Right now we're working on ambient sound. The kind that's on the background, and makes the game feel more like a living world. If you saw the video and listened to the ambient sounds there, you're probably wondering what are we doing, there was ambience on the video! Didn't fool you? Alright, I admit it, the ambient sounds on the video were an addon, so we're just now working to add them.
What I'm currently planning is that we'll create soundscapes, a sort of collection of sounds that go together to create say, a jungle, or an ocean, or a cave. Then I'll create a tool to paint these soundscapes to the world, and we've got positional ambient sounds. So you can go to the beach and hear water roaring, and go back to the jungle and hear the birds chirping. The volumes of all these sounds are cleverly computed on the background, and all I'll have to do now is paint.
This week we've been busy with making this video of Driftmoon. Tell us what you think!
This is Bobby the Stranded Skeleton. He's the man (or skeleton) behind our new menu, walking around and sharing his thoughts on being stranded and life in general. So the menu is really a map in the game, only without the player. I'm sure you modders out there will love this, as you can make the menu background a heated battlefield, or a flowing volcano.
So back to Bobby. I don't have too many quotes for him just yet, so if you're reading this, share your own sentences in the comments. My only requirements are that it's a really short text, and it must fit into being said by a stranded skeleton called Bobby. 
The best ones will get into the game!
Here's what I've written myself, to start you up:
- I'm a poor lonesome skeleton.
- Is that a boat?
- Maybe I'll plant a tree here.
- Well look at that. A new seashell!
- Man, I wish I could swim!
This week we've been working on adding sounds to the game. Mostly we're using sounds available at http://www.freesound.org/, they have plenty of useful free effects available. As opposed to any of my previous games, we're really putting an effort to make the soundscape believable. This means we're using multiple samples for each action, and we're trying to find sounds for most ingame actions. For example we already have over 30 footstep samples whereas the original Notrium had exactly 6.
Another useful addition compared to Notrium is that we're using different buses and different attenuations for different kinds of samples. In practice this means the sounds get bogged down a lot less, because we can dynamically reduce the range of heard footstep. In Notrium you used to hear all of the aliens' footsteps at one go, producing a terrible mass of sounds where you only wished to kill the aliens to quiet them down.
For modders I'm trying to make a lot of things automatic unless otherwise specified. An example, you can drag many objects in the game with your mouse. Dragging a large cupboard produces a lower sound than dragging a chair. I've automated the pitch changing to depend on the mass of the object being dragged, so you don't have to specify a drag sound for each and every different kind of chair you make.
Another helpful feature is that actual sound files are no longer used in any of the game scripts. They're just referenced with cues. For example my script could say playSound("eat") and I would have a cue in my sounds.ini file like this:
[eat]
soundFiles=crunch.wav, gulp.wav.
Well you may wonder where's the use in that? Simply put, you can now change any of the actual sound files in one place, you don't have to go into a dozen scripts to hunt them down. And you can have some definitions for each sound, like minimum and maximum randomization volume, plus pitch. Not to mention that you can define any number of actual sound files, and the game will choose one to play at random.
Well, what can I say? You asked for it, I said maybe later, and here it is! Meet Velvet, she's likely the first member of your party in Driftmoon. She's a quick tempered Panther on a personal quest of revenge for her ex-master - your father.
Velvet will follow you around, attack whoever attacks you, and she will have a lot to say to you throughout the game. You can heal her by giving her raw meat, and you can leave her standing around, but she won't stay put for long!
Who have been your favourite party members? What kind of people would you like to travel with in Driftmoon?
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