This Week In Veloren 82

This week, we had the 0.8 intro meeting. We hear from @Ellinia about the process being used to create sound effects for the game.

- AngelOnFira, TWiV Editor

Contributor Work

Thanks to this week's contributors, @zesterer, @xMAC94x, @Pfau, @james, @imbris, @sovareign, @Songtronix, @Sam, @rdbaker, @AngelOnFira, @Sharp, @Spyros, @T-Dark0, and @marius!

@Felixader has been working on lore for cities, cultures, and races. New colours were merged in this week, with help from @zesterer and @Pfau. @Pfau also rebalanced the behaviour of monsters, improved loot tables, and made lots of small UI and UX fixes.

@Capucho was working on wgpu a bit, however there were some compiler blockers preventing continued work.

0.8 Intro Meeting

This weekend, we held a 0.8 intro meeting. This included the normal discussions of what we want to see for the version, summed up into a "definition of 0.8". We also examined what we achieved since 0.7, and what we missed out on.

Completed

• LoD!
• Networking?
• More advanced UI
• Combat feedback
• Particle systems
• SFX
• Animations

Didn’t do

• Quests
• Interactions in settlements
• Story

Definition of 0.8

As a player, I want more interactions with settlements and NPCs. I want to be able to see a mountain off in the distance and be told to go there and complete a task. I want to feel like I’m a part of the world around me, and making a difference.

While in combat, I want to feel like I synergize with the players around me. I want to team up, and be able to use my unique skills to be a valuable member of the team. I want to be more immersed in what I hear and see.

Budget

We also examined what a budget for Veloren might look like. Since we are receiving donations on open collective, we want to come up with a healthy pipeline making use of the funds, and transparently tracking them. The primary item we want to secure is infrastructure. We will be getting a server, likely from Hetzner, that will allow us to run CI, the game server, as well as other services we use. You can see the budget here

Audio with @Ellinia

The Audio Team has been busy filling Veloren with many of the SFX that help make a game feel immersive and provide the player with tactical feedback while exploring. When done right, this kind of work should typically go largely unnoticed or taken for granted (that means we have done our job!). But we thought it would be fun to peel back the curtain a bit on some of Veloren's newest sounds.

@Eden and I have been gathering Foley recordings in a DIY isolation booth constructed with rockwool insulation absorption panels and utilizing an Audio-Technica AT-2035 condenser microphone. We've done plenty of mixing and synthesizing plugins in FL Studio as well. SFX that are on their way into Veloren are:

• new level up sound
• swinging and slashing sounds for the sword, axe, hammer, dagger, shield, and staff
• projectile sounds for the bow and a fire shot for the staff
• experience gained sounds

Further down the timeline are:

• snow footsteps
• swimming/splashing
• climbing
• dive roll

When approaching the design of a sound, I often will get right into Veloren and just think about it from a player's perspective. Sometimes it's easy as swinging a toy sword in front of a microphone (and adding a knife scrape to it in post). Other times I have to get a little more creative. For example, the upcoming roll SFX I have been working on has been a trial of rolling myself, a pile of clothing wrapped around a hammer, and various other items in an attempt to get a satisfying combination of body 'thunk' and armor/clothing rustling as the character hits and rolls on the surface.

A lot of sound effect design for me is thinking about how something sounds within the physics of real-world acoustics. For example, when planning a sound for an action that carries the player character or another in-world entity away from a starting position (like the roll), you have to think about how higher and lower frequencies behave. Lower frequencies are stretched out longer than higher frequencies. Think about hearing an annoying neighbor's subwoofer. The wall or the space between you and their home/apartment is often enough to deaden those higher and mid-range frequencies, but the low-end makes its way to you still. So when designing something like the roll effect, I apply a low-pass filter to automatically begin to muffle some of the higher frequencies of the sound. This adds to the perception of movement within the sound.