I just read the list ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I’ll just make something water based
Will there be more special ambiences for e.g. ice biomes or bodies of water that aren’t oceans?
A big part of these tracks will be sampling of underwater sounds. How important is it to look at the licenses for them? I don’t really know what permissions are needed to sample sounds for open-source projects
Very important. Things that can’t be creative commons licensed in their entirety are completely useless to us.
Any work that isn’t entirely yours probably comes with an attribution requirement as well. So we need to track each source that is used and the license for it and include that info in the game.
For example the used code libraries are mentioned: Thrive/LICENSE.txt at master · Revolutionary-Games/Thrive · GitHub
Also you might want to check the CLA again which you should have already signed, that says that you kinda promised you won’t submit other people’s IP to us as your own work.
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You need to be careful with samples since some have fine print that could lead to legal issues. What I’ve been doing for the underwater/microbe environmental ambience I’m currently working on (and what I usually do) is recording my own sounds or creating them from scratch in a synthesizer. I’ve been stopping by creeks to record water flow, recording water flowing from my faucet, water in buckets. This ensures that the sounds used are unique to thrive and I don’t have to look to into samples online.
I know that not everyone on the sound team has recording equipment or the same experience in sound design as me so I would be willing to make a “Thrive Water Sample Pack” if that would be useful.
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Yeah, this is the safest thing to do. If you take any work from someone else you need to completely understand the licensing terms that work is under and whether you can subsequently license your derived work in a way that Revolutionary Games Studio can then further license it to our users under the CC license we use for our graphics and other binary assets: Thrive/assets/LICENSE.txt at master · Revolutionary-Games/Thrive · GitHub
Alright… That’s unfortunate but understandable
That would indeed be very useful. I can’t really take my recording equipment outside, besides I don’t know where I’d even find a spot to record underwater noises.
Alright I’d like to take a crack at helping with the Microbe Biome Ambience for this next release.
Licensing
One big thing we need to clear up is how much we can use freely available sounds off of the internet. Can anyone provide a clear explanation on whether we can, and if so what steps we need to take to be compliant with licensing rules? If not, our only option is to create all sounds ourselves eh?
Current Ambience
The ambient tracks we have now have served us well for many years. I mean no disrespect to whoever created them, but I think that they can be replaced with higher quality and more accurate ambient tracks (as with many past features and assets we have improved upon). For perspective, here are the current two ambient tracks:
I will be honest, after many times of playing the game, this ambient track is harder to listen to now. This track has a bit of a higher pitched echoing/screeching sound (that gets strong about 30 seconds in) that I cannot fully place my finger on, that doesn’t sound entirely underwater and is a little audibly irritating.
I do prefer the second track, but I think it has some areas of improvement as well. It’s more of a clearly noticeably underwater bubbling sound, but I think the problem lies in having a single “bubbling focused” ambient track that plays in every patch is the problem (and a higher pitched echoey bubble track). Additionally, the amount of bubbling you hear often doesn’t match what you see on the screen. The amount of bubbling is actually quite intense, but then you can sometimes have a screen with no activity of cells or currents or compounds or chunks on it, and not even any bubbles (though implementing 3D and mobile bubbles will be a separate task). This disconnect between the audio and the visuals broke the immersion for me at some moments and made it feel more like a game.
Solution
I think the solution, as I highlighted way back when in the original post, is to break down all possible ambient sounds into their component “ingredients”, and then come up with a “recipe” of “ingredients” for each patch. Instead of recapping all the ingredient sounds and coming up with a master list for all the patches at once, I’ll start by focusing only on the Hydrothermal Vents biome. Once we have this one done, we can move one by one through the other biomes. I can update the Original Post as we finish each biome, and then we can eventually save all that info to the wiki.
Hydrothermal Vents
I think the ambient track of the hydrothermal vents should be comprised of three main sounds:
- Underwater hum. I don’t know the exact word for it, but if you have ever fully submerged yourself underwater without too many sounds around you you know what I mean. There is a strange humming sound that occurs when you are underwater, which is probably caused by the flowing of the water on and off of your eardrums. I think having this constantly playing faintly in the background is perfect for creating the sense of being underwater (I think this is what Microbe Ambience 1 was trying to do with the higher pitches echoey sounds). The best example I can find of this sound is the following:
-
Bubbling. Although I think that bubbling should not play in the ambience of other biomes, this is one place where bubbling belongs. The hydrothermal vents are constantly ejecting gasses which are dissolving into the seawater, so there should be constant bubbling. Perhaps we could have a second track where the gas release (and thus bubbling) occurs in bursts for a more sporadic vent.
- I think one big problem for now is that bubbling ambience will always feel unrealistic, since we will be able to hear them but not see them. In the future we can create a task to implement small bubble particle FX that swirl across the currents and float past the player’s camera to visually show the bubbles, and perhaps even some larger 3D bubbles that can be interacted with by the player (moved or popped).
- Occasional explosions/booms. Occasionally vents may release a large amount of pent up gas, and this could even create a shockwave in the water. There could also be moments where rocks around a vent crack from the fissuring forces of the vent. To show this audibly, every 5-8 minutes we can play distantly muffled booms or explosions amongst the ambient sound. I think this would be a really cool way of making the hydrothermal vents feel like both a fountain of nutrients and source of life, but also a little terrifying as we remind the player that they are close to volcanic activity. The best examples I could find of underwater sounding explosions/booms are below:
If we are indeed able to use free sounds on the internet without licensing problems, I can go ahead and start finding the best free samples I can find for these three sounds. If anyone has experience in sound design / sound engineering, or is able to help create any samples for these sounds themselves, I could really use the help!
The terms of use (the license) for each individual used sound needs to be evaluated separately if they are usable.
Anything that uses the already used license for Thrive assets: Thrive/assets/LICENSE.txt at master · Revolutionary-Games/Thrive · GitHub would be optimal as then we just need to add a bit of text in the assets readme that a particular asset uses work by person x.
Other licenses need to be looked at separately, most creative commons variants should be fine, but we’ll need to include the full license texts for them in the game if they are used as I don’t think the licenses are currently included.
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Ok that’s good to know! Being able to find a few crucial sound effects online that are under appropriate licenses that we could use will help a lot.
For demonstration, here’s a quick test track I threw together for a Vents Ambience track. It uses the “Underwater Snowstorm” track made by Yuri which works as a perfect Underwater Hum sound effect constantly playing in the background. Then I sprinkled in three underwater explosions off of Freesound.org to show when the vents release another burst of gas (they are pretty bad quality so you can hear the buzz of the microphone during their clips). Finally I added some bubbling taken from the current microbe_ambience2.ogg track. Sometimes an explosion leads to bubbling, sometimes it doesn’t, just to see what sounds best. Give a listen and provide your thoughts!
I opened an issue for expanding the game music system to allow context specific tracks to play only when that context is active:
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I opened an issue for the sound production component of the Ambience Revamp. It requires the issue you created HH to be resolved before it itself can be fully resolved:
Just as a quick update, thanks to @Twitchywhalez we now have a repository of some locally made Thrive sounds, which we can mix and match to produce our own ambient tracks. We can also grow this repository to include more and more recordings so we can keep making more interesting SFX and ambience.
I’ve created two draft ambient tracks with these sounds. Please listen and give feedback on:
- The sound quality. Is it too loud? Too buzzy? Is the bass too low? Did you hear any strange out of places sounding noises at some point?
- The immersiveness. Does it sound like you are underwater?
A generic background noise for being underwater:
Another one that is probably better suited for deeper environments:
If there are no issues we’re going to go ahead and starting creating more SFX and ambience in this style.
Considering the release candidate is scheduled for two weeks from now (and I will be leaving for a month of travelling shortly before that) it would be good to implement as much of our progress on the Microbe Stage ambience in time for that.
As of now, we have three new underwater hum ambience tracks designed for three different depth levels. We have not yet created new sounds for hydrothermal vents, ice cracking, water droplets (in a cavern), waves crashing, or water flowing.
We also have not yet coded in the functionality to the game to support biome unique ambience.
As such I suggest that for now we simply replace the three current ambience tracks with the three new ones, just to at least get the work we’ve done so far implemented for the release.
One week. Full 0.5.10 release is in two weeks. Release candidate is on the 17th.
For reference / if someone wants to give this a go:
I’m not fully on board with this, why can’t be have all of the ambiance tracks in the game? That’s the simplest change to make (only requires adding things and no removing).
As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I think that the quality of the current ambient tracks is not great, with two of the three being particularly poor. The three new ones that Twitchywhalez made are a much higher quality and sound completely different (incorporating low pass filters, reverb, and many other effects), so I don’t think we should mix all six into the same playlist at all.
Yeah I’m going to try to give that a go once I have more free time, though that definitely won’t be before this upcoming release, hence my suggestion above.
Well I won’t approve such a change by myself so, some extra people with ears will need to review the PR making that change. Which may be difficult as I’ve had a very low success rate in getting people with ears to listen to sound changing PRs…
I can make a PR with the three new tracks and publish it for testing.
@Oliveriver do you know if all three current ambient tracks play randomly through all biomes? Because in this PR I would just replace the three .ogg files with the new recordings without changing their filenames. Is there any preference for certain files to play in certain biomes?
I can answer that yes, because we don’t have that context specific track playing feature yet.
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What’s the process for checking the PRs? I would do it but I don’t have much experience with Github/programming and I’m on a mac so I would imagine it’s either complicated or not possible for me
Ah yeah, that makes it a bit more difficult. That’s because devbuilds are not setup to be made for mac currently (because it would cost quite a bit of extra to have a mac build server as those are way more expensive than Linux servers, and launcher also probably needs code changes to make that work).
Only option right now on mac is to manually checkout the right code using git and then running through the Godot editor. We have setup instructions but I’ll admit that without any previous experience with tools like that, it’s a bit difficult.