Music


[Music] Reports of Ryzom Forge's meetings (Music group)]

17th of august 2015

1 Creation of a Music Group Ryzom forge

We are going to make a Musical Project. For this we will first create Ryzom Forge Music Group. 
The Music Team will born in the future, we are still working on it with the Musical Lore. 
The manager of this Music Group will be Gaueko.
The common places for communicaton will be IRC, #ryzomforge or the specific channel #ryzommusic, the sub-forum that will be created, and of course Ryzom Forge Wiki.

General objectives
The role of both, the Team and the Group, will be to create the music of Ryzom and the ambiental sounf of the game itslef. The difference betwen them will be that the Team will take care of the Musical Lore (Scores, faction music, lyrics etc) and the RF group will create the ambiental music and the ambiental sounds of the game (I will explain more in few).

Ryzom Forge Music Group objectives
We have two main goals: Creation of background music and atmospheric sounds. The background music will be used for the missions and rites. This means we will create music to give a quiet atmosphere, frightening one, joyfull one etc.
And the atmospheric sounds are the objects do when we interact with them. 
Footsteps, a crate that is opened or broken, the wind, the breeze, the sound of the insects, maybe the sound of an animal that chase us... In the end, give to the background a more realistic sound experience, even if the one we have is good one, but we can improve it!!
For this, we will need to create music and sound files that later we will implement in game. We still don´t have a place to storage them but as soon as we have a place for it it will be told. The files we create must be created under CC-BY-SA license.

Q: Will it be possible to activate/deactivate the music according to ones prefereces, while still having the sounds of the nature? Managing music and sounds separately in the client ?
A: Dev should answer to you Zatalyz, but I guess it could be possible. Of course, musicians will need to co-work with developers too.
A of YannK: I'll speak about it later for the graphic assets, but a deposit with version management (under mercurial) for the sounds can be considered really quickly. 

Q: How to link these music and sounds to a place, an object, an action... from a dev point of view?
A of YannK:
First, I want to mention that my knowledge is very empiric regarding sounds in RC, I haven't had much occasion to make a lot of tests.
That being said, from what I know, there are two kinds of usages for sounds: through primitives and through datasheets. Till there it's all very normal.
The datasheet part is linked to an animation: the sound (.sound file) is linked to the application of an animation (.anim file), which tells it how it should appear, with which gradation, at which time, etc.
This .anim file itself is linked to a visible object in the 3D part of the client, a .creature.
Don't be mistaken by the .anim or creature name. It can be an event where nothing is moving or an object which isn't a creature :) For example the tower near Chiang on Silan is a .creature.
But genereally speaking, it lets you know when a sound should be emitted in order to be synchronised with what the player is seing: so ensure that the box creaks when opening it, the engine can make it with no problem at all.
He sounds created when walking depend on the kind of ground if I'm well remembered, so except if creating a new map with new environmental textures, it will probably be difficult to change the footsteps, because it would imply to change the sound of all the places where the textures is used (to be checked).
You've understood it, skills of the characters call for .anim animations, which themselves start .sound, so it is possible to link a sound to a character animation easily. The difficulty is to create new kinds of animation, because it requires to change the code on BOTH client and server sides.
The other way to manage a sound is through primitives: on the map you can place environment sounds, sometimes on very small places, but there again lots of set-ups since we call actually datasheets which themselves give lots of set-ups to the original .wav.
This sounds may change automacially (day/night cycle for example or depending on the weather) or they can be linked to external triggers, either them being environmental or related to a mission. Everything can be set-up (but it's sensitive and will require lots of tweaks).
All of this to tell you that the system allows a lot of things (which explains the wealth of what already exists :) ) but there's a very big problem:  It seems there's no .wav nor .sound source file anywhere (and more or less all datasheets are linked to sounds). Which explains why nothing was released when the graphical assets have been.
So it's not possible for example to change the existing particle systems (because they often call for .sound), nor change anything already existing in term of sound background. Any change will have to be a re-creation from scratch, including the base .wav files.
We'll have also to consider the question of creating datasheets linked to sounds, knowing that we have no complex example to understand their exact way of working. So documenting it will be long (documentation of the datasheets on which I'm working).

Call for musicians is launched!

---

Tamarea
Ryzom Team Manager
(FR / EN / ES)

tamarea@ryzom.com
Show topic
Last visit Thursday, 28 March 12:33:58 UTC
P_:

powered by ryzom-api