More sound effects and music

Well this week I have been continuing the work on the sound effects and music, hopefully this week I will be done with the sound in its entirety I have gotten all the sound artefacts that are left except for the music for when the guards are in the alerted state.

I’ve been getting a few different sounds that are atmospheric for the game and good indicators for what is happening, such as the sound for locked doors which is a rattling sound a sound I would describe as using and a door handle rather roughly since that’s the sound I’m guessing most people me included would associate with a locked door.
Speaking of the doors the idea of the doors were changed so the sound had to be changed the original idea was for the doors to be standard wooden doors but they were changed to sliding metal doors which is quite a different sound then the wooden doors.
But the most interesting artefact I have been working on this week is the win and loss screens.

Made by Ahmad Ali.

The trickiest one to find some fitting music for was the winning end screen were I had to find something that sounds jazzy but upbeat enough for a winning screen and I did not want any vocals in any music I have chosen to avoid any irritation and distraction from the game.
In the end I took a tune called minor swing which is rather upbeat and suppose to serve as sort of a happy atmospheric tune that really makes it feel as you just won the game and is now excited.
The loss music is a Kevin MacLeod Ambient song fittingly enough called Ambient.
It’s a sombre and slow paced piano tune that is perfect for something slow, sad or just calm.The music is suppose to be very low and not disturb you while playing it’s just suppose to be there to not make it feel so empty it makes the game come alive and not feel like a dead mechanical place.

I have been working on the sound effect that guards make when they see you as an indication that you have been spotted now and it is the sound of the guard going huh it is a deeper voice not very deep but it sounds sort of like some sort of stupid grunt getting confused over what that, who you are and what your doing there.

 

Sound effects

This week I’ve been continuing the work on the different sound effects such as a sound for doors and when the baton hits a enemy. I’ll begin by talking about the choices I’ve made with the sounds for the baton and why the sound is not by any means perfect but it will suffice. It’s really hard to make it sound as if some thing is hitting flesh and bone so I made it sound more like it’s the baton that clangs when you hit someone. And it I added a discharge sound so it sounds as if the electric charge is sparking into the unfortunate victim in the way of the players progress.

This image was made by Simon Brundin.
This is the futuristic looking baton that is electric and will make a loud sound that can be heard by the guards when it charges up to hit the poor guard that has stepped in the way of the protagonist of the game. The sound of the baton charge can be heard here this is part of the sound that fits better in with the game then the hit sound of the baton which can be heard here, I’m not to happy with this sound it’s got a much more high pitched. it’s got more of a stinging sound then the others used in the game, so if I’ve got enough time left over before the project is done I will revisit the sound and remake it.

I’ll go back now and talk about the Charge sound of the baton it’s suppose to make a buzzing charging sound that will be sort of loud since it will be quite quick to use when getting rid of the guards. So for balancing purposes it’s suppose to be quite loud so it will get guards to alert to your position. I’ve been working on the sound effect for doors opening and closing as well this was a easier task then the previously mentioned since there are good free sound effects of doors opening and closing of a wide selection of materials. I found a sound of a wooden door closing that I changed by lowering the pitch, I increased the speed of the sound, removed a small part on the end of the sound and faded out the few last seconds of the sound. The making of sound effects is on one hand very interesting but on the other hand it’s very tedious to be working on. But it’s something that has to be done to bring life into the game.

Sound effects and music

This week I’ve been working on making sound effects and finding some music fitting the theme of the game.
The sound effects take awhile to make since I’ve had to cut down the length of the sound while making sure it doesn’t sound choppy and at the same time making sure the sound effect blends in with the theme, the action that happens and the other sounds and or music.
I’ve been using audacity to work on the sound files it’s really simple to actually get into and learn how to use it.

This is the planned title screen made by Ahmad Ali.

The title screen music is one of the first things you will hear and so it will set the expectations of the theme of the game.
So I put some time into making sure it set the theme of the game and was long so it won’t be starting over before you’ve clicked the new game button and of good enough quality so that it won’t sound awful. Here is the title screen music before I edited it and made it fit better for the title screen in length and quality. It found this one quite quickly and put it as a maybe for the title screen.

For the in game music I needed a more ambient and something that would be associated with stealth and darkness.
This one took awhile to find I had to search through a lot of different ambient music to find a great piece of music to use for the game. I went searching through a lot of different websites such as incompetech  and soundcloud.
But I found a great track to use while searching over Kevin Macleod’s music I found the ambient music that I associate with stealth and darkness.
The music was called Lightless Dawn it’s got the perfect balance of not being complete ambience and still not being overpowering in the listeners ears.

The one sound effect I’ve been having problems with has been the sound effect for steps since I want it perfect a very low and deep sound effect that isn’t going to get so awfully irritating after a few minutes of playing the game.
But I’ll be working on making the sounds for the steps sound properly Friday and most likely next week when I will be continuing the work with the sound effects I will be needing such sounds as entering a locker, hitting someone with a baton and opening doors.

So this week has been mostly working for the pre beta and trying to get the world to sound alive.

Soundmanager in FMOD

You could read in a earlier post about my troubles with SFML and the sound which basically made it really annoying to use.
So this week I’ve spent making a new soundmanager in the library FMOD which was suggested to me by Tommi the programming teacher.
Using this library has been harder then I initially suspected since it’s very different from anything I’ve coded in before.

But there is very good documentation for the library even if it takes a while to find what I need and more so understand what is needed from the library to make a good and working soundmanager.
So I started to work with FMOD on Monday, It was a little rough in the beginning I was trying to get the initial phases off adding the new library to work which took most of the day and it was hectic that day so I didn’t end up with the library working or so I thought.

On Tuesday morning I got Jerry the assistant teacher to help me with the set up of the new library, it ended up being a minor miss on my part. To see if FMOD was working I simply copy pasted a code to see if it was working and I grabbed a code for a older version of FMOD that was now outdated.

Then on Wednesday I was excited to try this new library out and thought it would be a pretty easy task. So I started reading the API documentation and it was very different from any other library I’ve used thus far.
But the well documented API is making it the process of learning the library very much easier.

Today Thursday I’ve been working on the actual code the progression is much slower then I anticipated before starting with this artefact.
After I had a few lines of code in the soundmanager I tried to building the project just to see so that everything was working properly well it didn’t there was a linking error so after searching after what I had screwed up I noticed I had missed a slash in the additional libraries.
Felt kind of dumb when I noticed that but I guess it’s just a oversight.
But now I’ve come a long way with this artefact and I should have it working within a small amount of time.

But if there is anything I’ve learnt while doing this artefact it’s not to underestimate the work hours needed to complete some artefacts.

And now I’ll leave you with a tune that will most likely sound something like what will be in the end product of the game. Sorry that it’s a youtube link but I could not locate the music on soundcloud.

The timing is right!

Well this week started off pretty badly with me feeling like I’ve got a flu. It turned out to be a little bit worse when I went to the doctor and now I have to pop pills that make me sleepy and stay away from people so I don’t spread the illness.
This couldn’t have come at a worse time either right before the alpha for the game is supposed to be done.
Needless to say I’ve not got much work done this week at all.

But I’ve been trying to keep busy now later in the week and will probably work on things I’ve missed during the weekend.
But today I’ve been working on the timer for the game it will be a part of the HUD so that you can see how long you’ve been playing.

This is an example of the ingame HUD made by Ahmad Ali
The making of the timer started with me reading up on how and with what “tools” to do this task.
But I quickly ran into problems while making this at first I tried to use the sf::clock class which is not ideal for what I wanted to do. Instead I use sf::time which got me further along but soon enough I had a new problem which was how do I get a float into a string.
Float in a string.At first I simply tried to brute force it in there by just trial and error but after an hour or so of doing that. I decided to call up a friend who had apparently done this already and there is a built in function called “std::to_string()” this seemed to work.

But after I thought I was done with the timer and started the game up I saw to my dismay that it didn’t work.

And I will continue with the work on the timer into the small hours of the night today.

What’s still needed and planned for the HUD.

• The currently held weapon or the noise maker. (The noise maker will be a two way radio that you can throw and it will attract the guards to it.)
• If you are in possession of a key card or not that allows you to open locked doors.
• And if you are carrying the mission objective a file that contains the secrets that you are after.

These will be pretty simple to add onto the game since it will just be different if() statements that say you can pick up the item or if you already carrying something in that slot.

 

Plans of Futura’s Soundmanager.

The sound manager for the game has been quite an annoyance since the development library has a bug concerning playing audio.
The development library we use for the game is SFML (Simple and Fast Multimedia Library) while simple it’s got its own sets of problems for game development.

The problem that I’m annoyed by is a bug that when the game gets turned off crashes the game because off a missing .dll that isn’t missing.

While not finished because of the bug and also it’s in need of tweaking.

Fixing the bug:
While the bug is a annoyance it’s not game breaking or very serious since it only affects the game while shutting down and not while playing or starting up the game.
So to fix this bug I have to use another development library, Tommi recommended Fmod and BASS I’m not yet sure if I will replace the code or leave it as is.

The Classes:
The Manager has seven classes
SFMLSoundManager which sets the volume of the sound/song. PlaySound(std::string filename) it plays a single sound file such as a gunshot or a step, gets the duration of the sound and turns off the sound if one is playing.
PlaySong(std::string filename, bool looping) This class plays a song and checks if it should loop. (I’m planning on using .ogg files for the size of the music file.)
StopAllSounds() as you most likely can guess stops all the sounds if they are playing.
IsSoundPlaying() which checks if a sound is currently playing in the game.
IsSongPlaying() it does the same thing as the previous class but for music.

What could I have done better?:
Possibility 1: I could have avoided spending so much time on trying to fix the previously named bug which only makes the game crash while turning the game off and is not interfering with the game play in anyway.

Possibility 2:  I could have read up more on SFML and seen this problem coming up before making it.
That would have made me make the entire sound manager in Fmod or BASS which would maybe have taken a little while longer to make but would in turn work without a hitch.

Possibility 3: I could have used a small part of the SDL library to make the Sound manager and in turn it wouldn’t have taken as long as it did to actually get the sound manager to work properly and it wouldn’t be crashing when the game ended.

Escape week 2 day one

Well for the past two weeks I’ve been working on mostly the scrum document, the design document and the prototype of the game. While now I get to start working on the inner workings of the game, I will begin with all that concerns the sound of the game.The game will be about a corporate spy in a sci-fi 40’s setting that enters a office building on a mission to steal “the documents”.

The programming on my part will to a larger part consist of the sound mechanics such as the sound manager and the sound positioning. I’ve read up on SFML’s sound positioning which seems to be much simpler then what I earlier suspected.