Audio Engine?

OrchestralMonkey

Are there any plans for a more robust audio engine? As a composer I find the current option crippling, unless I'm missing something (if that is the case then please inform me).

--Lee

SlickZero

What do you find crippling, specifically?

rhinokey

well i don't know if its what he's talking about, but for my game theres several things i would have liked to be able to do, speed music up over time, dynamically change tracks to music (say when a monster comes on the scene have a guitar track that starts up in the music, not just a sound clip but part of the music, in tempo. maybe make the music start out like a nice simple melody, but the longer you survive without getting hit it gets more intense, like some drums start guitars, and it slowly builds up until you have a rocking backing track. if you get hit some of the music bits drop out.

Fraggs

I can agree with this guy to a certain degree. It would be nice if we could speed up or slow down the music without including six different versions of the same song. I would love that feature personally.

rhinokey

even with different versions theres no way to make the different ones seamlessly switch, maybe something could be hacked together with an elaborate timer system, but whew.

OrchestralMonkey

Just having the ability to cross-fade two stems would be great. It's a pretty basic function that is missing from GS.

lycettebros

There are many basic functions for audio not in GS. I think it will take many many releases to get any significant progress on this. We still are in the primitive days.

floydianspiral

Another thing that would take away a lot of rules would be to allow people to type the file name of sound effects or music tracks into tables to cue sounds. Right now if we want to have dynamic or randomized sounds we have to have a rule: if var = 1: play sound x; rule: if var = 2: play sound y, etc. They have an expression editor for volume and pitch, why can't the actual file name (drop down menu) be an expression editor that let's us TYPE IN strings as pointers to our files?

lukejr

I too would like a better sound engine. Trying to do a random sound clip is painful. I want to use a Table list and randomly pick them, but not possible.

OrchestralMonkey

Being able to use Wwise or Fmod would be the ideal.

gyroscope

It sure will be good when the audio side of GSC has many more facilities.... (as well as text)... fingers crossed they'll both improve one day...

Just having the ability to cross-fade two stems would be great. It's a pretty basic function that is missing from GS.

I don't know what you mean by stems; but cross-fading two sounds (but not two music tracks) is possible in GSC already... I guess you could take the chance of saving music files as sounds...

OrchestralMonkey

Gyroscope,

"Stems" are essentially individual music tracks. They can either be solo or multi-instrumental in composition. In my original post I was talking about the ability to cross-fade from say an Ambient state to a Battle state. Another example would be fading in one track on-top of another. This would require both music files to be playing at the same time, but with one at 0db. Example: two music tracks, one low intensity one higher intensity, that when combined create the full musical track. The higher intensity stem needs to be able to fade-in and out over the low intensity stem at any time depending on what the current game-state calls for.

I hope that clears that up (and doesn't confuse you more)

--Lee

gyroscope

@pianoomann88

Hi Lee, thank you for the explanation; I understand what stems are now. :-)

As I mentioned, you can cross-fade two sounds in GSC (although not two music files unfortunately). But if you bring in your music files as aiff or wav, you can save them as sounds (despite them being over 30 seconds long). Now I know it's advised (sort of) not to do this, but I'm wondering if you'd hear much loss of quality, i.e mp4 versus ogg? I really don't know that one; hopefully someone else can shed some light there.

But if you did want to bring in your music and save them as Sounds in GSC in this case, I'd explain how to cross-fade them if you like.

OrchestralMonkey

gyroscope,

Can you explain why it's allowed for sounds and not for music files (if you know)?

floydianspiral

From my understanding it's because it takes a lot of memory up right now to even play 1 music file, I feel as you do @OrchestralMonkey that GS is definitely missing out on a huge crowd of musical app creators if they made even just *simple* tweaks to the music system like true crossfading between music tracks and allowing a table cell to act as a pointer for the play sound behavior, thus allowing us to generate random sounds without creating tons of rules. Let's keep this audio discussion going in hopes that GS hears us!