In-game custom sounds for your ship

[hakkarin]

One thing I feel the game is currently lacking in the customization department is sounds. Currently every ship sounds the same when moving, shooting etc.

I suggest that the player is allowed to customize the sound effects of his ship, since I feel that audio is just as big of a part of a ship as it's visual design.

 

[Tobie]

There was a similar suggestion to this in the past by Toderon. http://starmadedock.net/threads/ingame-musicplayer.5530/#post-82328

It was mostly intended for playing music and audio announcements in game, but if we get custom sound system that is designed to be controllable via logic we could do lots of custom ship sounds as well.

A rundown of how I imagine such a system would work:
- A new "Audio" block could be placed and modified by pressing the activation key while looking at it.
- In this block's configuration menu, you could assign it an audio file that has been uploaded to the server (Allowing server Admins to pre-approve audio files before allowing them to be used, preventing some abuse). Perhaps they could also be attached to ship blueprints so that ships with custom sounds could be transferred easily from server to server.
- The range that the sound will be audible could be indicated in build mode with a wire-frame UI object, similar to the Boxes used to indicate docking areas. Although in this case we may want to use a sphere that is centered on the block, as that might be a better indication of audibility range than boxes. And perhaps there could also be two or more spheres, each indicating the volume that the audio will be played at, with the larges spheres being X% quieter than the smaller ones.
- A new block called an Audio Enhancer could be linked to the Audio block in much the same way docking enhancers are linked to docks. This way we can expand the range of the audio.
- Other configuration options for the Audio block could be:

• LoopCount[#] (Number of times to loop, Zero would be considered no limit, and One would be the same as having looping set to off)
• RepeatCount[#] (Number of times to repeat per loop, or activation)
• Break[Y/N] (Play the file to the end of the current loop or stop immediately when turned off)
• Interval[##-Seconds] (delay between repeated/looped audio)

- When the Audio Block receives an on signal from logic, it will start to play the audio file according to it's configuration.
- When it receives an off signal it turns off according the Break setting.
-Audio blocks will only play for people who are Aligned/Attached/Gravity/etc to the Entity on which the Audio block is placed.

 

[jstenholt]

I've said it once, I'll say it forever. This feature would be fantastic, definitely just a QOL thing, but still, as far as I'm concerned, this is the most important aesthetic function missing right now.

 

[PriZm]

Well, having a lot to do with audio in my job as well as private, i would absolutly appreciate some kind of "audio block". There is literally tons of stuff coming to my mind including audio stuff.. Just imagine a small wooden bar in your ship, where you can have a cold beer while listening to some old fashioned swing / jazz stuff =D

 

[Captain Benn]

I support this idea as well the only problem I see is other players being able to hear it like your ship's unique engine sound and so forth

 

[Ithirahad]

I'm just imagining a ship that yells "DIIIIICKS!" every time it fires its swarm missiles, or something equally ludicrous.

Give players something like this, and they will misuse it.




Hard.

Never mind that people will use shitty low-quality annoying noises that nobody wants to hear, or bloat up the server database with tons of high-quality tracks. That's not to say that I wouldn't fly my capital ship with a selection of awesome music to pipe through the comms system, or have alert sirens and hover elevator sound effects, if I could. Just that this probably isn't practical tech-wise, and if it is, that it will become problematic for, uh, other reasons.

 

[jayman38]

...Give players something like this, and they will misuse it. ... Hard....

Laughing as I type this, I agree, so I think custom sounds requested by the playerbase probably need to be implemented by the admin, so that desired sounds match the admin's "vision" for the server, just like Tobie suggested in post #2.

Absurdity-friendly servers can still have their bizarre sounds.

The admin can down-sample and optimize high-impact sounds to use less memory, prior to adding it.

 

[PizzaPress]

I'm thinking: "custom" option for music/sound. Looks in a folder for a sound with a specified name. If it matches, plays that. If none, play fallback sound.
Then if everyone has a sound already downloaded and named as...
metroidelevator.wav, everyone will hear that, but it'll be able to fall back to the game's own elevator sound for those without it.
Or it might even search for and select something listed in the category "elevator", maybe with subcategories or tags "start"," loop","stop","malfunction". So it'll pick one you have set in your client randomly.