Outerra forum

Outerra Engine => Ideas & Suggestions & Questions => Topic started by: PeterBitt on May 09, 2011, 07:52:41 pm

Title: Sound system
Post by: PeterBitt on May 09, 2011, 07:52:41 pm

i have some questions about the sound engine:

-will it feature full surround sound?
-will distant sounds sound different than close sounds (bombs, gunshots, etc)?
-will objects or hills dampen the sound?
-will the speed of sound be implemented (sound needs time to travel to players ears when soundscource is distant)?
-is it possible to get surround sound for environmental sounds (no stereo wavesounds when close to the coast, but mono sounds for each wave so that you can locate the ocean by sound direction)?
-will the wind have a sound? maybe there is some procedural(?) way to bind the sound loudness and some different soundfiles to the windstrenght?
-openAL, dsound, eax?

am i completely at the wrong place with these questions? will it be up to the game devs to create a sound engine?
outerras simulates a real world with authentic physical laws, hopefully you can provide physical correct sound too :D
bad sounds would hurt this awesome engine very much i think.

Title: Sound system
Post by: cameni on May 10, 2011, 02:57:28 am

It will use a 3D sound library. What we plan to do initially is to create sound sources on a grid, that will produce positional sound depending on the type of environment at the place - shallow or far sea, steppes or forests and so on. This should create surround sound enabling you to infer the direction of given land type in the world - breaking waves on the sea, forest and grass noises etc. It should be also dependent on wind strength, and of course attenuated with distance, but that is a normal function of 3D sound libraries.

Later it will be extended by stuff like occlusion damping, that needs additional queries. Sounds form objects and shots will be handled separately, I think it's not a problem to emulate the latency of sound by distance there. Some basic support for object sounds will be in the engine, but otherwise it should be game driven.

Title: Sound system
Post by: PeterBitt on May 10, 2011, 06:00:14 am

this sounds just great!
sorry for posting in wrong topic and thx for fast reply :)

Title: Sound system
Post by: ZeosPantera on May 10, 2011, 11:27:41 pm

Quote from: cameni

It should be also dependent on wind strength

Love you guys. That's insane.

Title: Sound system
Post by: seysen on May 14, 2011, 09:40:59 am

Will the engine supports some special effects of supersonic aircrafts such as Sonic boom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_boom) witch due speed of sound?

Title: Sound system
Post by: cameni on May 15, 2011, 02:06:25 am

Quote from: seysen

Will the engine supports some special effects of supersonic aircrafts such as Sonic boom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_boom) witch due speed of sound?

That is probably better left on the game itself to support, it won't be a thing that the engine itself should care about - I mean tracking all objects in the world and generating a sound effect when one reaches the speed of sound. Although, technically the engine could do it too, if there's nothing more in it.