Ambience and Background Music Overhaul

[Atermonera]

Brief description of the issue

The current implementation of "ambience", a list of soundbytes to play to players when they enter an area, has recently been tweaked to loop periodically. Some sounds aren't intended to loop, others are more appropriately classified as background music, and the system in general is jarring for some players and in some situations. This is a feature request/proposal to overhaul the system by which ambience and background music are played to players into a few distinct categories.

Proposal

We keep the area-based looping sound ambience, but actually restrict to to ambient sounds, as described below. The clatter of something falling over somewhere else in maintenance every now and again is ambient, but SpaceJam is not particularly ambient. We modify the area-based sound as it was implemented prior to the looping system, whereby when you enter an area, a particular soundbyte plays once. This is most appropriate for areas like the chapel, whose current "ambience" is more intended as a one-off sting. We add a new system of landmarks that periodically pulse background music to any players in view. Processing can be accomplished by a new subsystem, or by timers. The scheduling should allow for some variability in delay between playings. Playing a sound (And sound selection, if multiple are available) will ideally be handled by a proc separate to the scheduling, such that an admin can trigger the playing independently via VV/Proccall. Creative placement of these landmarks should allow for good coverage of target areas for particular background music pieces (Like the observatory in maint behind cargo). In theory, the landmarks could also check for some conditions where playing sounds wouldn't be appropriate (Like a breach). The system might even provide more immersion by sending everyone in sight the same swoops or droops of music at much more approximately the same time?

The Issue in Essay Form

I will give my hot take on all these ambience changes, after refining them a bit in teamspeak (And apologize for another essay, which this may well become, depending on how coherent my train of thought is): There's a difference between ambience and background music. BGM provides a much more dynamic atmosphere, but can't be so complex that it's distracting from the visual information (And given our graphical style, imo that's kinda limiting, but onions may vary), and should accent the themes provided by the visual design of, and actions performed within, an area. Adding a ton of foreboding bgm to maintenance is all well and good, but some parts of maintenance, or doing some things in maintenance (Like the location with two chairs and bottle of vodka by a window behind cargo, or the act of repairing a breach) really don't warrant that sort of theme at all, and it can actual distract from the intended atmosphere those places/actions provide. And since area code is so wonderful, it's even harder to paint ambience in maint, because you have to make such sweeping strokes, covering both that little observation deck, and such places as the underground boxing room, where a "foreboding" bgm is much more fitting. With departments it's a bit simpler, because they tend to have the same overall themes going on most of the time, but break rooms probably sound different than the brig, surgery, robotics, or the engine room. In other games, you'll often have bgm that's specific to an area, and battle music that's separate and evokes a particular contrast with the more mellow normal bgm.[...]

Ambience, on the other hand, provides a very small amount of white noise to make an area seem less empty, because total silence is itself a particular ambience. The whoosh of wind on the plains, the hum of atmos vents (which admittedly may be too loud for some, might be possible to make an ambience volume setting/pref?), the whirr of the engine room (Ok I'm an engineering player I can't really think of similar sounds distinctive to other departments easily). Those give a base feel for where you are, but do so very quietly, very unintrusively. A particular ambience shouldn't really detract from the feel of an environment regardless of what you're doing in it.[...]

Item usage kinda has both ambience and bgm, insofar as I'm using these terms, but they're a bit fuzzier. The sound of wrenching down a machine is definitely more towards bgm, because it's an active thing that you're doing, but the clang of dropping your wrench tends a bit more towards ambience, (perhaps in part because I've gone without it for so long) because it's quieter, but its presence reinforces the fact that that's an action that I'm taking. And the recent addition of a lot of item-usage sounds (Like dropped-item sounds) has absolutely done wonders for the immersion into the game that's available. In short, I do really appreciate all the work folks've been doing to add more sounds to the game, but I think in the zeal, particularly with the looping ambience PR, the appropriateness of various sounds has come into question. As someone noted, the chapel has a sound that's really only appropriate when first you go in, to repeat it while you're in there is jarring. So I think it's important to state that not just the nature of the sounds (foreboding, mysterious, etc), but also the frequency with which they need to be played should be discussed, and perhaps a system implemented whereby that can be controlled per-sound (I think Neerti mentioned tg might have a system for that?). I remember the original implementation of footsteps, where it was way too frequent, and much like the initial filth-persistence change, it was completely overboard of what was actually appropriate or fitting for the setting and the game, and was jarring as a result (And then promptly reduced in volume/frequency). And quite similarly, I've found myself muting the ambience on my test servers because it plays a single sound loop every minute or so, and in my tendency to forget about such servers and leave them up for a while, that's rather jarring to hear in the background while I'm doing other stuff.

;tldr please keep working on this stuff but maybe consider the actual physical, mapped-in places, and what actions occur in those places, and how often a particular sound can be played before you get annoyed with it, to help refine the levels of immersion that each sound can introduce.