UI and Particle Effects

Published October 17, 2013
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Getting the particle effects stuff back in place, as well as all the various projectile and payload thingies. Still haven't reimplemented the combat system, so the glowy things don't really do anything.

Decided to scrap the 3D UI for now. As I mentioned before, with the official Lua bindings the built-in UI system is a lot easier for me to use, so it seems pointless to pour a bunch of time into circumventing it.

One thing I've never really done is sound effects. Urho3D provides sound components, so it shouldn't be too difficult from a technical standpoint. It's just that I've never really made sound effects before. I don't like using stuff off the internet, but I've also never really spent much time mucking around with foley. Don't know my way around any kind of audio software, either. Still, it's something I'm going to have to do. That, and more character modeling and animating. Plus some more environment assets, a few more particle effects, gotta get the combat system back in, need to work on win/loss conditions, gotta do the home-base/crafting/laboratory state gameplay.... The list goes on. Lots of stuff to do.
2 likes 2 comments

Comments

Bacterius

I have heard good things about FL "FruityLoops" Studio to make game music, but I don't know if it handles sound effects, though. And I haven't actually used it (though it is installed on my computer, I keep wanting to try it but get distracted :p)

Liking the particle effects, goblin flamethrower!

October 17, 2013 03:46 AM
twobob

FL can easily fulfil your needs. almost any package can. With the sound FX keep it simple. One single simple nice wide reverb that you apply on everything. That's in terms of applying fx (which at the most you will need: chorus, flange, a bit of noise, a filter, a delay and a verb) most packages provide this and way way more. you dont "need" it, but yeah sometimes its nice to have presets. I guess.

for the record "a delay", a "reverb", a "flange", a "chorus" are all actually just specialist implementations of a basic delay. I.E. they are the same thing at the core. The point being the more you learn the more realise you need less.

In terms of "making noises" just go for basic oscillators and mangle noise/filtering into it. noisy sound start with noise and work back, harmonious sounds start with pretty and work toward noise.

keep the sounds sparse. lots of top and bottom frequencies not much mid. ( I typify MID as say 600Hz -> 3k for the purposes of the chat)

(REF http://www.dplay.com/tutorial/bands/)
[spoiler]

Midrange
600 Hz - 1.2 kHz
band04.jpg
Note how the female voice, naturally brighter, is stronger in this band. But these frequencies aren't particularly critical for dialog, and you can mix music hotter here. Also, musical activity seems more organized in this image than the previous ones: this band contains the harmonics that let you tell one instrument from another.


Band 5
High Midrange
1.2 kHz - 2.4 kHz
band05.jpg
This is a critical band for dialog: there's enough harmonic energy to tell most vowels apart, and all of the consonants start around here.
Our example singers are particularly strong in this range because they're trained to sing in the mask, opening resonances in their face to emphasize harmonics. But despite the activity in this range, volumes aren't as loud as they were an octave below.


[/spoiler]


save that "MID" space for the warm strings or vocal overlays as the ear responds best to the "vocal" range (think hi bass <- mid -> low top) it's quite a short range of a few thousand k. you'll get a feel for it when you start mixing 20 sounds and they start to sound muddy. scrape out some mid to make space.

I was going to use the Accidental noise function library you used but it creates too much runtime junk for the Compact Framework to use effectively... Thanks for your posts. fascinating. Hope I helped in my own small way.

Twobob.

August 13, 2014 02:06 AM
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