. I'd love to hear what you think of them.
I'm trying to learn as I go... and of course, better microphones help.

(BTW, Oingo Boingo rocks. 8) )
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Post by glarbl_blarbl »

Yeah, well - we're getting close to being done with the album. 68.61% done with the recording phase, according to my rock n' roll spreadsheet (openoffice.org calc .ods, that is). When I first created it in Feb, we were about 35% done.

I realized that I needed to create the rocknroll spreadsheet when I counted up all the songs for which we had recorded basic tracks (19 of them). It would list all the tracks we planned to record, whether each track had been recorded yet, and a function averaging the "completeness" of each song as well as the overall project. I'd upload it, but I'd have to save it as an .xls and I don't know if my spiffy green formatting would make it through the transition :P

It occurs to me that I could use a version of the rocknroll spreadsheet for the sfx foley work for VS. if I knew everything that needed to be recorded. It would also serve as a handy way to keep metadata on each sample for future use.

EDIT:
OT
For completeness, I should mention that the RNRS included mixing as well - since our album is a multitrack project.
/OT
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Post by klauss »

Creating such a list would require deciding the extent of "realism" (try not to read too deep into that) of the sound engine, the amount of variety, quality, and a lot of design decisions we've been procrastinating.

As a general design goal, the idea is to have the "base" dataset (the one that has to be recorded) as little redundant as possible, by removing "ambiance variants" - that is, we don't need two versions of the same sound when only the environment changes, and the source itself is the same. That is... a laser firing as heared from inside the cockpit needs not be duplicated for each cockpit type we want it to sound different, the idea is to make the engine process the sounds to create the variants.

So... to create the list, careful attention has to be put into deciding which variants should be recorded, and which should be left for load-time generation.

Also, how many "cherry sounds" is a very important decision. By "cherry sound" I mean those that effectively are the "cherry on top" - structure squeaks while the ship is under pressure, ship equipment background, etc.

If you're indeed into it, we could try to work on such a list. You're welcome to post to the vegastrike-devel list at sourceforge.net about the subject, to coordinate.

Some sounds that are certainly going to be needed: shield hit (monophonic, as environmentally neutral as possible given that most of the sound is environmental in nature), hull hit (same about environment) for various weapon types (laser, plasma, etc... contact JackS for an accurate list of weapon types and some descriptions as to their principle, so you can make up a sound for them), weapons firing (that is, you fire your own laser, or things like that), engines (main thruster - continuous, maneuvering thruster - sporadic, SPEC - continuous, though we have some good ones for SPEC but aren't being used).

About the "style" of those sounds... I had played a bit with shield hits, looking for a particular style that I had in my mind but couldn't put into words or into sound - pretty difficult, if you come to think about it - turning an idea into sound. When I get home I'll see about posting one of them, but they're not at all perfect, ingame they get swallowed by the other sounds (they don't fit in).
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Post by glarbl_blarbl »

Cool beans. I agree with you that only one sample per sound is necessary in the actual game. I posted those variants so I could get an idea of the preferences around here. When it comes to samples, I like to have a lot of choices up front, disk space is getting pretty cheap :D

Personally I like the darker-sounding hull collisions from the set I posted - though there is a bright sounding one which is nice and short. I moved the mics in between each sample to get a set which encompassed a range of the sounds I could naturally produce with this situation.

I still have the multitrack files, so if we decide we need more of the beta-52 @100Hz it's still possible. Yeah... you have an excellent point about trying to communicate about music/audio. My friend Jake (the lead singer in my band) can only sing his ideas, regardless of which instrument he's talking about. It usually falls to me to tell the guitarist that he should do a hammer-on instead of picking the individual notes, for example. Jake will just sit there and sing the part over and over until they get it. At least he has a great voice :D So if it comes to it, and you don't mind feeling a little silly - you could always sing your idea and send it to me.. Though I guess some sounds might not be singable, either :/

--
This sounds like a lot of fun! I've been playing with the penguin since RedHat 5.2, and it's nice to have finally found a project to which I want (and have the skills, I'm no coder ;) )to contribute.

I'll go ahead and post to the devel list after I get back from vacation in the middle of June. Going hiking in the mountains with my brother- no 'net access :shock:

In the meantime, I have some time I can spend on some of your suggestions. I'll probably need to do some research to be able to do laser and energy weapon sounds. I did play around with an old shortwave last night after I finished the hull hits - got about 10m of frequency sweeps... Of course, it's all electronic noise from my digital studio here, so I'm not sure what use it is.. Maybe it'll end up on The Archives (my band) album. ;)
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Post by klauss »

Glarbl... I finally got a shot at hearing your samples, and they're pretty good. I'd change nothing... even the low-frequency humm is a nice touch, and whenever it's undesirable, it can be filtered out rather trivially.

About the firepod... though...

I don't know, but after googling a bit, it seems overpriced for the resulting quality. I've noticed a very high noise floor, and poorly done noise shaping. That's a problem with the DAC, not the preamp. The mikes, though, seem pretty good. I think my creative SB Live gets better results... really...
Consider ditching the firepod if you ever switch gear - try M-Audio, they do good stuff, though only their top-of-the-lines are worth the price - the rest drop a lot of quality and still are a bit costly. Stay away from E-MU (personal preference), and I'd recommend what I have, except they don't make it anymore (swissonic).
Of course... that's assuming you didn't as much as touch the bitstream after recording. If you used some kind of editing tool - first consider switching tools. I've seen some tools that even for simple copy-paste, they modify the stream by passing it through several internal format conversions that practically destroy noise shaping and sometimes downgrade 24-bit to 16-bit (for instance, GoldWave - be careful with that one).

That's why I make my own tools - it's a lottery with third parties.

EDIT:

I forgot - the samples are a bit short. You missed a lot of resonance (not environmental, from the... thing (can't remember what it was - and I'm lazy, I don't want to wait for the previous page to load :p )... you banged itself. Next time, try not to cut the falloff.

BTW: I checked out the specs for the firepod, and yap - not very impressive. THD < 0.005%. Mackie preamps (same price range) have a THD+N < 0.0007% - Besides, they aren't specific specifications (imagine that) - they don't specify weighting for the THD, nor anything else. Usually, when I find that in manuals, it means either it's really not worth saying (so they don't - why publish unimpressive stuff), or they're not very serious designers (or... they don't design the stuff at all). I tend to avoid those - getting those is not how you get quality.
Of course... that evaluation depends on how much you paid for it. If you paid the $700 USD I've been seeing on the net, you really paid too much.
Just a guideline for the future.
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Post by glarbl_blarbl »

Klauss: thanks for the feedback! It always helps to have another set of ears take a listen.

I paid $550 for the firepod and got a free pair of $70 headphones (gotta love Musician's Friend - BTW, the Mackie Onyx was going for about twice that much last I checked). I pretty much used up my whole budget at that price point, but once I start making some real money doing this you can bet your sweet bippy that I'll be moving on from the firepod. It sure beats using a behringer mixer through an RCA-1/8" adapter into a 5 year-old sound-card, though. The big advantage over the SB Live! I used to use is that it will record 8 channels of 96kHz audio simultaneously, instead of just stereo 44.1kHz. Also, having trained on Sony 2" analog 24-track tape machines, I can tell you that the noise floor is comparable on the firepod - and certainly nothing a regular listener would notice.

When I shop for gear, and also when I record- I try to always keep my intended audience in mind.. I'm sure that less than 1% of the population in general can hear the distortion you're talking about, and even those people need really expensive gear to actually pick it out. For VS, I imagine this will do pretty well for the time being - and I'm sure I can make some time to work on it once I get my studio up to a $50/hr rate. ;)

I used Sonar 5 Producer Edition, which has worked really well for rock music in my experience. I did the final editing in Steinberg's WaveLab. Both programs are professional-quality. There are a couple of samples in which I did a quick fade at the end to smooth out some abruptness (I didn't use a compressor, so a couple of them clipped and I had to edit around that). I did run the signal out of the firepod, through a brand-new DOD graphic EQ (bumped up the beta 52 track about 3db at 100Hz and the mxl-603 at 1kHz), then back into Sonar. My setup is such that it's really difficult to do the EQ to disk, and I hate the way Sonar's digital EQ sounds.

I was playing around in WaveLab with the freq generator trying to come up with some interesting laser and SPEC sounds and had an interesting idea. It would be cool if the pitch of the SPEC engines changed depending on the ships proximity to massive objects. I'm not sure how practical that would be, it seems like you'd have to use the sound card to generate the proper waveforms.

I took a brief glance at the OpenAL documentation, and it looks like they haven't implemented a way to have internal loops in a sample yet (it's on the wishlist). Apparently you can only do looping on a sample-wide basis. I was wondering how we'd accomplish continuous sounds like the SPEC engines, but this makes it a bit more logical: a ramp-up sound, the continuous loop of running engines, then a ramp-down sound. I'll upload my first draft to my webpage later today or this weekend.

Here's the homepage for my studio You can take a look at my gear and a quick overview of my qualifications.

Ok, this post is entirely too long...
g
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Post by klauss »

glarbl_blarbl wrote:I paid $550 for the firepod and got a free pair of $70 headphones (gotta love Musician's Friend - BTW, the Mackie Onyx was going for about twice that much last I checked).
I see - I was instructed by knowledgable people about Mackies. Their mixing consoles have utra-good preamps, while being really cheap (and the mixing can be useful at times). Most models have insert capabilities which let you pick up the preamp's output pre-mixing, which avoids quality degradation. So... the best way to get well-priced preamps (ya... bulky and... weird, I know) is to get Mackie consoles. Mine isn't an Onyx, but seems to have the same preamps.
glarbl_blarbl wrote:The big advantage over the SB Live! I used to use is that it will record 8 channels of 96kHz audio simultaneously, instead of just stereo 44.1kHz.
Good point.
glarbl_blarbl wrote:When I shop for gear, and also when I record- I try to always keep my intended audience in mind.. I'm sure that less than 1% of the population in general can hear the distortion you're talking about, and even those people need really expensive gear to actually pick it out. For VS, I imagine this will do pretty well for the time being - and I'm sure I can make some time to work on it once I get my studio up to a $50/hr rate. ;)
Ehm... just in case there's doubt, I was in no way complaining in that sense. It only struck me as strange, given the looks on the pod thingy and its price, and commented on it to... well... spread knowledge/opinions.
glarbl_blarbl wrote:I used Sonar 5 Producer Edition, which has worked really well for rock music in my experience. I did the final editing in Steinberg's WaveLab.
I used it, it came with one of the audio stuff I got (can't remember what). Not too good in that regard. CakeWalk is much more trustworthy, but less powerful in its editing tasks. Again... that's why I make my own.
glarbl_blarbl wrote:I did run the signal out of the firepod, through a brand-new DOD graphic EQ (bumped up the beta 52 track about 3db at 100Hz and the mxl-603 at 1kHz), then back into Sonar. My setup is such that it's really difficult to do the EQ to disk, and I hate the way Sonar's digital EQ sounds.
Don't worry... I see (yes, see) mostly digital distortion. I don't think the analog gear is to blame.
Though you could try Orfeo... it's posted around somewhere in this forum... its my tool of choice for most of that stuff (postprocessing). It's a bit weird to handle, I never got around to making a decent GUI.
glarbl_blarbl wrote:I took a brief glance at the OpenAL documentation, and it looks like they haven't implemented a way to have internal loops in a sample yet (it's on the wishlist).
Ya... OpenAL is quite troublesome. I'm pondering using several APIs, DX on Win, OpenAL on Lin/Mac. DX is much more mature in the gaming audio department than OpenAL.
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Post by glarbl_blarbl »

Don't get me wrong, I love Mackie's stuff. I learned to record on one of their 32x8s and it set the bar for me in terms of good mixers. Later at AIS I worked on a 32x12 Soundcraft which was really nice too.

It's all about bang for my (limited) bucks for me right now, so I went the computer multitrack route until I can expand.

Here's the Onyx ... Looks like the price has dropped since I was shopping for a firewire ADA interface :( ... It was over $1000 last November when I bought the firepod. I sold my truck and bought a cheaper SUV in order to afford my firepod... Damn.

I'll give Orfeo a try, I'm not afraid of a little command-line action.. Unfortunately, the linux drivers for the firepod are still in the pre-alpha stage, so in order to use the firepod I have to stay in XP (and it's hooked up to my good monitors :/ ).. I can probably come up with a work-around in a few weeks - my brother and I have pushed our hiking trip back until after our sister's graduation next week, so I'll see what I can do before then.
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Post by klauss »

Good find, that Onyx, but the specs don't match. I use a VLZ-something (can't remember exactly right now, I'll check when I have the chance) with a swissonic DAC and an ADAT interface card. The budget for that went a bit over your numbers (not much, I got a special deal on the swissonic - I got lucky). It was a big investment at the time... mostly because 1USD here is... well... a lot, compared to 1USD in the US. But it was worth it, and it was an "investment" rathern than an "expenditure", so...

Anyway, in normal circumstances (no special deals), I guess my rig (not counting the mikes) must be close to $2000. That's hot. I got it for less than half of it... hm... around 800 (I got the swissonic+adat basically for free - there was one guy very desperate to get rid of it, so I got all suspicious and fought the price a lot, just in case I was being cheated - but no, it turned out he just was desperate for some cash - now I feel bad for him).

Anyway... Mackie's preamps perform much better through the inserts. I basically have the Mackie for monitoring only, because everything goes out of it through the Mic Inserts towards the DAC and then the PC. I usually do the mixing on the Mackie, note down the settings, and then try it again on the PC - if it sounds good, I push "go". If not, I can re-do it since I recorded each mic on its own channel. It's a great way of working, lots of places to be careful to retain quality, though, and needs tons of HD storage.
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