Volunteer for sound design

Create music and sound effects for mainline or user-made content.

Moderator: Forum Moderators

leorock116
Posts: 15
Joined: September 26th, 2015, 12:40 am

Volunteer for sound design

Post by leorock116 »

Hi
Greetings from Brasil

I'm sound producer and volunteer for creating and manipulating sound effects.
I'm also into music, but work better collaborative rather than alone.

How can I participate? Do you use github or some tool like that?

[]s
Att Leonardo
naestrada@gmail.com
User avatar
zookeeper
WML Wizard
Posts: 9742
Joined: September 11th, 2004, 10:40 pm
Location: Finland

Re: Volunteer for sound design

Post by zookeeper »

Yes, we use GitHub, although one doesn't need to use the pull request system for music/sound submissions, just posting here on the forums works (and might even be the more convenient method in many cases).

If you want to do sound effects, then there's a few suggestions for new sounds and old sounds that'd need replacement in this thread (perhaps exempting the mace, which it seems I've just forgotten to finalize and commit) as well some notes about file formats.
leorock116
Posts: 15
Joined: September 26th, 2015, 12:40 am

Re: Volunteer for sound design

Post by leorock116 »

Fine. I'll make them in some days, post here and wait for the feedback.
leorock116
Posts: 15
Joined: September 26th, 2015, 12:40 am

Staff preview

Post by leorock116 »

I made some sounds and gathered some more. Tell me if any of these fits for the staff. If so, please show me the specifications and I'll export it right. If you need something different, just tell me and I'll try to improve.

First preview contains only wood impact.
Second preview contains impact + wind.
staff miss (in second preview file) contains just the wind.
Attachments
staff preview2 .mp3.zip
(66.04 KiB) Downloaded 712 times
staff preview.mp3.zip
(49.66 KiB) Downloaded 688 times
leorock116
Posts: 15
Joined: September 26th, 2015, 12:40 am

Heavy Mace

Post by leorock116 »

if you need something different, don't hesitate in telling me
Attachments
heavy mace.zip
(159.47 KiB) Downloaded 637 times
User avatar
zookeeper
WML Wizard
Posts: 9742
Joined: September 11th, 2004, 10:40 pm
Location: Finland

Re: Volunteer for sound design

Post by zookeeper »

Ok, the main problem with the staff sounds is that they're pretty "thin": they sound quite like wood hitting wood in a small room. Ideally, it should sound like something that really hurts whatever it hits, more of a smashing sound the kind of which you'd hear in a movie when someone receives a crushing staff hit. I'd recommend recording hits against soft targets (such as a punching bag, or maybe cushions or piles of certain kinds of clothes) and carefully mixing those with the more wooden sounds, to achieve something with a bit of both: a heavy soft "oomph" with some bone-crunching woodenness.

The mace sounds are really good! They shouldn't include any breathing and grunting sounds in them, but the impact sounds themselves are very nice. Looks like the grunting and the impacts don't overlap though, meaning I can easily do that edit myself, so don't worry about it. If you don't mind, I'd like to do a bit of other tinkering with them (maybe some light EQ or pitch-shift, mixing several sounds together, etc) to make sure they fit in nicely with existing sounds, which might take a few days. Could you post lossless versions (*) of them?

I don't think there's need to make special miss sounds for most melee weapons, since we can use the generic miss sounds, but if you want to make them then it doesn't hurt.

(*) Either wav or flac files are fine. Pretty much any program should be able to export to wav, flac support might not be as common. Once I've made final edits (trimming silence, adjusting volume level, etc), I'll commit the final lossless wav versions of sounds to the resources repository, and make a separate lossy ogg version for the main repository.
leorock116
Posts: 15
Joined: September 26th, 2015, 12:40 am

Re: Volunteer for sound design

Post by leorock116 »

Ok, I can try some wooden sounds different from "wood against wood" as I used.
About the heavy mace, you want the sounds with the wind (woosh) but without vocal sounds, right?
I will render them again and send them in lossless format, please wait for it before making any edit

I have no ideas for the mermaid at the moment, but will start thinking about it.

What sounds do you need next?
User avatar
zookeeper
WML Wizard
Posts: 9742
Joined: September 11th, 2004, 10:40 pm
Location: Finland

Re: Volunteer for sound design

Post by zookeeper »

leorock116 wrote:Ok, I can try some wooden sounds different from "wood against wood" as I used.
About the heavy mace, you want the sounds with the wind (woosh) but without vocal sounds, right?
Yes, that'd be good. They don't need to include the woosh (since I can easily add one myself), but if they do, then that's fine too.
leorock116 wrote:I have no ideas for the mermaid at the moment, but will start thinking about it.
The mermen sounds are probably pretty hard to do well, but you're welcome to try.
leorock116 wrote:What sounds do you need next?
There's not a lot of must-have sounds left, but depending on what the new staff sound ends up being like, it might be a good idea to make an extra variant or two of it: or example, a lighter and flimsier staff (like a lvl1 mage's wand) and a light club (like the footpad's). Currently they all use staff.wav, and could maybe be differentiated a bit.

Other possibilities:

- Better entangle and thorns sounds (for the Elvish Shaman line).
- A sound for the faerie touch attack (Elvish Shyde/Sylph, maybe Mermaid Siren).
- Better sounds for melee tentacles (Tentacle of the Deep, Cuttlefish).
- Unique sounds for the baneblade (Wraith/Spectre).
- Better wail sounds (Ghost, Wraith/Spectre).

Most of those would probably warrant both hit and miss versions of the sounds. Whether the generic miss swoosh sound can be used depends a bit on what the hit sound is like, but sounds like entangle and wail obviously need their own unique miss versions.

And of course there's some creatures in addition to merfolk which could use unique or just better hit/death sounds: Mudcrawlers, Giant Rats, Sea/Water Serpents, Saurians, Cuttlefish, Tentacles of the Deep, many of the monster units in Under the Burning Suns.


P.S. Have you read the licensing notice about contributions? You need to agree to release your contributions under the GPL (v2 and later) for us to be able to include them, or you can just declare them CC-0 or Public Domain if you don't care about licensing details.
leorock116
Posts: 15
Joined: September 26th, 2015, 12:40 am

Re: Volunteer for sound design

Post by leorock116 »

I prefer to send the sounds with respective wooshes, because the woosh is unique to each weapon. That's why I also prefer to send the respective woosh alone, to be used when the attack misses. It's just a few kb, for a better sound experience.

But if you think the wooshes can be better, just tell me

Do you have any idea where to begin on the mermen sounds? I made some experiences with vocoder, convolution and ring modulation between a scream and sea, but couldn't yet achieve a good sound quality.

New sounds attached.

[]s
Attachments
heavy mace.zip
final?
(847.79 KiB) Downloaded 655 times
staff preview 3.zip
new attempt
(68.64 KiB) Downloaded 696 times
leorock116
Posts: 15
Joined: September 26th, 2015, 12:40 am

Re: Volunteer for sound design

Post by leorock116 »

How can I release the sounds under GPL?
Is it enough to declare it here?
User avatar
zookeeper
WML Wizard
Posts: 9742
Joined: September 11th, 2004, 10:40 pm
Location: Finland

Re: Volunteer for sound design

Post by zookeeper »

leorock116 wrote:I prefer to send the sounds with respective wooshes, because the woosh is unique to each weapon. That's why I also prefer to send the respective woosh alone, to be used when the attack misses. It's just a few kb, for a better sound experience.

But if you think the wooshes can be better, just tell me
No, I think they're good.
leorock116 wrote:Do you have any idea where to begin on the mermen sounds? I made some experiences with vocoder, convolution and ring modulation between a scream and sea, but couldn't yet achieve a good sound quality.
I've tried to make them myself before, by mixing different sounds together, but it never really sounded good. Now, I'd probably fill a sink with water, stick my head in it and make some bubbles, splashes and underwater grunting sounds and then try to mix those with something else.

Strickly speaking, the sounds don't necessarily need to include any splashing or bubbles (especially for hit sounds, those should be very subtle in any case) because they're getting hit out of the water pretty often. I've just figured that a little water-like component in the sounds would help make it sound more like an aquatic creature, even if it's not in water at the moment.
leorock116 wrote:New sounds attached.
Great! As I said, I'll do some light editing on the mace sounds and put it in the game as soon as possible.

The staff sounds a lot better now. I think I could edit together the final sound from these.
leorock116 wrote:How can I release the sounds under GPL?
Is it enough to declare it here?
Yes, you don't need to do anything else.

On a related note, when I start committing the sounds, how would you like to be credited? The format used in the credits is usually either "Real Name (nickname)" or just "nickname".
leorock116
Posts: 15
Joined: September 26th, 2015, 12:40 am

Re: Volunteer for sound design

Post by leorock116 »

zookeeper wrote: Great! As I said, I'll do some light editing on the mace sounds and put it in the game as soon as possible.
The staff sounds a lot better now. I think I could edit together the final sound from these.
You can change the sounds the way you want. I am no jealousy about the authorship. Also, if you need any resource used to make these sounds, or information about the process used, just tell me.
zookeeper wrote: On a related note, when I start committing the sounds, how would you like to be credited? The format used in the credits is usually either "Real Name (nickname)" or just "nickname".
Do you think I can use my real name (Leonardo Magno Sampaio) and my city/country (Curitiba/Brasil) instead of name (nickname) or will it appear strange among the others?

Attached: some club sounds. How do you think we can make them better?

About the mermen, it´s really not easy!

[]s
Attachments
club preview .zip
(40.76 KiB) Downloaded 665 times
User avatar
zookeeper
WML Wizard
Posts: 9742
Joined: September 11th, 2004, 10:40 pm
Location: Finland

Re: Volunteer for sound design

Post by zookeeper »

leorock116 wrote:You can change the sounds the way you want. I am no jealousy about the authorship. Also, if you need any resource used to make these sounds, or information about the process used, just tell me.
All right, great. I've been a bit busy for a few days so I still haven't done much with the mace and staff sounds, but I'll get to it as soon as I can.
leorock116 wrote:Do you think I can use my real name (Leonardo Magno Sampaio) and my city/country (Curitiba/Brasil) instead of name (nickname) or will it appear strange among the others?
Yeah, it would be pretty strange. There's no other creditations including city/country, so even if we did that, we'd have to write it as "Leonardo Magno Sampaio from Curitiba, Brazil" or something like that, and people would probably rightly assume that the whole thing is some kind of really long weird nickname.
leorock116 wrote:Attached: some club sounds. How do you think we can make them better?
I think they have a bit of the same problem as the first staff sounds did: they don't sound like really hitting something hard. Clubs usually do at least as much damage as a staff, and are used by melee-oriented units (whereas staffs are mostly used by mages and such), so it should be a reasonably beefy sound and a little bit more bone-crunching than the staff sound.
leorock116 wrote:About the mermen, it´s really not easy!
I should probably give them another try myself, sometime...
User avatar
doofus-01
Art Director
Posts: 4121
Joined: January 6th, 2008, 9:27 pm
Location: USA

Re: Volunteer for sound design

Post by doofus-01 »

leorock116 wrote:Do you think I can use my real name (Leonardo Magno Sampaio) and my city/country (Curitiba/Brasil) instead of name (nickname)
If you want to fly your flag, you can specify your location in the forum profile. Assuming "leorock116" is the nickname in the credits, there would at least be some connection.
BfW 1.12 supported, but active development only for BfW 1.13/1.14: Bad Moon Rising | Trinity | Archaic Era |
| Abandoned: Tales of the Setting Sun
GitHub link for these projects
User avatar
zookeeper
WML Wizard
Posts: 9742
Joined: September 11th, 2004, 10:40 pm
Location: Finland

Re: Volunteer for sound design

Post by zookeeper »

All right, I think I'm done with the mace sounds. I mixed together three of your sounds, applied some EQ and slight pitch and tempo shifts, a touch of reverb and narrowed the stereo width quite a bit, and this is what I came up with.

I'll get to the staff sound next. I only have the mp3 version so far, so if you think it matters that I work off of the lossless version, please do post the wav version as well.
Attachments
mace_edits.zip
(24.93 KiB) Downloaded 707 times
Post Reply