What sounds are needed nowadays?

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

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Gwren1
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What sounds are needed nowadays?

Post by Gwren1 »

Hello. I'm Gwren1, known also as Aleph Wren. (Yeah yeah, you can find me on facebook like that).
I'm 23 years old and have worked on many projects as a sound designer. Pretty cool, huh? ;)

Now I discovered Battle for Wesnoth not a long time ago (about a year or so) and decided to install it again after I formatted my PC again. Thought I could be of help in regards of sound design! :D

So here I am now wondering what could be done for this game. What sounds is it requiring? Do you have an idea? If you do please let me know through here.

If you speak spanish feel free to talk to me in that language although, as you can see, I can manage perfectly well in English.

Anyways, I guess that's it. So I'll be waiting for the list of sounds that need to be made. I'll happily contribute as needed.

Here's a link to my soundcloud in case you want to listen some of my music: https://soundcloud.com/wren206

Here are links for the games I've worked on in regards of Sound Design:

Code-Man: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0emmehc0tx8th ... ish%29.rar

Loquito Fire: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/xv3 ... FMvOg&dl=1

The Xmas Travel: https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... XMasTravel

Little Jallo's Cover: https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... &hl=es_419
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Pentarctagon
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Re: What sounds are needed nowadays?

Post by Pentarctagon »

The dropbox links seem to be broken.
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Sapient
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Re: What sounds are needed nowadays?

Post by Sapient »

It's not clear to me if you are offering to contribute sound effects (for example, axe.ogg) or just music.

I'm afraid that the music samples you provided don't match the orchestral style of Wesnoth.

However, there are plenty of sound effects that could use improvement.
http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/User:Sapient... "Looks like your skills saved us again. Uh, well at least, they saved Soarin's apple pie."
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zookeeper
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Re: What sounds are needed nowadays?

Post by zookeeper »

If you prefer to be given specific sounds to make/replace, then here's a few suggestions for starters.

1. A replacement for mace.wav. It's one of the oldest sounds, from 2003, but I never managed to make a good replacement myself. It's used as the impact sound of maces and hammers (regardless of what it hits), should sound heavy and possibly slightly metallic.

2. A heavy mace/hammer sound. Like the above, but for attacks which deal massive damage, such as a lvl3 troll's hammer. Should sound even heavier, deeper and more pulverizing.

3. Better club and staff sounds (currently club.ogg and staff.wav). Used when hitting anything with wooden clubs or staves. The sounds should have a fair bit of punch, since they're impact attacks. A single suitable sound could perhaps work for both a club and staff, or they could be different sounds like now.

4. Better merman hit and die sounds (currently all 4 sounds starting with merm*). Used, unsurprisingly, when mermen are hit and killed. Should sound somewhat human'ish, but maybe with some kind of aquatic element to it (such as the bubbly sounds in the current ones). No prominent splashing of water though, because they're often on land.

All the above sounds can be found in Wesnoth/data/core/sounds/, whereas Wesnoth/sounds/ contains only interface sounds.
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SkyOne
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Re: What sounds are needed nowadays?

Post by SkyOne »

zookeeper wrote:1. A replacement for mace.wav. It's one of the oldest sounds, from 2003, but I never managed to make a good replacement myself. It's used as the impact sound of maces and hammers (regardless of what it hits), should sound heavy and possibly slightly metallic.

2. A heavy mace/hammer sound. Like the above, but for attacks which deal massive damage, such as a lvl3 troll's hammer. Should sound even heavier, deeper and more pulverizing.

3. Better club and staff sounds (currently club.ogg and staff.wav). Used when hitting anything with wooden clubs or staves. The sounds should have a fair bit of punch, since they're impact attacks. A single suitable sound could perhaps work for both a club and staff, or they could be different sounds like now.

4. Better merman hit and die sounds (currently all 4 sounds starting with merm*). Used, unsurprisingly, when mermen are hit and killed. Should sound somewhat human'ish, but maybe with some kind of aquatic element to it (such as the bubbly sounds in the current ones). No prominent splashing of water though, because they're often on land.
Well, the unit is very minor, but I think Giant Rat also needs better sounds for its HIT and DIE.
Currently, it shares the sound with Bats, but it is not really Rat-like, isn't it?
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Andrettin
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Re: What sounds are needed nowadays?

Post by Andrettin »

SkyOne wrote:Well, the unit is very minor, but I think Giant Rat also needs better sounds for its HIT and DIE.
Currently, it shares the sound with Bats, but it is not really Rat-like, isn't it?
What about this sound for the rat's death? It is public domain, so it can be used in Wesnoth.
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Gwren1
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Re: What sounds are needed nowadays?

Post by Gwren1 »

Sapient wrote:It's not clear to me if you are offering to contribute sound effects (for example, axe.ogg) or just music.
Yes sound effects.

To the rest who answered: Thank you very much! It's nice to see there are still sound effects needed. (Which means I should be working asap)

And the links seem to be broken. I'll see if I can fix them.
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iceiceice
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Re: What sounds are needed nowadays?

Post by iceiceice »

Also, we have a vacancy in sounds right now, for a sound which is played by multiplayer clients when the host launches the game.

I decided to add such a sound because many scenarios begin with a [message] dialog, and if you don't click through it you won't hear your turn bell, so such games are sometimes ruined by a player who went afk while waiting for slots to fill. People complained about it so hopefully this will address the situation.

Right now there is just a placeholder sound. If we got to a release candidate without having a new sound for it, I guess my plan was to each time randomly choose a sound from data/core/sounds/horn-signals/ and play that. I don't have a clear criteria for what this sound should be, almost anything could suffice I guess, like maybe the sound of a wooden door creaking open, a simple drum roll, a mystical chimes...

If you have a candidate, or indeed if any user has an idea they like, I'm certainly open to suggestions.

Edit: Also, IMO some of the current mp lobby sounds might benefit from edits, it seems to me that using the lobby with all sounds on is often annoying. I'm not sure if it is just that there are too many sounds that clash, or if some of the sounds are individually poor and play frequently. Not sure what anyone else's take on this is, but I think I would welcome any changes / an alternate mode, if you were interested to have a look at this.

Edit: Another idea: It occurred to me that one feature which we intend to revamp at some point I guess in 1.13 is "tunnels". These let units move from one hex to a far away hex, similar to the teleport ability. It occurs to me that we don't have very good sounds for these kinds of things, I'm not sure if we have a very good teleport sound anyways? But people might also use tunnels in a scenario quite literally as an underground tunnel, or as stairs or ladders for instance. Movement in wesnoth is usually soundless I suppose but I imagine we would welcome some optional sounds to play in this case.

In a similar vein, I guess one thing that we could also use is more ambient sounds. Wesnoth has an ability to make "sound_source" 's which may play a sound when the user scrolls near to a location. We use this right now to make crackling camp fires, birds chirping, and some other sounds, I guess mostly found in this directory: data/core/sounds/ambient

We don't have any cave sounds though for instance. It might be nice to have some dripping water, tumbling loose rocks, and other such sounds. Also, a brief search shows that the Legend of Wesmere campaign also has some macros for ambient "river" sounds but it looks like they are commented out. I'm not the maintainer and I don't know what the situation is but there might be desire for a sound there.
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Gwren1
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Re: What sounds are needed nowadays?

Post by Gwren1 »

Well, well... I finished creating the requested sounds (included the notification sound mentioned by iceiceice), it wasn't a very easy job but nevertheless I enjoyed it. And that's the best part. :mrgreen:

Now, the sounds I made, I created them completely from scratch using previous sounds that are in the public domain under the Creative Commons 0 licence which enables you to use the sounds without the need of giving credit to anyone, also known as free of use. I also used sounds created by me which are provided in sub folders (raw sounds). I also provide the core files used and the audacity projects for the assemblies, or known as mixes (because they are basically a mix of sounds). Sounds have been extracted from http://www.freesound.com

Anyway, enough talking! Here are the sounds: https://mega.co.nz/#!D9Qi0QiB!R0jX7D4nN ... 9_emAik-Sc

By the way, I want to thank zookeeper for the clear description of the sounds needed, and sorry SkyOne, I forgot to create the rat sounds. I'll be working on those as soon as I can and see if I can improve them (again, working from scratch instead of using the original sound).

Edit: oh Sorry guys!!! I forgot to export the Club sound as .ogg!! Please if somebody who has audacity can export it (with 100% quality if possible) I'd be more than thankful. Thank you guys!

Edit 2: Oh Golly!!! Sorry guys again!!! I forgot to mention I exported all files as ogg and there are files which are wav like mace.wav!!! Please if somebody can fix that I'd be grateful. Sorry again guys! (I was testing and the sound didn't work, heh, I forgot to check it was wav instead!! Oh my, my!).
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zookeeper
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Re: What sounds are needed nowadays?

Post by zookeeper »

Heavy hammer sounds pretty good. Maybe warrants some EQ'ing or other minor tweaks as a finishing touch.

Mace could use a little bit more punch, and the high-pitched metal sound of the first channel (and maybe the Mezclar channel too?) to be toned down, but it's almost there.

Staff I think needs some redoing; it's a very thin sound, a bit like wooden blocks hitting each other.

The mermen sounds have a lot of audible clippinging in the voice component, and the bubbling seems to have a lot of reverb. Also, I forgot to mention that for hit and die sounds we'd like to have at least a few variations of the sound, so for example when a merman is getting hit repeatedly, it doesn't just play the exact same sound over and over again, but alternates between a few variations; usually 2-4. For die sounds variations are more or less optional.

I was in a hurry right now, so I'll give more detailed feedback tomorrow.
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Gwren1
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Re: What sounds are needed nowadays?

Post by Gwren1 »

Thanks, and feel free to tweak the sounds as you please. That's why I provided the .aup (Audacity) files.

All right, I'll wait for you to add the extra comments tomorrow. ;)
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zookeeper
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Re: What sounds are needed nowadays?

Post by zookeeper »

Ok then, I guess this isn't really more detailed as just a few additions, but here goes:

Club is ok, but I'd make the swoosh lower pitch (like in heavy hammer, but not quite as much), and probably make it sound just a little bit less like a mid-frequencies-heavy punch.

For mace, I fiddled with it myself a bit, and came up with the following: pitch-shift the first channel down some -20-30%, drop gain to -10dB, and after mixing and rendering equalize some of the highest treble away. Result attached.

Heavy hammer's final channel seems to give it a harsh even if low-volume crackling sound which seems a bit out of place. I guess it's supposed to be a sound of things crumbling under the blow, but in the final sound I think it comes off as more like sound artifacts.

Regarding file formats, we'll want final sounds to be lossless, that is .wav or .flac, even if we convert the in-game sound to .ogg to save on filesize. We keep lossless copies of (some) sounds and story art (which otherwise tends to be .jpg in-game) in a separate stash so if further work needs to be done on them, it can be done off of a lossless version.

Also, as you probably figured, you can easily test especially replacement sounds in-game yourself by just overwriting the original. Especially the final volume level of a sound needs to be determined by testing how it meshes with the other sounds in-game, anyway.
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Re: What sounds are needed nowadays?

Post by Elvish_Hunter »

A sound that sometimes I really felt that is missing in core, is a nice sound of breaking glass. That's useful when a character breaks a mirror or an artifact, for example.
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Re: What sounds are needed nowadays?

Post by SkyOne »

Gwren1 wrote:sorry SkyOne, I forgot to create the rat sounds. I'll be working on those as soon as I can and see if I can improve them (again, working from scratch instead of using the original sound).
No worry. As far as developers, especially zookeeper for the sounds, don't mention, you don't really have to work on them. Thanks for contributing.:)
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