Audio in Orxonox: Atmospherics and Sounds

[youngk]

EDIT: Crud... I accidentally deleted the introduction post... I hope you forgive me.

In Short: I took the sound ticket and made sounds for the game. Now follows a list of the major ones:

Cheers, kev

• Borderline (first fight scene song - seamless) http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~youngk/Borderline.m4a
  Squarely Symmetrical http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~youngk/Square ... trical.m4a
  Alpha Centauri http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~youngk/AlphaCentauri.m4a
  Mars http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~youngk/Mars.m4a
  Jupiter http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~youngk/Jupiter.m4a
  Ganymede http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~youngk/Ganymede.m4a
  #NEW# Earth http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~youngk/Earth.m4a

[beni]

Hmm, expectations...

I think we should have a lot of different music styles and maybe also reoccurring themes. I try to explain this in more detail in the next paragraph. What I do not like in many games is the typical orchestra music. Since Orxonox is a SciFi game the focus should lie on modern, electronic music. I would also like to direct you to already existing music (for instance menu sound). Ask your supervisors for the other pieces of music from Thierry Zaugg and Luke Grey.
With music there come a lot of feelings and it is true that you can make people feel or think in a certain way, when hearing music which they heard before showing the same behavior. A song can make you mad, because it was played a lot during a time you had a hard time working on a project etc. So using this principle we could have themes for all the places (or kind of places) there are in the game. An example: The game starts in the vicinity of Jupiter and you hear the same reoccurring theme in various pieces played during your stay in that system. Now you go to Mars and experience a whole different atmosphere (less industry and busier system). Having the same background music for this place wouldn't make sense. Going back to Jupiter however, you should encounter the same themes again. Another example: use different music for different situations like fights, silent and dead passages, busy systems etc. Or use different themes when encountering certain characters or companies in the game.

Now those ideas are maybe a bit too many and a little unstructured. Since we do not have that many companies and no characters from the story line my last point is not realizable yet.
I would suggest you use reoccurring themes for companies, situations and characters and different "instruments" and styles when you change places (Earth, Mars, Jupiter).
Earth is the blue planet, most polluted and over populated.
Mars is the red planet, people are fighting to survive in the new world and try to be independent here.
Jupiter is a very industrial place with a lot of corporate rivalry.
It would be interesting if you could put this kind of feelings into music styles. If you want more information about those places or my ideas just ask.

Also please ask other people who are interested in making the whole thing more realizable. My expectations are as always too high, but it would be nice to see at least a little bit of those ideas in the game.

[youngk]

Earth is the blue planet, most polluted and over populated. ...

I'm very surprised to see that there's so much story already worked out. I expected much less to be clear, and - to be honest - I never even heard of a storyline for the Orxonox game.

But in that case it's clear what music you're aiming for and I will certainly not use classical music . I do have a certain style in mind which would fit perfectly - I'll post new music as soon as possible.

@ beni
One last Question though: What to do about licensing? The songs I create don't have a license yet and I was told that you know quite a bit about CC licensing. Could you fill me in on the points that I need to think about before I apply a license to my music?

Thanks, Kev


EDIT:
second @ beni
Since there is a story-line, where could I find it? I'd really appreciate it if I could read the story in order to get an impression of the game seen with your eyes (since you wrote the story-line).

[greenman]

i personally don't really like electric sound but i guess it's inevitable that some parts of the sound are like that.

but i still hope there will be some classical/orchestral music in some scenes/moods

however you did great work with the plays you created. thank you very much

[x3n]

@ beni
One last Question though: What to do about licensing? The songs I create don't have a license yet and I was told that you know quite a bit about CC licensing. Could you fill me in on the points that I need to think about before I apply a license to my music?

Well I'm not Beni but since you were so kind to not interrupt me while I was solving my exercises last wednesday, I guess I owe you an answer.

CC is an abbreviation for Creative Commons and is the name of a bunch of licenses for creative content (like music, images, models, ...). There are six licenses, each of them with different rights and constrictions. You find them here.
We're using the CC-by-sa 3.0 license (here). This means, you can redistribute our work, for free or commercial, in total or just parts of it, modified or unmodified, as long you mention the original author and use a compatible license.
The CC-by-sa license is comparable to the GPL, but the GPL is for code (afair it contains terms like 'code' or 'compile' that really don't work for media files).

You may now ask why we use a license that allows commercial use (the GPL does this too). This is because Orxonox could be included in Linux distributions on a DVD of a computer journal. Additonally most Linux packet managers use only free packages by default, non-free have to be allowed explicitly.

We already had some discussions in the team about this topic, because we don't really want people to earn money with Orxonox. But we also don't want to restrict the distribution of Orxonox and of course our code has to be licensed under GPL, because other code we use enforces this. One possibility would be to create a non-free package with additional media files which has to be downloaded separately by the user. We never really agreed on such a solution because there was no need for it. But if you really have some concerns to license your music under CC-by-sa, this could be an option (of course I'm by far not the only one to decide this ).

I hope this was somewhat understandable. Licensing is a tedious thing, but if we don't do it right, no one can share Orxonox legally, which would be quite a shame.

[youngk]

i personally don't really like electric sound

I will do my absolute best to accommodate most of your wishes ( using moods would give us an elegant solution to this ).

Bottom line: I aim to create sound that conveys emotion and creates an authentic atmosphere for the game, regardless of the genre of music. That is, if I have a contextual element that can only be supported with classical music, I'll do so - however on the other hand, if I want to portray an industrial colony for example, I will most definitely use electronic music.

@ greenman
Thanks for the head's up! I'm not satisfied yet - so they should get a lot better


Second topic: Licensing
@ x3n
I hope I will never have to create music to sell it, that would stand against my belief that creativity should be shared and enjoyed regardless of the depth of ones pockets... So CC licensing would be perfectly appropriate for my goals - as long as the license I will use is compatible with the license that Orxonox holds.

That said, I will probably look into licensing details this weekend (eg.: looking into difficulties with using music samples and instruments that might be licensed under different terms). This issue however is not as important as of now - I can still apply a license at the end of the semester.

Cheers, kev

[beni]

I really like rock as well, but I just cannot see it fitting for a SciFi game. And of course Battlestar Galactica was all just orchestra music, but that is not where I see Orxonox going. Too spiritual and stuff .
I believe that we can allow a lot of freedom for our designers if they check back with all of us early enough.

Story is very much in my head and scattered in the forum and the Wiki. We also make a difference between Story and Universe. While the first is rather what is happening and changing while playing the latter is the rough and static state of the environment the game plays in. While both things may affect music, the Universe will help you decide in most cases. Check here.

[1337]

Check out the new songs Kevin has added! Sry for pushing, but the forum doesn't notify edits.

[beni]

Check out the new songs Kevin has added! Sry for pushing, but the forum doesn't notify edits.

Thanks for the push, I didn't notice!!

[greenman]

OT: is it possible that the forum notifies about edits ?

[youngk]

Wonderful! Thanks for bumping the thread.
Would you like me to upload the atmospheric sounds (like rumbles and such) too?

@1337
Were you able to get the OGG loader working again? After I converted mainmenu.wav to OGG-Vorbis, I experienced the same problem (snap, crackle and pop where it shouldn't).

Cheers, Kev

[1337]

@ogg problems: No, not really. Though I noticed the problems were only occurring during loading (at least with mainmenu.ogg).
And speeding up the loading process wasn't very successful either: Best speedup I can do is about 10% by setting the std::vector reserved size in advance. Maybe a manual vector and memcpy could yield slightly better performance, but it's not worth it I suppose.

As far as Oli told me, libogg just isn't very fast in decoding. Maybe that can be resolved by streaming the files (vaiursch wanted to do that this semester).

[youngk]

@ogg issues
Guess we'll have to look at it on wed. There's not much I can do and the issue makes the sound pretty much not presentable.

Anyways: New music! Earth is now done too - plus: I renamed OmikronSystem into AlphaCentauri (I still kinda liked the tune - and it fits nicely for an *alien" system)
-> Check first post.


Cheers, Kev

[x3n]

cool stuff

[1337]

Kevin, I have merged your branch into presentation2 so we can all work together towards the presentation.

The only thing you have to do is an "svn switch". Just right click on your svn folder and hit "Switch..." in the tortoise menu. Then replace "sound3" with "presentation2" and confirm. That's it!