Oolite Bulletins

Hi all. I tried some soundpacks but now i want to make my own. I have a few questions:

1. Where do i find a 'list' with all possible actions which i can connect to a sound? I'm new to Oolite and Addons so i'm not sure where to start other than changing the existing sounds.

2. Where is the default file that connects the current sounds? Found this answer already.

3. What is the best way to edit plist files?

4. Can i attach sounds to ships passing and if so, what are the properties concerning distance/radius volume rolloff?

5. Going on from 4, does Oolite support stereo? (A ship passing to the left plays a sound to the left.)

6. Are ambience sounds possible? i.e. I'd like to be able to have cockpit and ship sounds (distant metal hull sounds / computer sounds etc) and Spacestation hum when you approach.

7. I've read that sound effects can't be looped, is that still true?

8. Music is streamed of the HD, how exactly do i trigger this?

Well for now these are my questions. I have more, but i'll wait until i'm working on it to ask them, or find the answers myself.

Cheers,

zeep.

1) The sounds in Oolite.app/Contents/Resources/Sounds can be replaced. Certain effects can be mapped to other sound files using custsounds.plist, but not all sounds go through this mechanism. The default custsoudds.plist (in Oolite.app/Contents/Resources/Config) lists (hopefully) all that can be changed this way.

3) Under OS X, with Property List Editor or Xcode, which are part of the free developer tools. Under Linux, probably with GNUstep ProjectCenter, although I’m not aware of anyone having actually done that for Oolite. Otherwise, with difficulty and much trial and error. (Over the past couple of days I’ve improved Oolite’s feedback for bad plists.)

4) No.

5) Oolite supports stereo effects, but not positional audio. So, to the question you meant, no.

6) Not really.

7) There is no mechanism for looping custom sounds at this time.

8) Under OS X, sounds which would require over 1 MB in memory (i.e., a total of 262 144 samples, or 131 072 samples/channel for stereo sound) are streamed. For other platforms, it looks as though only the theme music and docking music are streamed. The ability to trigger ambient music separately from sounds is one of the things that I’d like to change in the sound system, but probably won’t get around to doing any time soon.

Thanks for the reply.

3. I'm using windows so i'll find some other tool. With my very limited coding experience maybe wordpad.exe will do the trick

4 + 5. *sound of shattering dreams*. I'm very sorry to hear that. Would it be very difficult to implement support for positional audio in the engine? What engine is this anyway? Maybe i can do some research and take some work off your hands.

6 + 8. So maybe you can make it possible to use music for ambience? A trigger to start & stop it should be enough at some point.

7. I've read in a thread that you (or another dev, i'm not sure sorry) was planning to implement it. Variables like Att / Dec / Sus / Rel were mentioned. Will there be further development in that area?

9. By the way, who is Oolite's lead programmer? Are there more coders in this community who work on Oolite?


I know these are a lot of things i'm asking. I appreciate the time you take for the answers.


Just some info. I've been producing dance music for over 12 years now. Since last year i'm shopping for deals on games, there's a good market out there. So far i've worked on-, and with some mod makers on various engines like UT99, UT2K4 and HL. No commercial releases yet, just mods. Unfortunately, the mods have been abadoned before a release came out. I would like to enhance Oolite as much as possible through sound and music. It will be fun to do and also add to my portfolio.

4 + 5: the sound code is custom. I started on support for positional audio, but the problem lies in making the rest of the game tell the sound code where sounds are supposed to be played… this is a heavy rearchitecting thing, regardless of the underlying sound code.

6 + 8, 7: probably, but not now.

9: It used to be Giles (aegidian). Currently I’m de facto it, but I refuse to wear the hat, be it ever so shiny.

The random sounds should be easy if we add a scripting method to play sounds. I would have said this was easy but I don't think the sound code is the simple "play this sound" that it used to be.