Improved sound in Wesnoth?

[khelben1979]

In my opinion, I wished that the sound samples in Wesnoth could be made in a higher quality and I'm wondering about if there are any plans to make some changes on this in the coming future?

[thespaceinvader]

Sounds are one of the most difficult areas for us, the amount of available public domain or GPL sounds of high quality if very limited, as is the number of people who have the skill and equipment to make new ones. So we do what we can, but it's not easy, nor is it a terribly high priority.

[zookeeper]

Nope, not much plans like that, I'm afraid. It'd be nice if we got some new contributors who'd be able to make higher-quality sounds, but for some reason that's one of the most inactive areas of development. Heck, we've had many times more musicians than sound effect makers, and you'd think composing the kind of music we got has to be a lot harder...

[ancestral]

Recording sound effects at high quality is much harder than composing music, simply because the building blocks for music are there and accessible (various packages are available that include software instruments and sound clips). Meanwhile, there really are no building blocks for sound effects; if you want to make your own, you need to record them, and then it's the recording process that becomes so crucial to determining its quality.

[hiro hito]

I opened that thread http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=17000 some years ago to try to improve sound...

I was waiting for some followers

[khelben1979]

They certainly are a lot better than what's in Wesnoth at the present.

Also, if there was some licensing problems with those, one can easily use a mobile phone and record from different places like a horse track racing place or from other places to get better sound effects. I think there could be many people which easily could contribute with sound in this, and it's too bad sound effects is a low priority, I think it's a mistake in the sense that it's very important aspect of the game.

[zookeeper]

Also, if there was some licensing problems with those, one can easily use a mobile phone and record from different places like a horse track racing place or from other places to get better sound effects.

What kind of a recording would you get from a horse track racing place? There's practically no easy way to record sounds of a horse without actually being with a horse somewhere without any outside noise. I don't think horse races tend to be especially quiet events, which is absolutely what you need for recording viable sounds.

Also, the thing a lot of the few people who have posted sfx have forgotten is the context at which they'll be played in-game. You can't just go and record some rattling of swords and expect it to be usable as a "sword sound", because what we actually need is sounds for a sword missing and a sword hitting, as those are the only two sword actions in the game.

[khelben1979]

You can't just go and record some rattling of swords and expect it to be usable as a "sword sound", because what we actually need is sounds for a sword missing and a sword hitting, as those are the only two sword actions in the game.

So how about recording those sounds from an Iaido ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iaido ) club somewhere? There are even those kinds of sounds up on YouTube and with the owners permission, it would be possible to get it from there.

I must admit that I myself lack the proper equipment, like a decent recording device.

[zookeeper]

So how about recording those sounds from an Iaido ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iaido ) club somewhere? There are even those kinds of sounds up on YouTube and with the owners permission, it would be possible to get it from there.

Maybe. I've myself spent countless hours scavenging the web for usable sounds, and generally they're pretty hard to come by. Feel free to post links to material you think might be useful and I'll take a look at it.

[Velensk]

I had a fairly easy time finding the sounds that I used for EoFM however only the ones I actually found (mostly animal sounds). I spent a great deal of time looking for a few other sounds and could find nothing. I suspect that it would be easier to create new ones than to find some of the ones that would be nice to have.

[khelben1979]

B.t.w. I have taken contact with a person here in Sweden where I have trained Iaido with myself, and I'll see if he will manage to do something about this sound sample regarding the swords, but I cannot make any promises.

I'll see what he responds.

[artisticdude]

Speaking as someone who is an active sound effect contributor to several FOSS projects, I'd agree that creating quality sounds from scratch is very difficult. Actually, I've found that using my digital video camera on the 'voice recording' setting produces recordings of surprisingly high quality (if only the same could be said for the video quality ). This is especially useful, since you can use your camcorder as a portable recorder. And if you're trying to record sounds in an outdoors environment, it's best to record them at night, since that's the time you'll get the least background noise in your recordings.

But overall, I think Wesnoth's sounds are pretty good, especially for a FOSS project that relies on user contributions.