Ideas for sound

For collaboration between the different artists creating music and sound for vegastrike.
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primate
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Ideas for sound

Post by primate »

Sound is obviously a great and important (and often overlooked) way to establish atmosphere in a game. Atmosphere is everything in a game like VS. Here is my two cents of ideas, I hope some of them are useful:

[list]* Tracker style sound library - Allow a single sample to be played at different pitches and volumes, looped if neccessary. Thus a limited amount of samples can be used to generate a wider variety of sound.
* Low volume thrust/engine/ftl noise - While inside the cockpit, some engine noise can add the feel of being in a spaceship. Using the above tracker style engine, use a engine loop ("VRRMMM" :) ) sample and change its pitch in sync with the speed of your craft. Use one for thrusters and one for FTL multiplier. Also use different sound for different sizes of crafts.
* Ambient radio noise and talk - Occasional radio noise adds to atmosphere. Linking existing messages to garbled radio speaking samples. Avoid any real words to allow generic use. Radio "traffic" might increase near installations like commerce centre.
* Alien sounds - I think there is an unknown faction - strange alien craft sightings and the like. These could produce a strange "screaming" sound on the radio to add a level of fear to their presence.
*Jump node proximity noise - A jump node might have a magnetic field or the like that causes vibration in the ship, thus a low throbbing looped sample linked to distance from the node might add to its feel of significance.
[/list]
I think that's the extent of my sound-related ideas for now, let me know if this would go better in the feature request section. Apologies if any have been already implemented or suggested. Hope this helps...
loki1950
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Post by loki1950 »

Welcome primate good ideals now to produce the necessary files so they can be included :wink:

Enjoy the Choice :)
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primate
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Post by primate »

Good point. Always more ideas than helpers.

For the tracker perhaps there is code in an existing open source project that takes a sound sample and pitch/volume shifts it etc. For example a tracker?:
http://www.soundtracker.org/
http://cheesetracker.sourceforge.net/

I had a bit of a look at the vs development section thing and apparently a reworking of the sound code is in progress? I wonder if they are including something like this already.
I'm not much good with the coding I play around with web dev stuff a bit is all.

I also typed "jet" into freesound.org and got a few likely results. I imagine cutting the loudest bit of the sample of a jet passing and looping it might be one possibility, maybe with some kind of filter to space-ify the sample before use.

Will look into it when ISP removes shaping in a few weeks time... net is so sloowww.
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Post by klauss »

Don't worry about the tracket. It's what I'm doing in the sound branch.
And superb ideas man. All of them except perhaps jump nodes were already on my head, some are simple to implement, some not at all.

But slowly... my personal goal in VS is to have all of those implemented.
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Deus Siddis
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Re: Ideas for sound

Post by Deus Siddis »

primate wrote:* Low volume thrust/engine/ftl noise - While inside the cockpit, some engine noise can add the feel of being in a spaceship. Using the above tracker style engine, use a engine loop ("VRRMMM" :) ) sample and change its pitch in sync with the speed of your craft. Use one for thrusters and one for FTL multiplier. Also use different sound for different sizes of crafts.
Engine noise is a good idea, but this execution would be terrible, thruster noise should be tied to when the thrusters are firing, it should not run constantly or else it is less realistic, much more confusing for piloting and would kind of get old after a while plus interfere with the all important and well done music.
* Ambient radio noise and talk - Occasional radio noise adds to atmosphere. Linking existing messages to garbled radio speaking samples. Avoid any real words to allow generic use. Radio "traffic" might increase near installations like commerce centre.
Ambient radio chatter would be better blended into music if it is to play regardless of what is happening in the game. But hearing radio chatter when you recieve or send a message would be good and chatter when you approach stations and such like would also be fine.
* Alien sounds - I think there is an unknown faction - strange alien craft sightings and the like. These could produce a strange "screaming" sound on the radio to add a level of fear to their presence.
Hearing each alien race speak in its particular alien language when it sends you a message would be a major improvement to the feel of the game.
*Jump node proximity noise - A jump node might have a magnetic field or the like that causes vibration in the ship, thus a low throbbing looped sample linked to distance from the node might add to its feel of significance.
Another very good idea.
primate
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Re: Ideas for sound

Post by primate »

Deus Siddis wrote: this execution would be terrible, thruster noise should be tied to when the thrusters are firing, it should not run constantly or else it is less realistic, much more confusing for piloting and would kind of get old after a while plus interfere with the all important and well done music.
True. I think the main thing is to have a good SPEC powering up and down noise, perhaps that is audible while the spec multiplier is at very low amounts? It would also provide a audio queue that you're approaching a destination (I always crash because I'm off eating or something).

I wouldn't mind engine noise sub-spec if volume was low - particularly for battles etc where it could provide a audio queue to know velocity without having to focus away from enemy and read something.

I guess it would be great if all this stuff was user configurable. But then configurable might be another word for complicated/feature creepy.
kensuguro
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Re: Ideas for sound

Post by kensuguro »

always great to see activity here. All my sounds were put there to be replaced in the future, so any work towards replacing my placeholders is awesome!

Thrust noise can be shaped from any noise source. With creative filtering, a not so perfect noise can sound pretty good if the visuals go with it. I'd say do one, put it in the game, and see what it feels like.

Radio chatter isn't so hard either. You just need to record some random speech, run it through a granular synth to generate random sample clouds. (or just mangle it by hand) Run that through a bandpass filter, reduce sample rate (to 8000hz or so), and overdrive it to simulate tiny speaker tear. Someone just has to sit down and do it.

All this is easy to say, but I guess integrating it into the game is the tough part. I remember when I did the in game sounds, the biggest issue was not being able to pitch anything, and so that's why the engine sounds weren't continuous. We couldn't get a perfect loop from ogg either I don't think. (at that point in time) But anyway, a tracker style engine would be awesome since you can pitch. If we could also do a phasevocoder based pitch shift and maintain formant, it'll help us avoid the chipmonk effect, but I guess audio won't have that sort of processor attention in this context.

I all essence, please feel welcome ditch any of the old stuff. They're stuff I did in a limited time with the best resources I had access to at the time, and were not meant to be used for this long.
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