Hi everyone, I've been making some progress with a game I'm working on in Game Guru. Hitting a bit of a roadblock in one of the details that's been bugging me. My custom terrains no longer seem to have any material index assigned to them. So there is no footfall sounds.

How do we go about giving our custom terrains sounds? I'm assuming once we are able to properly assign them a material index they will have the according debris as well for if impacted with bullets/weapons.

I believe Lee once explained this, but i cannot locate that thread on the forums.

As far as I know, and I should know, there was never any code which detects the material type of terrain painted surfaces, and so ALL footfalls on terrain would default to the grass sound effect. The Building Editor, on the other hand, has full control of material indexes for textures and should work fine. Given the close relationship in the way the two texture atlases are presented, it does make sense to add this functionality for terrain textures, but it's not part of the current workload. I think it can probably make it into a sooner update without resorting to the voting board as I think most of the code is straightforward and just needs to make sure it does not impact performance in any noticeable way (i.e. there is a potential read of the terrain texture each time the player (or character) stomps down on the floor, but I have a feeling I will move the data to a very fast an optimized memblock, and move the functionality to a LUA command so it keeps it well away from more internal hard coding

Lee, that sounds awesome.

For me it would be just nice to hear my feet again with having the volume at maximum - haven't heard them for ages now

As usual you are doing an awesome job.


Reliquia...

I'm actually not hearing any sounds at all when walking around on the custom terrain. Was there possibly a sound reduction added to terrain at some point in one of the builds?

EDIT:



Oh so there is sounds? its just low volume? Is it then possible to increase the volume somewhere?

Odd. I seem to remember different sounds when walking on grass, mud, water etc. Perhaps I am mistaken, Lee should know. For certain you had water effects when in water and obviously when on objects, get the sound type assigned to the material.


I would imagine the volume is set in the lua code that has replaced the hard coded stuff. Not checked though, but it's bound to be in there somewhere. I generally turn GG's sound down to almost zero as it can be quite loud when firing and I often work late; so I haven't noticed any issues here. Sound would be one of my low priorities when making a game. It's rare I get to that point

Discussed here a while back - https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/218358 - mostly at end of thread.

I can only remember 'grass' sounds on terrain except for water sounds near water plane.

I used audacity and 'Effect\Amplify' option (+15db) to increase the grass sounds.

Cheers.

thanks cybernescene that was the thread i was looking for! Forward I was the one that started it.



I remember this too. Perhaps it was removed due to the custom terrain implementation.

Glad it's not just me. But as I say probably just my brain confusing things. For sure you had a standard walk sound and a water walk sound, plus different sounds for different floor types. I seem to remember different sounds on the terrain as well, which impressed me, but I could be mixing that with object effects.

I could have suggested adjusting the wav sounds volume but really that seems unnecessary in general. At least if the sound effect being used is set to 50% volume for instance. Obviously if it is 100% then you will have to adjust the .wav in order to increase it's volume. I will freely admit I have not really done anything with GG in almost a year and lua wise, things have changed. I would be surprised if you could not alter the default volume of basic sound effects though.

I'd say that many things have changed this year that really need more (some) documentation other than in the daily report. Lee really should have done a video update on a lot of this. The new lua command changes thrown out last update with no real explanation of them are an example (the global is not sufficient here) and even a veteran user like myself has fell behind with many lua updates. There's a boat load of new commands but not a jot of info on how to use them. Not only that, but many commands are now obsolete, with no explanation as to the differences. I haven't the inclination to experiment these days in honesty, and many will know I was very keen on experimenting not that long ago.

Sorry I seem to be in moan mode of late, but after several years of waiting for GG to become useful, all I find is new commands that change the way of doing things and no real improvements in the engine itself. I must be getting impatient for some reason Also, something as simple as the sound effect volume should be adjustable in editor. You should not have to trawl through lua code to adjust it, or even worse, have to amplify the sound effect in another package At least not with the default sound effects, they should be as loud as they can be without any editing. Editing sound files in Audacity or such should only be for custom effects. Default ones should be sufficient and working. Imagine a game that you needed to edit the sound effects to get them the correct volume. Not a fair comparison you may say? Well I disagree, default included sound effects should be at a decent volume out the box.

Sound effects in GG are faulty. Standalone's have issues and changes to sound levels are overridden by the default menu. There's a long way to go before we have a serious game making engine. Somehow we need some conformity to sounds set in FPE and lua to continue fine when you have entered the menu and out again. In honesty, the options menu at the moment is just too clunky by far. None of this low, medium, high nonsense, people want to enable disable effects themselves. We need a menu that gives you all the options available. Generic terms just don't cut the mustard these days, apart from very casual users.

My second rant of the day, lol.

@DVader - agree on the lack on info on new commands. A twitch broadcast on how to use the raycasting functions would be exremely useful. I know Amen Moses and smallg tried to explain it, but I just couldn't wrap my brain around it.

Yeah, I tend to agree with what you are saying there DVader.

I used to be pretty prolific in working on various ideas for my own game idea, and in making stuff for the store, but just loose interest real quick now. It is OK I suppose, this is all just a hobby for me anyway, and the grandkids keep me plenty busy

For me it is just that some things Game Guru used to do well have been made harder (especially terrain), and other than rewriting the engine a few times, nothing has really changed since the release on steam - not to mention not seeing anything added that I would like to see in all these years.

You expect updates to break things, but I just think those broken things need to be fixed before moving on to other stuff - but it seams they just sit there broken..... Terrain, Stand-alone, AI . . . . . Sound is broken for terrain - has been for ages now, I don't think you should need to edit any audio files to get it working properly.


I have been thinking for a while now to start a WIP in an attempt to keep myself interested, but yeah . . . . . . . I just can't see Game Guru becoming more than just a first person shooter engine any time soon.

We can only hope things improve when the new update is out, but if I read between the lines correctly, we shouldn't expect DX-11update and PBR before this year is out. So another year goes by . . . . . .

Reliquia....

I can see it becoming more than just a first person shooter, but one needs to be able to code with lua in order to extract the capabilities, quest and adventure games are absolutely possible.

My health has prevented me from doing much this year, now i'm not really busy because i prefer to wait until the update is released.
If that will be somewhere in December it is ok with me because it means that the beta testers have more time to test and hence find bugs or broken stuff which can be reported to Lee and fixed before it is released.
This is one important area which makes or breaks GG as a whole, release an broken update and reviews will be deeply negative, hence pushing away potential customers.
With earlier updates, beta testing seems to have been quite unsufficient (lack of time?) hence things are broken now.
The public preview versions do have bug fixes but so many might not know of its existence and hence wait a long time or simply stray away from GG after some negative words.

So taking the time needed in order to have it properly tested before release is essential in my view.
I personally use the time to familiarize myself with PBR and try out demo's of 3D pianting programs, yesterday i found out that models can be unwrapped in 3D Coat and the UV map saved.

I wonder how much broken areas are already fixed, the list of bug fixes that goes accompanied with the coming update seems to be quite large.

I do recall specifically the grass, dirt, water and gravel working in early builds. Still have the audio files in my Game Guru audiobank folder. I think the sounds stopped working when the EBE was released and not when the custom terrains were added. Or both. Not sure. I just miss hearing the sounds of being in the environments I create.

Yeah, something in that release broke terrain sound.
Having no sounds when walking on terrain seriously detracts from the user experience IMO. Like you can't hear footsteps, but you can still hear the sound if you jump (space) The thing is this is not stuff added that doesn't work properly, it is stuff that used to work but now doesn't - I just don't see that as improvements

The 16 texture terrain release just broke the 'friendly, terrain painting' we once had.

Reliquia...

In a sense i think its safe to say this could be reported as a bug then?

Well, it has been reported in several threads, some of which has Lee commented in, this thread for example

Also I reported this as a bug here awhile back, but filing a bug report doesn't necessarily get it checked out or sorted. Since it has been mentioned several times by various users - and the best we had was some suggested work-a-rounds - it seams it is not considered something we need\want sorted....

Reliquia....

Well to - DVader and others I also hate "software deprecation". Wikipedia quotes this as:



This happens all the time in the fast pace world of technology you have to be superhuman to keep up. I have several projects in computer languages that have totally died, let alone parts that have just been deprecated. Yes, better documentation is needed now as well as some twitch tutorials.

If different sound footsteps where in a previous build, I agree they should be put back (probably broken in the EBE build as some noted) and then overlooked.

Even better, a permanent fix should be implemented in the GG's interface to accommodate this aspect of the overall game creation design. As T-Bone noted it makes a big impact with the atmosphere of the game you are designing to have control over "atmospheric" sound effects. Small details like footsteps put you further into the game.

I think an analogy can be related to film. Too often in film music scores or sound effects are an afterthought and thrown in at the end severely limiting the overall impact of a movie/scene if left out /done unprofessionally.

Hope this gets addressed at some point.

Despite it's flaws I still love GG

I can say as a beta tester that the update so far is looking nice, it needs more work but I think most current users will like it. The lengthy beta phase (compared to others) is a good thing, Lee is still methodically working through stuff mainly, which is understandable. He has given us plenty of time to report on issues for him to devour once he has finished adding the good stuff. He's fixed a couple of those as well along the way. Obviously, I can't say anything specific, but I'm pretty happy with it so far.

I still agree with the sound issues, but still think GG has great potential and I think the DX11 update will put it back on track a little. Despite cataloguing bugs and screenshots/vids to demonstrate, GG has been fairly fun again while testing it over the last few weeks. I'm already trying to think of a nice simple, but good game idea, lol.

Totally agree, PBR is making a huge difference, but there are still quite a few bugs to iron out, what people have to be prepared for is the fact that just adding DX11 and PBR alone doesn't make the graphics awesome, they will still need to use better models, just the same as before, it's just the quality of models we can use now is much better.

I think we should all club together to buy Lee a t-shirt ....

@Belidos


Brilliant! count me in!

lol count me in too