Is there any way to get footfall sounds for enemies? I think we had them in the classic engine. It helps add a lot more atmosphere and I think could even add to the creep factor of certain games. Sound of bare feet around the corner on a hall floor. Cause currently it feels like something is missing when an enemy approaches you or is near by:



The player has foot-fall sounds but not enemies. In games like Skyrim and Fallout they have every enemy have their own footfall sound bank for grass, metal, wood and stone. i think GG could really benefit with this type of quality boost. i'm detail obsessive.

Best bet would be to add it to the voting feature. Then the community can decide the order.

Those Zombies are awesome .... Cant wait till they make it into the core ....
I prefer those to what we have now ...

When I first glanced at the post I thought it said football sounds anyway great zombies Teabone. Agree, could do with more sounds.

Am I mistaken that we used to have sounds for enemies walking around back in the day? I'm wondering how hard it would be to integrate this and hopefully it doesn't have to happen via the main LUA scripts.

Maybe add something to ai_soldier.lua saying if character is within X distance from Player and in walking or running mode then play a footfall sound at volume based on that distance. Sorry my Lua isn't great but I bet someone such as SmallG could help you.

it wouldnt allow you to check the actual material of the floor at that time though so unless the ground is all the same material and you can get away with only 1 sound this is something that'll need to be done in the engine or externalised.

Hope this could be included into the engines so we could add another folder to the character bins for foot-fall sounds. Like how we have the idle, aware, cautious, aggro and etc. Least this is how Bethesda goes about it.



I did that with swimming and for some reason its still at the bottom of the list. Won't receive it till probably 3 years from now

I would add to that, when these things get externalized, I would base the sound on animation frames. More audio slots, and access to the materials! I don't script much, but can Lua access external files? (Look for the material index in the .fpe?)

@ Jerry
I've read and re-readed many times your post to get the point right, since I do not want run into error, because the bad translation, anyway not sure about get it, (not because you, but my hightschool english. LOL).


This does not should be difficult to get, since you already can access files via LUA, read/writte data from.

The obstacle I see here is than you can only work with those 2 sound slots, and you are not free to upload sound files, via script, when you like, and the amoug of sounds you wish, IE:




Here I'm not too sure about, since as far as I know, you set the material id via fpe, IE: wood=2, so when player walk over, GG automatically play wood sound, or not?, I fill I'm missing something here, and I would to know what is it?

As aside note, there are a lot of undefined sounds in GG, than GG mark as = 0; so perhaps all you are looking the possiblity to defined those sounds freely, if we can handle the sound slots?

If so, yes would be nice, so we can do it via script using globals, and each item I've place into my map, tell me their material ID, so script can play the sound I ve applied to this material id when needed, and you are done.

Anyway I think it is not so easy, and I'm missunderstanding something here.

3com

I think you got the gist of what I was saying, 3com. I was kinda thinking while I was typing, and had just got home from the bar, lol.

EDIT: Google translate can't do drunk speak... Yet!

You still have the issue of how do you know which object or part of the terrain is the entity actually on to know which file to reference?

Yeah, I wondered if that was possible to find out also. Oh well!

Here is how it used to work in Classic....material ID was the same as GG and was assigned in segment fps, for example materialindex = 3. If it was a metal material then metal footfall sounds are used. This meant you couldn't assign a different footfall per character and it was limited to biped sounds since all characters walking on it used the same. If you wanted a quadraped or even a floating character you had to remove material sounds for all floor entities/segments or your spider would sound like it had two legs and wore hob nailed boots. I can't remember if there was ever a fix for this but it was highly irritating when making non-biped characters.

As said you could get around it by removing materials altogether and play some music to cover it up, but it wasn't ideal by any stretch.

Whats required is a match between material index and character type so we can assign the appropriate footfall sounds. I don't know why Lee hasn't set non player characters to use material index but it is likely for this very reason.

LOL

Still I think if you are able to load your sound via script, so GG does not need manage what material you are using for to assing the sound accordingly, because the handle would be at your end.
There already exits a lot materials, and also sounds not always should be handle because the material type, but what it does, IE: a glass breaking, but why?, because it fall down?, because stone impat?, perhaps some bullet?

What I mean is not only important the material type, sometimes the reason is important too.
Many things to take into account, so why simple we does not load the accurate sound when needed, via script and you are done.
Just my thought.

3com

It isn't as easy to script as it sounds when an npc can encounter so many different material surfaces. When things are supposed to work default and out of the box at least an npc footfall type for materials would work. Easy enough to script sounds like breaking glass but we are talking npc footfall and not so simple. there are a lot of material types and I for one don't want to be scripting for every one of them with every character I do and trying to figure a way to link it to material type.

This is why GG should really take advantage more of the "character" folder within the "audiobank" folder. From there is the only way more than 2 sound can play for a character. Its also incredibly similar to the nature of which Bethesda goes about this.

Here is a video, I just put together, comparing The Game Creator's Game Guru character sound file structure with Bethesda's GECK sound file structure:



Bethesda's file management with Game-Guru's. Its very similar and all we really need is a folder called onFootstep and in there have a variety of sound files (#.wav) that are randomized the same as the other soundbank folders within "character". Really hope Lee checks this out as it will open up the doors for even more uses.

Additionally we really need to bring back what we had in FPSC where we could play any sound we wanted from a path with "playsound" and a number of other commands followed by a path within the audiobank folder. This is actually one of my biggest headaches with Game Guru. Since day one.

I'm not very good at LUA, but if we have to end up using it to make the foot-fall sounds happen, when a character is set to walk it should follow up then with some time of delayed: PlayCharacterSound(e,"onFootstep").


While taking a look deep inside Bethesda's working folders, I noticed the GECK handles the footsteps without detecting the material index, actually. It seems only the player does, just like in Game Guru. So this is even more do-able now. I'm going to try creating an onFootstep sound bank folder within a character's folder and see if this works. If it does work than for characters that do not require foot sounds on the ground per-say could actually load in the sounds of flapping wing and etc with this method. Of which Bethesda too does do for sure creatures.

EDIT: unfortunately this area seems to be hard coded as I just created a new folder OnFootStep with sounds files it it range 0.wav to 4.wav and used PlayCharacterSound(e,"onFootstep") and it did not work. But works if I use anything like onDeath and etc.

If your a game design company you can script in anything you want per level, what has to be remembered here is the nature of GG as a drag and drop easy game creator which is expected to cover all the bases. I highly doubt most users will want to be altering scripts for different materials in their levels, what happens when npc crosses from metal to stone and how to detect it? Of course there may be workarounds but that isn't ideal for this particular product, I can only say what the limitations were in Classic and the current limitations in GG but isn't as easy as some seem to predict.

Ironically Bethesa's GECK engine is also a drag and drop system. Not much scripting goes on within it - unless its quest related.

Above i mention I noticed that even Bethesda's characters do not detect material index. Of which I assumed wrong. For GG we need to have at least onFootStep reference working and then we can just simply throw in a bunch of stepping sounds for our creatures.

You are of course correct that in some way different characters should have their own footfall sounds, you get different sounds with different footwear never mind different characters, pretty sure it could be done but it needs to tie into the material index of whichever surface without having to script it.

It for sure be a benefit if the material indexes could come in to play. But currently it be great to just get rid of the silent moments of characters walking without any sound that they are physically there.

With the extra detail of detecting the material index, you could have specific sounds for each creatures based on what each creature would sound like on various materials. That would really add to the immersion and atmosphere.

I work in a downtown Toronto multi-media arts studio that has amazing equipment and talents and I would love to put all that to good use but cannot currently with Game Guru. The audio side of things are way too limiting, presently.

Check out the awesome sound foly work by Mark Lampert at 29:48 in Fallout 3 and Oblivion in this clip. We can't put efforts like that in to Game Guru when limited to just two sound files per entity. Especially since I'd love to be able to tell stories through sound design and dialogue and create good atmosphere. and I find Game Guru does not make this process easy. In fact its almost impossible unless you do bizarre work arounds.

Trust me, the community can show you great things if made possible to do them within GG. I am obsessed with detail; that is why I'm extra critical.

I should be able to add footfall feature for enemies when we get to the AI task (next one after EBE if voting holds) as I agree it would give the 3D sound system something more interesting to do, and the commands for LoadSound and PlaySound in LUA are getting more conversations in the community now so expect that sooner rather than later

I don't mean to hijack the thread, but as you bring up the subject of the voting I had a thought.

On the list for voting is a section for "All settings to have equivalent LUA commands", and currently with each update you are exposing more commands to the LUA anyway, so it's being done already in a piecemeal kind of way.

If it's being done bit by bit anyway would it not be a good idea to continue adding LUA commands each update, and remove it from the poll to free up some votes for something else?

@ Rolfy
You are right about npc footfall and a lot of material types, for that reason I think GG can't handle all them, at least not yet, and is for that reason than I want the chance to do it myself via script, at least in meantime.
My suggestion goes for another sounds/materials, than you would wish to customized.
Of course sounds like footsteps plus surface material in environment (terrain, snow, water, etc), and not mention all the variant each one can have.
Terrain may be wet, dry, marshy, with snow, ice, forest, stone, rocks, etc.
And it is assumed that sound of the footsteps is different, in each case.

@ Teabone
Do not remember about "character" folder within the "audiobank" , yes is a good system, even you can loop thru sounds.



Good news so!

3com

Found out about it not too long ago actually. Found out the hard way when I killed an FPSC character I was testing and it screamed into my headphones, scaring the heck out of me and I had no idea why it occurred; at the time. All because she was set to "female" in the FPE and I didn't realize that was what linked her to a bin of sounds to cycle though lol

If anyone is interested, I have created a new character sound folder for anything "robotic" using the stock FPSC sounds and a few of my own: http://freetoronto.org/gameguru/. All you have to do is use "soundset = robotic" to give your characters robotic sounds.



That's good news! As I'd love to be able to have full dialogue with my characters for questing; currently only text or up to the first two lines with audio.