The Mana World Forums

The soundscape of a world is a tricky beast to fiddle with. If we manage to do it well, it'll enhance the experience of a player.

If we do it wrong, it ends up overwhelming or annoying the players.

So far we have no clear consensus on soundscape design apart from "there should be sound effects and background music is nice too".

Should we have ambient sounds? Where should we and where we should not? I still want it to be technically possible to attach a sound to an object on the screen. Attaching to particles might be especially nice.

What sounds monsters should usually make? Making things too noisy and too repetitive will seriously annoy people.

Are we going to do movement sounds for things?

For attacks, I'd have a scheme of three varieties per attack type: light, medium and heavy. (Subtle consistent hints play a big part in building immersion.)

For almost every sound, I'd like to have a few varieties so the inevitable repetition sounds more natural: no two sounds are ever the same.

The discussion for how we're going to proceed is hereby opened.

So do we know what types of monsters/enemies we will need sound effects for and such? Also, how would natural ambient sound effects work? For certain areas, we could have quiet waves in the background, with gulls, for example. As far as music is concerned, I have some ideas in mind. I think ambient music has always "worked" best for MMOs like this one, but we could make some more interesting songs, as long as they are relatively passive and "in the background."

I will be working on some songs, and possible looping ambient effects over the next few days. Anyone with ideas should definitely let us know, and anyone who would like to work on some effects and music should too.

An ambient effect system is unlikely to be available with the release of CR1.

To make things clear, I've appointed saturn as the project manager of this subproject of CR1.

The inability to use ambient sounds in CR1 makes me sad, but we can also revisit this in CR2 or later when we gain the technical ability to do so.

If I understood, the tools we have available for CR1 are per map background music, being sounds, effect/action sounds. Could we also attach sounds to NPCs? We could fake environmental sounds with invisible NPCs for now, if this is possible.

As for things to do I'm so far seeing at least:

Score for the academy
Score for the academy dungeon

Score for the village
Score for the village surroundings
Score for the port

Score for the forest
Score for the temple

Score for the lagoon
Score for the lagoon cave

Sound effects for playerset related actions

Sound effects for monsters

I tried to group thematically linked items together. I'm also quite sure this list will not be the final truth, but it should set us into a sensible direction.

Rotonen wrote:Could we also attach sounds to NPCs? We could fake environmental sounds with invisible NPCs for now, if this is possible.

If not, should be easy to add.

So the tech sector is giving us a full green light for all soundscape related designing for CR1.

Hi,

Just in case, there is a music digest here:
http://mantis.themanaworld.org/view.php?id=863

Regards.

The big problem with the sound system is that it is very rudimentary right now. It can play back audio files - that's it. It has no support whatsoever for positional audio or dynamic volume. Binding a sound effect to an NPC would mean:

-NPC comes onto screen, effect immediately has max volume.
-NPC leaves screen, effect is silenced immediately.

Before we can have proper environmental sounds we need a completely new sound engine which can manage the volume (and preferably the stereo position) of sound effects based on sound source objects placed in the game world and the relative position of them to the listener object.

Hi,

In other word, add support for OpenAL, add support for positional audio.

Regards.

OpenAL would be a possible choice for the backend of a new sound effect engine, yes.

OK, so no environmental SFX for CR1 after all.

Score and SFX are still required.

However, when I mentioned "ambience," I meant like my forest song which has birds and water and ambience already in it. If the track is then looped, it would effectively be just "ambience." If that is cool with people, then we /could/ do ambience in game, as part of the music track. If people can't write both in the same track, I could take a preferred ambience, and the music track for the area, and combine them.

For now, that might work quite nicely. Again, most MMOs' soundtracks are quite ambient in nature.

Yes, that works too. But regional ambiance (like falling water near water falls) will also help in the long run.

So maybe we can use my forest song for the forest area mentioned above. I will be making many drafts for the other areas, and post them here for critique. Anyone else who would like to make music should do the same. As the area progresses, our songs might change, and we will get a better sense of the style, but for now we have enough good descriptions to get started. I'll post some music here this weekend.

I made a nice little pizzicato song for the village (it's fully loopable). Let me know if I should create a new topic for this.

I got an error: "The extension ogg is not allowed." so I tried uploading it as an MP3 and I got the error "The extension mp3 is not allowed." So here's a mediafire link to it: http://www.mediafire.com/?nm2ljdmrzjm