Topic: Walking animations and sound defects (Read 17017 times)

Holey Moley · « **on:** February 04, 2016, 01:14:08 AM »

I've been restless of late. I am tired of working on the new 3D model support related software, and am looking for something else to do on the side.

I was just going to make this thread in the main forum as usual, but since Verdite made that thread about working on the tile defects, I thought that this is more or less in the same arena, so I am posting it in this forum as a renovation project.

I'll be blunt. Everyone of SOM's footstep sound effects for NPCs is unusable. I haven't looked into the monsters yet. Half the NPCs don't even having footstep sounds! And many of them have walking animations that teleport in the middle of the step.

This is just another one of those corners of SOM that if it wasn't part of the included KF remake, no one at From Software even looked at it before shipping the final product. After all, you must put the NPCs in walking mode to access these features.

The standard footstep sounds sound almost acceptable, except that they are all asymmetric. It's not clear if they are supposed to be heel-toe sounds, except the heel is synced with one footfall and the toe the other, or if the sound was originally meant for a character with a pronounced limp. It's strange if you think about it.

The heavy characters have a plodding sound that is symmetric, but it doesn't really sound like footsteps at all.

This really isn't a software initiative, although I'd like the PC to have a footstep sound of their own. That is after all why today I made a map with a series of chambers occupied by walking NPCs. This is a larger issue.

1) fixing the animations will only be practical after I can complete my export/import to DAE work sometime later this year. This establishes a time frame for the completion of this initiative.

2) new footstep sounds are required. Where will they come from? I'd prefer to try to mine Shadow Tower or Echo Night or whatever is available from From Software's library before resorting to sounds completely unrelated to Sword of Moonlight. But how to do that? I don't know. Does anyone have experience in this? It would be sufficient to just isolate the sound in the game and record them...

Anyway, I am not uncomfortable with familiarizing myself with the game discs themselves, it just seems like a lot of trouble for a relatively straightforward task at this time. Eventually the sounds on the King's Field 2 disc will have to all be extracted to port KF2 to SOM, but maybe there is a simpler way to skate by for this comparatively minor initiative. I don't have a hard copy of Echo Night. I do know it has a sophisticated footstep sound suite. I will have to fire up ST to see what it is like.

To be blunt this is perhaps the most neglected corner of Sword of Moonlight. Some of the NPCs/monsters may be missing sounds across the board. Death cries may be missing for NPCs also, since that's another dark corner.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #1 on:** February 04, 2016, 09:08:14 PM »

Last night before finishing up a movie on Netflix, while the PlayStation was on, I fired up Shadow Tower and Echo Night.

Almost all of Echo Night's walking sounds are very carpet-like, even over wood floors. I know it has some clanging sounds on metal sections.

I have a Shadow Tower game in the early area, stuck down in a hole. I explored a little bit, and actually collected lots of items and equipment during the process. It has a walking effect which is also quite muffled. It sounds closer to the sound used by SOM's heavy NPCs, than the standard one ... which I am beginning to think maybe it was taken from one of the zombies, where the pronounced limp might've made more sense!

Anyway, there is a loading screen door down in this hole. But it exits to a path blocked by a large boulder. But it connects to a different area, and even though it looks similar, it uses a different sound effect for walking, that sounds slightly closer to what the heavies use.

So a plan I've devised is to just try to record these two sounds and use them to make new sounds for SOM. So much of SOM is exactly like Shadow Tower, so it seems more befitting to use the ST sounds. I will also see if there is a different sound in the opening section of the game.

I am going to try to route the PS3 into a microphone jack on my backup computer probably later today, and see if that won't suffice for recording purposes. I rummaged around earlier for the necessary adapters and cables. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't. Thankfully its very easy to do, since ST and EN don't really have background music. Even if I try to look for the sound files on the discs, it would probably amount to more work to listen to each of the clips, even if it proved no work to gain access to them.

Verdite · « **Reply #2 on:** February 04, 2016, 10:27:22 PM »

The ST sound effects for walking & falling are great. Have you tried relistening to the TAC footstep SE? Although they might sound a bit too Holland-ish (clogs)

I know that even the earliest M&B uses multiple different footstep sounds, including different sounds for different surfaces. I know we've discussed having sounds built into map tiles before, I just thought I'd drop it off here.

If you've no joy finding a good sound I'm sure I could rummage around in my sound files. I've a recording of walking around in a castle basement which yielded a few good results that could be used as a 'general' footstep SE.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #3 on:** February 05, 2016, 12:11:37 AM »

I like the idea I had for approaching this. I want it to feel methodical. I had a good time turning my quarters into a makeshift recording studio. Although nothing fancy, just over wires.

Attached are the two distinct footsteps captured from ST by way of analog recording. This approach worked very well. If game makers need sound, I recommend drawing from these titles, because eventually they will all be systematically added to SOM's library, so it's not like you are pilfering from From Software. And in any case, they asked for it, by pilfering everything from ST to make SOM in the first place

I forgot to check out the opening space. It may well have had better sounds, but these are fine. The first is from a cave area early on in the game. The second comes from a brownstone section, that looks very cave-like. My guess is the tile set is the same as the ones near the very beginning of the game.

I may assign the second to the heavy characters, just because it uses a separate "SFX" slot, and this will avoid having a duplicate sound (even though I'm sure there must be many slots with duplicate properties) however I am leaning toward all NPCs just using the single sound for simplicity sake, for the time being. I will have to decide if it's worth editing the PRM files or not. They will require some tinkering if the NPCs that don't have any sounds are to be repaired...

But what I mean to say is, there is a need for a second sound, and there is an extension for a sound to play when you jump up into a ceiling and bang your head. So my instinct is to use the second sound for this role, and also generically for falls and maybe jumping into walls, which is something that doesn't yet play a sound, but could. I think if it does play a sound, it probably should when you jump into a wall to climb it as well.

Right now I'm just trying to claw our way up to some basic measure of functionality. From Software left SOM into a kind of hole. So right now we are trying to reach the original PlayStation's era of functionality, although graphically we are doing alright by modern standards, if not better than everyone else in many ways. But to really take advantage of that I have to complete the work to transition some to DAE, and then it will just be up to artists to unleash their wildest imagination to really make SOM shine ... combined with a liberal borrowing from From Software's halcyon days.

Quote from: Verdite on February 04, 2016, 10:27:22 PM

The ST sound effects for walking & falling are great. Have you tried relistening to the TAC footstep SE? Although they might sound a bit too Holland-ish (clogs)

I don't like discussing "TAC" on this website. Not just because I am not a fan. But also because the war strategy here is to coop (and record for posterity sake) classic artwork that is technically the property of big companies, and to make that a trend. And if that's going to happen I want to limit any such activity to the pre-PS2 era of 3D. In short, it's too soon, and until we conquer the earlier era, we haven't earned the right to go messing with classics like Ico and SOTC. The only real redeeming quality TAC has to me is it's the only other game that really bares a likeness to Ico and SOTC. These are games that I want to judge SOM by in the coming years/decades. Plus I want to erase TAC from the history of KF (my main flagship game project for SOM is a replacement for KFIV after all.)

Quote

I know that even the earliest M&B uses multiple different footstep sounds, including different sounds for different surfaces. I know we've discussed having sounds built into map tiles before, I just thought I'd drop it off here.

You can already achieve this with events more or less. But yes it would be nice, but this would have to be a very comprehensive framework. You have to consider what are the sources of the sounds, how do the surfaces modulate the sounds, how much of the sounds are really due to impact, and not just due to shape of the spaces the sound is happening in, which is something else I'd like to consider... not so much because I think it's important to be accurate, but because it would eliminate multiple variables which would otherwise have to be baked directly into the sound samples, creating a much large sound matrix, resulting in unmanageable sound suites.

EDITED: Also some sounds can just be made by the model moving regardless of the surface. Those sounds would need to be attached to the animation, but not to the model of sounds produced by inter-model impacts ... or IOW, exactly how NPC footsteps must work for the time being, since theirs cannot be event driven. We will definitely ultimately move away from this approach. We cannot setup motion-capture studios, so the best we can be are puppeteers, or what you really do when you use your controller to play a game. So, yes, I'd like NPCs and PCs to be identical, so you can create stock animations of NPCs by using your controller, or recording dialog with messaging software with face recognition (which is something I'm considering doing for SOM because it would be useful, and because I've lost faith in peoples ability to communicate with text-alone without losing their goddamn heads) and that can only be done by moving to purely environmental sound generation.

Quote

If you've no joy finding a good sound I'm sure I could rummage around in my sound files. I've a recording of walking around in a castle basement which yielded a few good results that could be used as a 'general' footstep SE.

I'm sure artists can produce better sounds than these (see attachments) but I am very hesitant when it comes to curating the original SOM art style. Although I more or less consider its style to be photo-realistic, and I expect it to slowly evolve in that direction. But I wonder if the standard definition models need be so, and if they cannot play a double role of offering a secondary art style if you want to limit the game to only low LOD (so that models which would normally only be visible from a vast distance would be approachable, and essentially this would be the "classic" SOM art style in the coming visual style matrix)

EDITED: I meant to say, to get these files, I just ran the PS3 into a microphone jack, and recorded with Window's Sound Recorder, which is just one of the programs around MS Paint and the Calculator section of the Start menu. I am sure further processing will be required to eliminate static and clip the sounds, and probably the actual NPC files will have to be timed for walking, and may have to have two steps per clip, I guess I will find out. But I am happy with the initial capture process.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #4 on:** February 05, 2016, 05:40:11 AM »

Small Update:

It might be interesting to try to emulate ST. Or maybe that's best left to ST mode. But anyway, I had some difficulty trying to cleanup/clip these recordings. But in the meantime I looked at the monsters' walking sound effects.

Oddly the most NPC like monsters exhibited the same asymmetry. I don't understand it. The swordsman/woman seem to have unique sounds, but I am uncertain.

But there's one exception. The Talos monster. He looks like a person, and oddly has the most generic stepping sound, and it's more like a stepping motion than ST's sound, and of all the people walking sound effects, other than the heavies, he's the only one that is not asymmetric.

So now, just under the circumstances, this one ray of hope, I want to consider using this sound effect. I think it will work fine for all of problem NPCs (including monsters) although I have reservations about it working for the PC's variable movement, since it is complex, unlike ST's or EN's sounds. But it seems like a good place to start.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #5 on:** February 05, 2016, 06:48:50 AM »

Thanks to the "Data Space" in this website with a cross-referenced database of SOM's files and 3D model previews, and the "Enemy PRF Editor" made by "JDO" of long ago, I was easily able to locate the Talos' sound file. It would otherwise be very difficult, because AFAIK the game player just loads all available SND files at the beginning, but I could be mistaken.

Anyway, it's interesting to try the following:

Code: [Select]

[Sample]

footstep_identifier=30

I thought I put documentation for these extensions in the wiki, but it doesn't seem like it. There's nothing there anyway.

30 is the SND identifier.

I don't know if this will work or not. The sound is just one sound, and the Talos plays it twice apparently for each step in its animation.

For the PC the sound plays when the foot touches down. This is too late it seems, even though it always seemed to work okay with the menu beeps. I guess I must have SomEx analyze the sound file, and assume the middle of its playtime is when the foot touches down. Maybe that's a bad assumption, but it's sure to be closer than starting at the top.

It also throws a wrench into the walking effect, since it will have to anticipate the foot touching down. One philosophy there is to just play the sound come what may, or after the sound begins playing, the step cannot be reversed at that point. I will opt for the former for now, since there are other times where locking in the step would be appropriate, and I haven't enforced that just yet either.

Anyway, it's a little spooky to hear a stepping like sound coming out of the walking effect!

Man I really wish the "Enemy PRF Editor" worked on NPCs. I also wish JDO had the good sense to publish its source code.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #6 on:** February 06, 2016, 05:07:11 AM »

EDITED: I should warn--or I just noticed--that if you try the footstep_identifier=30 experiment, the way SomEx plays the sound (like a menu beep) has the side effect of converting that sound into a non-3D sound played at full volume. So the end result is the Talos will also play the sound like that, and you can here it as long as he is visible.

I will have to find the subroutine for playing 3D sounds. I discovered this experimenting with the volume, because it would play louder than the Talos walking beside you. I don't know, my feet make loud sounds traipsing across the hardwood kitchen floor. I don't really notice it, but it becomes distracting in a video game, something about how it's just bellowing from speakers from in front of you perhaps. The arrangement does sound what it sounds like to walk though. Even though something about it doesn't quite sit right with me.

I converted the 30.SND file to a WAV file by hand earlier today. Just to be sure I understood the SND files. I determined that its length was close to real-time, and when cut in half is more than 15fps. So being so short, I thought when it played shouldn't make much of a difference. I didn't want to try to time it. So what I did is change where it plays from at the bottom of the walking effect, where the foot hits the floor so to speak, or bottoms out at least, to the point where the sine wave crosses its middle. It's only a heuristic, but it's good enough to get the sound out in front of the touchdown, so it more or less succeeds in fooling my brain.

I've also added a footstep to when you land from a jump. It's not ideal, but you expect to hear something when that occurs, so it's necessary. It can play out loudest volume after I get everything sorted out.

BTW: DirectSound cannot make sounds louder than they are. I guess that goes for the BGM also. Possibly this is standard operating procedure for computer sound files. I don't know. But it means kind of like how 3D textures have to be super bright, because they can never get any brighter under most system, the sounds are the same.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #7 on:** February 06, 2016, 06:28:47 AM »

Funny!

Looking at the swordsman/woman monsters, they actually use 30.SND, but only for the second step. The first is 31.SND. This explains the asymmetry. This is according to the user generated "Enemy PRF Editor" tool.

31.SND sounds less like a footstep. It's like a peg leg maybe. It's almost as if a better footstep sound was provided for all of these NPCs, except that the staffer who made the change didn't realize both legs had to be changed! And didn't test the models after the change...

The NPCs are not visible, but they probably use the same pattern. Although I thought these monsters sounded different from the NPCs. Probably just my imagination. This tool should use negative numbers I'm sure, where it says the pitch is "255" or something near this. That should be -1.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #8 on:** February 07, 2016, 01:46:33 AM »

At first I thought the "pitch" parts of the sound effects in the PRF files were not doing anything, as if they were a feature that was disabled in the end. I couldn't really tell a difference. But I was probably just inputting figures that were out of range.

Anyway, for safe keeping, here is how the pitch works for an input frequency of 11025, which the SND files all are implicitly, because they do not store the frequency part of the WAV file (they are raw PCM data)

Note, -1 is 255, -2 is 254, as they map to an "unsigned" byte. I said this should be represented as -1 and so on in the "Enemy PRF Editor", but actually it would be better if it presented the following menu of frequencies to choose from, disallowing invalid values.

Code: [Select]

		[0]	11025
		[1]	11943
		[2]	12862
		[3]	13781
		[4]	14700
		[5]	15618
		[6]	16537
		[7]	17456
		[8]	18375
		[9]	19293
		[10]	20212
		[11]	21131
		[12]	22050
		[13]	23887
		[14]	25725
		[15]	27562
		[16]	29400
		[17]	31237
		[18]	33075
		[19]	34912
		[20]	36750
		[21]	38587
		[22]	40425
		[23]	42262
		[24]	44100
		~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
		[-24]	2756
		[-23]	2986
		[-22]	3216
		[-21]	3445
		[-20]	3675
		[-19]	3905
		[-18]	4134
		[-17]	4364
		[-16]	4594
		[-15]	4823
		[-14]	5053
		[-13]	5283
		[-12]	5513
		[-11]	5973
		[-10]	6432
		[-9]	6891
		[-8]	7351
		[-7]	7810
		[-6]	8269
		[-5]	8729
		[-4]	9188
		[-3]	9647
		[-2]	10107
		[-1]	10566

The function does change if the frequency changes, and the SND slots do seem to store WAVEFORMATEX data, even though for the SND files they must all be equal. I think it would work fine if the table was filled out with something other than the SND files (not the frequency table above, but the actual place where the sound effects are inside the game player's memory. Which is actually dynamic memory for a change, if I am not mistaken.)

I got the 3D sounds working without much trouble. Although I noticed that the system I set up a long time ago to fix the sound limitations, doesn't let the duplicate sounds have independent frequencies. It averages them. I don't know if that's a DirectSound limitation, or if I just didn't have enough information to go on at the time, or was just lazy. I've made a note to look into it.

I don't know how far I will take this right now. I want to get the sound effects working for the PC. I may fix some of the NPCs. It would be easier to do later. I guess it's conceivably possible to do. At least for the NPCs that do not use the soft body animation style. That can be done later in the year after I get those exported to DAE.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #9 on:** February 12, 2016, 08:14:03 AM »

Update:

I've removed some (off-topic) mentions of a Windows 10 keyboard navigation bug that I noticed/wanted to address at the same time I was working on this. Today I sat down to work on it, and the bug was no longer presenting. I have no idea what that means.

I would like to do the work I'd also mentioned to add some features to SOM_MAP, but it's very tempting to call it day, and save those for later. Especially since I won't be going elbow deep into the tool's SomEx code now!

I've wrapped up work on the PC's footstep sounds. And I ended up doing a lot of other things while I was at it. So I am inclined to not get into editing the PRF files for the time being. This thread will not be closed until this job is complete. The two monsters are fairly easily edited the "PRF Editor". They are 60.PRF and 61.PRF I believe, and they need their first walking sound changed to #30, like the second.

I believe the last version of this user-generated tool is 1.6, and I was able to search for that and find this (http://www.swordofmoonlight.com/bbs/index.php?topic=533.0) link. Lookout if you just search for "Enemy PRF Editor" you're likely to get an earlier version. Organization is not the strongest suit of most anyone who's done anything like this for SOM (other than myself of course

)

I only mention these PRF files, because the NPCs don't generally require their walking sound effects, as authors rarely fool with their walking mode feature.

PS: It doesn't look like I've mentioned it yet. But I do intend to work on adding a way to tag MHM polygons with a material ID, for purposes of playing sound effects off of them, and probably other affects as well (ice can be made slippery for instance.) And so however that will work it'll also have to carry over to the MPX files, as MHM files are not of importance to the game player. I have not studied these two file formats as of yet, however I do intend to have MHM fully understood and available as a DAE target by the end of the year. The MHM data should probably be part of the DAE files that house the MSM data. MPX will be next in line--its priority not being as high as MHMs.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #10 on:** February 13, 2016, 04:16:15 PM »

Off-topic: I actually DID end up working on the SOM_MAP features I wanted to include in the imminent release. I just woke up feeling like there wasn't enough on the plate to even call it a micro-release. Briefly I suggested I'd do otherwise in the previous post.

I nearly drove myself to the brink of madness too. The drag detection support (to replace Window's DragDetect API; with something that supports the right mouse button and a specifiable timeout period) had poor response times with the obvious approach that made right-clicking tiles to turn them unacceptably clunky/hit-and-miss. And once I got into dragging the map with the right mouse button (as with the other visual editors) I nearly lost my mind, as I've come to suspect that the scrollbars are using the size of the font instead of the 20x20 icon size for scroll units. It took me an entire afternoon to wrestle against this thinking I was doing it all wrong, and then to convince myself otherwise/determine by trial and error the closest common factor of the two.

I am going to write up a blog post. This is just good news until I can get everything in order, and I'd mentioned this here already. It's very disorderly but in a weird way it's more so than the alternatives

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Holey Moley

Holey Moley says,

Holey Moley

Holey Moley says,

Verdite

Verdite says,

Holey Moley

Holey Moley says,

Holey Moley

Holey Moley says,

Holey Moley

Holey Moley says,

Holey Moley

Holey Moley says,

Holey Moley

Holey Moley says,

Holey Moley

Holey Moley says,

Holey Moley

Holey Moley says,

Holey Moley

Holey Moley says,

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Sword of Moonlight| Archive (pre 2023)| Projects, demos, and games Information| Walking animations and sound defects

Author Topic: Walking animations and sound defects (Read 17017 times)

Sword of Moonlight|

Archive (pre 2023)|

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Walking animations and sound defects