Cogmind's Ambient Soundscape Takes Shape (Patreon)

Woohoo, it seems to be working out so far :D

Pretty much every audible named machine got its own sound effects this week, over 100 of them. I actually did a sudden dev stream yesterday (will be up on YouTube tomorrow) to share the results so far since it would be more fun to do all that walking around in different maps with a few players rather than all alone :P

To recap, the first planned experimental phase of Cogmind's approach to the question of "music" has always been to just give all machines their own ambient audio and see how that works across a real map. Turns out the answer is "pretty well."

At first it wasn't good enough without anything to fill the inevitable empty space between the machines, but for that I threw in some very subdued drones for testing, and that filled the gaps nicely. There's still a lot of tweaking to do, but yesterday's stream-test also gave me a lot of ideas for the next phase.

Beta 10 currently adds 127 new audio tracks, with more to come. Retaining my sanity while getting through such a large number required breaking everything down into categories to produce the most appropriate sounds for each. So I was working with categories like terminals, mainframes, alien, research, tech, mechanical, etc., each with usually about 10-15 sounds.

Working on the mechanical theme in Audacity:

The process was also helped along by the addition of yet more new debugging features.

Tweaking individual machine ambient settings in game (min range, max range, and falloff):

Matter Pump with an inverse falloff rate:

Same Matter Pump with a log falloff rate:

The main ambient machine placeholder sound effect that's been in the game since its first version, the Nuclear Reactor, worked well with an inverse falloff rate, so that's what I'd started with as the default for other machines, but it turns out the drop near to the machine is too steep to work with a lot of the other sound effects, so the new default is log falloff.

Testing map-wide default falloff settings:

I also wanted to experiment with whether globally increasing the range of machine audio made sense in the bigger picture, so I added a way to do that (it takes a while to update the image because processing the debugging visualization for audio volume uses a super slow stupid method :P):

Turns out it gets kinda weird when the global ranges are expanded beyond what I normally use (about 2~15).

Here's a triple multiplier in effect on that map anyway :P

That said, the two debug feature examples above are actually using inverse falloff rather than the new log falloff default, so the overall volume levels actually appear lower than they really are in the latest samples.

The examples I've been using so far are in Materials, but check out these Factory floor sections :D

For you patrons I'll be releasing an early Beta 10 experimental build with all this audio (and the drone stuff!) sometime soonish. No date yet but probably this week.