Alternating repetitive sounds..
Monkey Archive Forums/Monkey Discussion/Alternating repetitive sounds..
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| I find myself in a situation where I have very rapidly firing guns, and of course as a result the sound associated with it needs to be played a lot in very quick succession, the sound itself I find pleasing to the ear but when holding fire for even a short time it wares on you.. I had the same thing with my Explosions and to fix that I created about 6 different bangs and play them randomly when something blows up and I found that it works wonders, this is what I plan to do for some of my more annoying bullet sounds in the hope I get the same results, but it is a lot more and way more frequent so who knows. Anyway I felt this an interesting enough topic, that of sound and noise in our games and thought I would start a topic, so have you had this issue and if so how did you address it, or do you have any thoughts on it at all. Solutions 1) Use more than one audio file each resembling the main audio file but with subtle differences to present the player with non uniform audio 2) Randomly fluctuate the volume level . 3) Randomly fluctuate the pitch of the audio . |
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| You can also just vary pitch a little bit. I do that for the matching noises in my match-3 games. |
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| I found that randomizing the pitch between 0.9 and 1.1 was often enough to make it sound different, and also randomize the volume between about 0.5 to 1. The upshot is, if the sounds are annoying to you, they're going to be annoying to everybody else as well. If you need to use multiple sounds (I've done three or four in the past, when the pitch variation didn't help so much), then it's a small overhead well spent, in my opinion. |
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| Yeah I have 6 bomb sounds at the moment, but the guns all only have one, most of the gun sounds are ok just one of them grates on you after a little while, I think its the higher pitch, I will try the varied volume and see what it sounds like, failing that I will use more than one sound and just randomize it. |
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| Agree with the pitching. A few years back I was ready to switch to GLBasic, but it was lacking sound pitch!! Imagine my games without sound pitch! How bland!! Like GfK says, a nice Rnd(0.75,1.25) is a standard in most of my audio commands, and it reduces the repetitiveness quite a lot. A shame it doesn't work in HTML, but.. Meh, what can you do!? I also tend to quieten overly repetitive sounds. Your own weapon fire, for example, in a lot of my games is either very very quiet or completely silent. If the game's busy enough, there's plenty of other audio going on, and it generally won't be missed. |
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| In Oozing Empires ( http://www.kongregate.com/games/gerryq/oozing-empires ) I put in eight slightly different sounds for the moves. It picks randomly each time from one of the seven that wasn't used last. |
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| Yeah a few randomly picked sounds seems to be the most compatible solution for all targets. |
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| Interesting discussion! It is very subtle and something most people wouldn't notice outright. Thanks for the tips. |
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