Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
1. Baseline sounds in the world environment relative to your build's location (e.g., seaside or mountains).
2. Score or theme that sets underlying tone (e.g., horror, peace, loneliness, etc.).
3. General ambiance of your location, such as sounds of a marketplace, factory, or ield.
4. Prop sounds, proximity activated as you pass through the environment, such as doors, a buzzing
neon sign overhead, automated butler robots, and the like.
5. Sounds that are touch or voice/chat activated, perhaps part of a game you are playing inworld or part
of the functioning of the space (e.g., magic doors, supersecret hideout entrances).
This list excludes voice chat and sound-generating devices an avatar may be wearing because those are
transient events in your environment. While they are important elements, these sounds may not be part of
every visitor's experience all the time, so they can be put aside for the moment while you build the environ-
mental soundscape. Just bear in mind that if you need to allow for focus on speciic sound emitters, the rest
of your environmental sound should be made more subtle and localized to smaller areas. As you start to
plan the soundscape for your next project, take the time to create a list of all the sounds you want to utilize.
There are just a few more things to consider when you set out to make your soundscape, and these are
important factors about the volume of the sound you will bring into a virtual world. The volume of your
sound is deined by a range of 0.1 to 1.0 with the sound scripts in Second Life and OpenSim. This is per-
fectly adequate if you are hearing the sound when your camera is in mouse-look and you are standing near
the emitter. However, try to remember that most visitors will just trundle along with their camera loating
above and behind their head. This will affect your soundscape design, and you will have to compensate
for it by moving your sound emitters up to where most of the cameras are or tell the visitors to hear sound
from their avatar location. This setting can be changed in the Avatar/Preferences/Sound & Media/Voice
settings menu.
One method for getting the right amount of sound to the avatar's camera/audio listener is to have the
emitter installed in a small prim or object. That way, to “see” it, they have to move the camera or avatar close,
and by doing so, they bring the listener into the appropriate range for hearing the sound effects made by
that object of interest. Another method is to set up a series of sound emitters, both high and low, at different
volumes to reach the audio listener no matter where the visitor has the camera set. The best approach is to
consider these methods, put a preliminary soundscape in place, and do a test walk through with your camera
in many positions. From that walk, you can start to eliminate any extra sound emitters that have proved
superluous and add to the work the server has to do.
Another issue that pops up is a sound ile that plays too faintly for the virtual world, even if you have
it set to full volume in the scripting. If that is the issue, take a look at the clip in your sound editor and try
“normalizing” the sound to bring the waveform up to 100%. You should also look at the bit rate of the sound
encoding and use the lowest possible setting that gives you clear and undistorted playback in the virtual
world. A setting of 64 kbps (kilobits per second) will work ine for speech and simple sounds and will create
much less lag in the server than a ile uploaded at 128 kbps [7]. Finally, make sure that, as you create, install,
and test your soundscape, your headphones and the sound settings on your viewer are set to the default
settings for your initial test walk so you can set a “baseline” for the audio experience. This will help you
decide how you should ramp up the sound as the visitors explore the region and what visible devices you may
need to add, such as signs and note cards to clue them in to changing their audio settings for the maximal
experience in your build.
Although not much data are available, the client viewers seem to hit the top limit at 32 simultaneous sound
emitters in any region. It is also wise to avoid putting too many looping sources close together; use only one
or two within the range of hearing if possible.
