Ambient sounds

Right now we’re working on ambient sound. The kind that’s on the background, and makes the game feel more like a living world. If you saw the video and listened to the ambient sounds there, you’re probably wondering what are we doing, there was ambience on the video! Didn’t fool you? Alright, I admit it, the ambient sounds on the video were an addon, so we’re just now working to add them.

What I’m currently planning is that we’ll create soundscapes, a sort of collection of sounds that go together to create say, a jungle, or an ocean, or a cave. Then I’ll create a tool to paint these soundscapes to the world, and we’ve got positional ambient sounds. So you can go to the beach and hear water roaring, and go back to the jungle and hear the birds chirping. The volumes of all these sounds are cleverly computed on the background, and all I’ll have to do now is paint.

driftmoon_2009-10-17_21-30-3 Screenshot from the editor: Painting the ambient sounds.

7 Responses to “Ambient sounds”

  1. Pete Pete says:

    Eeeeeenteresting.

  2. Redemption Redemption says:

    Sounds pretty cool. I assume there’ll be some sort of fading for edges?

  3. Ville Ville says:

    Your assumption is correct. The game calculates all of the distances of each visible soundscape area to the camera, and adjusts the volumes accordingly. So the sounds go smoothly while you move from your dark cave into the open forest.

  4. Spoons Spoons says:

    sounds like work. eww, work is hardd.

    though i admire your dedication for attention to detail.

  5. Ed Ed says:

    Awesome!

    You could make it that when the PC enters an area marked ‘cave’ (or whatever) reverb and echo are added to the sounds.

    That way you dont have to have too many differing sounds…

    If that makes sense.

  6. Ville Ville says:

    Sounds like a plan! Currently my audio library doesn’t allow echoes, but I’m hoping on switching to XAudio which allows many such effects out of the box.