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[Feature Request] SNDINFO (Ambient Sound) Support

Open JohnMason1986 opened this issue 5 months ago • 3 comments

Main goal of this feature request is to untie hands of mappers that is sticking with such map formats like Boom and/or MBF21 by letting them to use ambient sounds.

There were an idea of ability to create actors that can represent ambient sounds and chosen tech was MBF21. Sadly, but this idea wasn't so successfull, since long ambient sounds became problematic to use. In short terms, you have two options:

  1. To use one long sound that can be abrupted by pausing the game neither by walking too far away from actor. And after that your only option is to wait enough tics to pass, so actor can go to its "Loop" pointer.
  2. To use several sounds, where each of them must be ~= 1 second long (equivalent of 35 tics in "Doom"). With this each game's second that passed, every next part of the sound can be heard whenever player gonna pause the game or walk too far away.

Even with 2nd option there is a loud'n'annoying popping sound that can be clearly heard every second, so this option still can't be used freely and w/o any additional problems. Here (Streamable) you can see this option in action. I can recommend to use a headphones to understand the problem.

After some research I found out that in the past there were some discussions about implementing a support of SNDINFO tech, so even on Boom/MBF21 maps mappers can use it to define a true ambient sounds easily and w/o any problems.

This feature were implemented in "DSDA-Doom" V0.27.0 and documentation about it can be found here (GitHub).

On the closing note I can add that hearing is very powerful human's sense among vision. Sure, map in videogame can have astonishing visual design, but ambient sounds is those working gnomes who makes it feeling alive. I am in love with mapping, but I am in more bigger love with sounding ambience as phenomenon itself. With this feature, many maps can become more convincing, since ambient sounds themselves are always surrounds us in real world. Also it is another important step to show off that even Boom/MBF21 maps can have such neat things inside.

P.S.: Adding showcase video from "Streamable" as separate file just in case... https://github.com/fabiangreffrath/woof/assets/156240806/6dc185b8-3ee5-4a6c-94e5-7050bb222c60

JohnMason1986 avatar Jan 10 '24 20:01 JohnMason1986