Ambient sounds?

[Mordeth]

I'm currently defining some "ambient sound" objects in EDF, by making invisible objects with a PlaySound pointer. This works realistically for short, non-looping sounds. Looping, and especially long duration looping sounds, have some problems I can't seem to get rid of. When walking/running towards the source, the sound starts playing too late and suddenly (at high volume) instead of gradually increasing in volume.

I suspect it's because sound volume gets determined only when the PlaySound pointer gets called. So probably the engine does not keep track of sounds that are supposed to be playing outside the player's range, so is not able to smooth up the volume when the player does move into range.

Does anybody have some pointers on how to improve this?

Only solution I can think of at the moment, is to cut up a long sound into smaller bits and call on them sequentially to create a long duration looping sound. I'd rather not do that, since I'll end up with loads of sound entries that way.

[Lüt]

How long are they, and do they really need to be that long? The only thing that comes to mind is the waterfall effect in Heretic, which worked rather smoothly because it was such a short length that even with the run-toward problem, a sudden increase in volume or sudden start-the-playback problem was barely noticeable, and so the volume remained very smooth regardless of sporadic player movement. Aside from that, all I can think of is revamps for the actual engine, like various sound processing additions. For example, variable pitch shifting applied to a short wind sample could make it seem incredibly long or even non-looping if truly applied randomly to the sample. But somehow, I doubt Q's up for adding features like that :P

[Mordeth]

"Long" in this particular case is about 4,1 seconds.

[Quasar]

The sound engine as-is is really only good for very short samples. Long samples require special treatment to work as you'd expect (and in fact, over a certain length, they won't work in the DOS version at all -- Allegro supplied a separate API for playing large samples to which BOOM never added access of any kind).

The ability to now use OGG, MP3, and module music in 3.33.33 could be exploited to have ambient sound tracks, although they'd have to be pre-mixed with the music and would not be localized, obviously.

[Mordeth]

Quasar said:
The ability to now use OGG, MP3, and module music in 3.33.33

!!!

[TheDarkArchon]

That's Mordeth E2 held back for another 5 years then :P

[Mordeth]

Nowadays, it's much more easier to get people to make you ogg music instead of midi. In fact, most musicians I've asked laugh at my (virtual) face when asked if they would want to make some midi's for me :)

But back to the original topic: I guess I'll have to cut up long looping sounds into smaller bits.

[Csonicgo]

Mordeth said:

!!!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!