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Dealing with sound and music

The purpose of this patch is to give a very brief outline of sounds that could be created and used in the game. Many of these ideas will require coding changes but it should not prevent you from doing them, the coding staff will take care.

Sound Effects

Sound Effects are smaller sounds which provides immersion and... well, effect. Their list is huge as they are used almost everywhere.

Ambient Sounds

  • Water Drips in caves or from leaks in run down buildings
  • Computers whirring in office buildings / labs
  • The ocean tide or running rivers
  • Leaves rustling in the wind
  • Generators running
  • Air Conditioning units running
  • Buzzing / Crackling intercoms in office buildings / warehouses
  • Doors opening/closing
  • Locked doors that Tux cannot pass through
  • Enemy re-spawns
  • Interaction with signs, rocks, gates, etc. (such as “House For Sale” signs)

Foley

  • Running or Walking on metal floor in boots
  • Running or Walking on concrete
  • Running or Walking on grass / dirt
  • Running or walking on the beach
  • Running or Walking on stone in a cave (or other structure with high reverberation time)
  • Changing equipment
  • Inventory sounds (moving items around)
  • All skills need unique (or semi-unique) sounds
  • Tux panting when stamina has run out
  • Tux heart beating when Hit Points (HP) has dropped to a critical level
  • Tux overheating
  • Robots and NPCs walking, moving, being
  • Death sounds for all of the different bots and for Tux.

Weaponry

  • Melee weapons
    • Wrench
    • Baseball Bat
    • Iron Pipe
    • Knives / Swords / Meat Cleavers
    • Axes
    • Chainsaw
    • Hammers
    • Bare hands
  • Traditional Firearms
    • Rifles
    • Shotguns
  • Laser Weapons
    • Laser Knives
    • Energy Whips
    • Staves
    • Laser Rifles
    • Pulse Cannon
  • Plasma Weapons
    • Plasma Guns
    • Exterminator
  • Grenades
  • Reloading Firearms
  • Out of ammo
  • Melee weapons breaking
  • Enemy weapon sounds
  • Melee weapons missing (both Tux and robots)

Equipment/Items

  • Dropped items from robots
  • Dropped weapons from robots
  • Dropped armor from robots
  • Tux equipping different armor / weapons
  • Upgrading weapons and armor through Add-ons
  • Money, parts, pills, liquids, ammo, and books

Speech

  • Tux “complaining” that he cannot equip Armor/Weapon 'X' because Stat 'Y' is too low
  • Individual character greetings not just first time (these could be translated to other languages, too)
  • Tux stating that his inventory is full
  • “Tux Comments” upon entering very dangerous places or clearing all of the bots off a level in the warehouse
  • Tux getting bored from standing still for too long
  • The game introduction being audible (narrative) Review Request 2247
  • Enemies sighting the player
  • Enemy taunts / threats (“Break fingers...” etc)

Buttons, Interface, and Menu

  • Mouse over/Arrow key selection events on menu/sub-menu items
  • Changing selection values in menus
  • Clicking responses/questions/answers while talking to a character
  • Scrolling up and down in a dialog window
  • Canceling/accepting/back in menus
  • Alerts (such as when difficulty is changed and the game needs to be restarted)
  • Deleting heroes
  • Typing a new Hero name

Whooshes, Splats, and Other Sounds

  • Crates/Barrels/Drums/Chests being manipulated (opened, broken, etc)
  • Leveling up
  • Skill point distribution
  • Learning a new skill
  • Increasing a existing skill's level
  • Using a skill (each skill would have a different sound and possibly more than one associated with them, such as Repair Item and Identify Item, Takeover)
  • “Takeover” mini-game: Tux and robot sounds, win/loss, etc
  • Obtaining new quests, completing quests, quests being updated
  • Notes being added

Implementation

We would appreciate if all sounds were recorded and/or created, not borrowed from other sources.

Those are the advised specs for Sound Effect samples.

File Format: OGG Vorbis

Extension: .ogg

Sample Rate: 44,100 Hz (44.1 kHz)

Bit Depth: 16 bit

Developer notes:

  • There was discussion about supporting alternative platforms (e.g. the Wii). While not feasible due to our current memory footprint mostly due to our complicated graphics (the Wii requires very simple textures), I think that was part of our selection of bit depth and sample rate.
  • There are a number of ideas regarding music, sound, and audio on the bug and feature request tracker (http://bugs.freedroid.org/ ). Mostly these require some programming changes, but there are some requests for individual sounds.

An outdated version of Sound Documentation with rather important notes might be found on Review Request 1919

Music

(TO BE DONE)