Sound effects quality and music combination

For collaboration between the different artists creating music and sound for vegastrike.
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Scar
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Sound effects quality and music combination

Post by Scar »

Hi all,
since I'm playing svn I hear sound in vegastrike.
And all the effects sound like from an old computer game and too aggressive.
Have you ever thought about creating new ones which sound more, well friendly?
And the music combination is not as good as it could be.
As I'm flying through space I got marching snare going over to silent chillout.
How could that be?
And is it possible to get own mp3/ogg songs into the specific game contexts?
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Post by charlieg »

I think the issue with sound effects is lack of expertise in making them. If somebody contributed better ones or found better ones under an open license, I'm certain they would be included in the game.
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Post by loki1950 »

There was support for user playlists in 0.4.3 whether it survived the rewrite of the sound system i do not know but someone who does will most likely respond.As for music an e-mail to mike on the music group might be in order he has not been active much of late or a PM to someone in the group who is active ATM.

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Post by Halleck »

I thought we still used M3U playlists, if that's the case you should be able to modify those to use your own music.

As to sound effects... seems to me that the ones we have are at least adequate. I do some amateur sound design for films from time to time but I don't know that I could improve the ones we have very much. Perhaps something could be found in the freesound library.
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Post by klauss »

You'll find .m3u playlists in /home/whatever/.vegastrike (linux) or <vegastrike dir>/.vegastrike (windows), and you can edit them with notepad if you like (or an m3u playlist editor - like winamp's).

About soundeffects... yep, I tried to make a few new ones, but I must face it - I lack the experience. Although I've done lots of music/restoration work, it seems that didn't prepare me to make creative work, like creating sound effects from scratch. I'll always try again from time to time, but if anyone knew of a) a free quality-SFX source or b) someone who'd make them, it would probably go faster (and appreciated).
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Post by Deus Siddis »

If anyone knows of any good freeware/opensource software tools for making high quality sound effects or has links to any good tutorials on this subject, that might help alot.

If VS' sound effects where of the same league as alot of its music, that would probably almost double the quality of the game experience, since that is currently the weakest link in VS' artwork, imo. Some weapon sound effects are not bad, but the beams especially really don't sound like they have any punch.
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Post by Halleck »

Please see the link above to the freesound project. It has a large library of audio samples and an active community of audiophiles. :D

I don't know that you can really teach sound design much more than you can teach any art form. Seems to me that it's all about your experience, creativity, and of course, equipment.

Equipment-wise, Audacity is a good general purpose (and free) audio editor, and a fine place to start.

Education-wise... for myself, I'll see if the Audio Techniques class I'm taking next semester will spark any ideas. :wink:
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Post by klauss »

From my limited (and theoretical - ie not practical) knowledge about SFX authoring, you need synthesizers and sequencers far more than general purpose audio editing, although the two get combined usually.
The usual way about FX creation is to use a synthesizer to create a base, and then morph/mix it with sound editing software into the final product.
I tried to make, for instance, a cool shield-hit sound I have in my mind, but fleshing out the sound I imagine turned out very hard and, when I plugged the final result into VS (once it was barely decent), it didn't match the rest of the sound effects to the point of being unusable.
So, it's not only about creating isolated SFX, it's about creating a whole style first - it's a lot of work, and filled with creative challenges rather than technical stuff.
So... I'd rather ask for "SFX sets", rather than plain SFX. Any submission should have shield, some interface, some weapons, and some of everything in order to "paint the overall picture". Then, if its liked (and plays well together), it can be worked on (even by others) following that style to get each SFX needed. But a sketch is needed first.
That's what I got from my earlier attempts, at least. I hope it helps/is agreed upon.
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Post by ace123 »

On a related note, is there anyone else who decides to cycle through the whole list of targets rather than go backwards with Shift simply because of that awfully annoying BEEP-BEEP sound?

Should we change forwards and backwards to use the same sound?
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Post by Miramor »

To expand upon the problem in the OP - last time I tried out the SVN, after the sound fixes, I found that the background music didn't sound very good in the game, as compared to how it sounded when played using GStreamer - it sounded fuzzier and less crisp, and although I'm no subwoofer maniac I thought that the base was a bit too quiet. Is it possible that however the sound is now handled isn't so great for ogg playback quality, or something?
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Post by klauss »

Miramor wrote:To expand upon the problem in the OP - last time I tried out the SVN, after the sound fixes, I found that the background music didn't sound very good in the game, as compared to how it sounded when played using GStreamer - it sounded fuzzier and less crisp, and although I'm no subwoofer maniac I thought that the base was a bit too quiet. Is it possible that however the sound is now handled isn't so great for ogg playback quality, or something?
YES
That's what I noticed, in a nutshell.
If you ask me, it's dithering.
Must be.
OpenAL is poorly adjusting volume and loosing too many bits of precision in the process. That's my opinion, founded only by listening experience.
If that's so, upping the volume (for both SFX and music, so that balance isn't affected) should help.
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Re: Sound effects quality and music combination

Post by kensuguro »

As been brought up before, the sound effects are stuff I whipped up in a modular synth environment, so they're not very "modern" in terms of the approach used to generate them. Even the original Star Wars stuff wasn't fully synth based. But anyway, we needed sound effects and we needed them fast, so it was the quick and dirty. Remember, before these sounds, the game was silent.

Better approach would be to record some live audio, and to manipulate that, or mix that with synth based sounds. Either way, sound effects building is quite an undertaking, and is a process that will make you understand why the effects libraries actually cost money... and furthermore, understand why the hollywood standard sets costs thousands.

Someone just has to do a new set guys. It doesn't have to be a masterpiece, it just has to be better than the current ones a lot of people are complaining about. It's already been what... 3 years? even more? It can't be THAT hard. If it helps, feel free to make that game completely silent for a version or two until someone comes up with a new set.
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Re: Sound effects quality and music combination

Post by Halleck »

Fancy seeing this thread showing up as having new posts in it. I guess I haven't checked my threads in a long, long time. :)

But yeah, I'm now about to graduate from Chapman University with a BFA in Film Production, emphasis in Sound Design. I currently would love to make a career out of audio engineering for games.

So this might be a fun and challenging pet project for me...
My own sound design techniques center around layering and processing recorded sounds rather than using synthesizers, but a sci-fi game like VS definitely lends itself more to the synthy stuff so it would be cool to explore. (I also still make liberal use of the Freesound library.)
And I think it may be... educational... to dig into what I expect would be the stringy mess of VS C++ code in order to get at the OpenAL stuff. I have written my own audio class before but it was in C#/XNA so I imagine it's a great deal more abstracted than OpenAL.

Now, what would be really spectacular, would be to start an open-source audio middleware framework with a GUI tool, like the little brother of FMod/Wwise/XACT. Perhaps as a wrapper for one of the other open-source audio libraries that provides additional functionality and ease-of-use. I've gotten so used to the flexibility and ease of prototyping using these kinds of tools that have multiple abstraction layers between the event call and the actual sound that gets played (most of which can be configured using a slick GUI) it would be quite a trip going down to the level of audio buffers and the like. One day perhaps. :)
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Re: Sound effects quality and music combination

Post by klauss »

Halleck wrote:Now, what would be really spectacular, would be to start an open-source audio middleware framework with a GUI tool, like the little brother of FMod/Wwise/XACT. Perhaps as a wrapper for one of the other open-source audio libraries that provides additional functionality and ease-of-use. I've gotten so used to the flexibility and ease of prototyping using these kinds of tools that have multiple abstraction layers between the event call and the actual sound that gets played (most of which can be configured using a slick GUI) it would be quite a trip going down to the level of audio buffers and the like. One day perhaps. :)
You can check out the audio branch, where such an FOSS middleware is in the works. If/when it gets big/useful enough, it's my intention to fork it on its own project.

I'm not entirely sure to which slick GUI you're referring to, though...

BTW: the branch is getting closer to merging with trunk, so you better forget what's on trunk about sound and get to know the branch instead ;)
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Re: Sound effects quality and music combination

Post by Halleck »

I think fmod designer is pretty slick...
http://www.fmod.org/index.php/products/designer

Although so far I have been mainly working with the GUI frontend and C#/XNA API for Xact. Here's a screenshot of the gui tool.

I'd like to write a GUI tool for this middleware that would allow sound designers to import audio data and specify/preview to the greatest extent possible how it will react to in-game events by using internal configuration parameters as well as variables passed between the game engine and the audio engine. The tool will generate a machine-readable data file and possibly compile the audio into an optimized format to be used by the game during runtime.

This is just coming off of what I have observed to be the working standard for sophisticated game audio. It may not totally jibe with your plans for the middleware... but let's talk about it! :)

I have been gaining experience in designing and programming GUI applications... here are some examples of fully functioning programs I've worked on:
Level Editor for Panther Game Engine (collaborative class project but I did a lot of the 2d gui layout and coding)
A tool for attributing samples downloaded from freesound

Both of these were done using Windows Forms, however I think for this audio engine, it would be more suitable to write a cross-platform tool in a language like Java using SWT to produce native widgets on each target platform. I know that somewhere, it's listed that tools to be included in the vega strike distribution should use either python or c++ or something along with this python widgets library. That's fine for config tools and the like but for complex developer tools such as this one and perhaps an exception can be made.

Also.. do you need any help on getting the current audio code up to snuff? I've never used low-level audio APIs or written much C++ but I'd love to get my hands dirty and write some code (time allowing of course!) What a great learning opportunity for an aspiring game audio engineer. ;)
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Re: Sound effects quality and music combination

Post by klauss »

Very interesting... so it's like a scripted sequence to be played automatically upon activation of some event.

I had planned something like that, but not as detailed.

That will probably come at a very advanced stage of the SUCSS, since it requires premixing of sources and a lot of advanced stuff I had planned for pretty much the last stage.

But a GUI for editing templates is certainly possible. I'll add the corresponding ticket.
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Re: Sound effects quality and music combination

Post by Halleck »

so it's like a scripted sequence to be played automatically upon activation of some event.
Exactly. I think this is essentially the paradigm for modern game sound design. The engine calls an event in the sound engine in as simple a manner as possible (in my XNA/XACT based AudioEngine the simplest case can be done in a script in one line of code resembling AudioManager.Play("sound_cue").
However, there is a good deal of inderection here. "sound_cue" is an event created by the sound designer. In XACT this cue could randomly choose from a list of sounds, or pick a sound based on a global audio engine variable or a variable that is local to the cue itself.

In XACT each cue can contain 1 or more sound, and each *sound* can contain one or more WAV files. These wav files can optionally be set to randomly select their own volume and playback rate (pitch/time) in a specified range of values, or be selected randomly or semi-randomly from a playlist.. Or such values can be specified by the use of a curve set up by the sound designer that maps each accepted audio engine variable value to a parameter like volume, pitch, or filter settings.

Using a relatively small set of objects, the XACT tool is able to provide a lot of flexibility, mainly due to the ability to map any variable to several common sound parameters using a curve. It would be great to sit down with jackS or some content people sometime and hash out what subset of these features would be most important for more immersion audio in Vega strike, and focus on implementing those after the base is working.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "premixing of sources" and "templates"?
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Re: Sound effects quality and music combination

Post by klauss »

Halleck wrote:
so it's like a scripted sequence to be played automatically upon activation of some event.
Exactly. I think this is essentially the paradigm for modern game sound design. The engine calls an event in the sound engine in as simple a manner as possible (in my XNA/XACT based AudioEngine the simplest case can be done in a script in one line of code resembling AudioManager.Play("sound_cue").
However, there is a good deal of inderection here. "sound_cue" is an event created by the sound designer. In XACT this cue could randomly choose from a list of sounds, or pick a sound based on a global audio engine variable or a variable that is local to the cue itself.
Well, that I've called "templates" in the new engine, though I didn't consider (yet - eventually, that's slated for a future version) such complex templates.
Halleck wrote:Could you elaborate on what you mean by "premixing of sources" and "templates"?
Well, basically, if the engine has to fire up the dozen or so sound files that make up a "cue", and sequence them, and filter them (my design includes effect filters, convolution, high/low pass, reverb, etc...), then the audio system would be... slow.

In order to support all that and be fast, the audio engine would pre-mix (precompute) sources into several reusable forms, and precompute the values required to quickly combine that and environmental factors into the final render.

So, it's a complex scheme I have in mind in which you can have even more complex cues than the ones you described, interacting with the environment even, and still have a fast audio system.

All this would be used to create, out of a handful audio files, complex audio customization based on ships to render complex and environmental cockpit sounds. Which I've found, while playing CFS3, is really, really good for immersion.
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