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Walking animations and sound defects

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Holey Moley:
I've been restless of late. I am tired of working on the new 3D model support related software, and am looking for something else to do on the side.

I was just going to make this thread in the main forum as usual, but since Verdite made that thread about working on the tile defects, I thought that this is more or less in the same arena, so I am posting it in this forum as a renovation project.


I'll be blunt. Everyone of SOM's footstep sound effects for NPCs is unusable. I haven't looked into the monsters yet. Half the NPCs don't even having footstep sounds! And many of them have walking animations that teleport in the middle of the step.

This is just another one of those corners of SOM that if it wasn't part of the included KF remake, no one at From Software even looked at it before shipping the final product. After all, you must put the NPCs in walking mode to access these features.


The standard footstep sounds sound almost acceptable, except that they are all asymmetric. It's not clear if they are supposed to be heel-toe sounds, except the heel is synced with one footfall and the toe the other, or if the sound was originally meant for a character with a pronounced limp. It's strange if you think about it.

The heavy characters have a plodding sound that is symmetric, but it doesn't really sound like footsteps at all.


This really isn't a software initiative, although I'd like the PC to have a footstep sound of their own. That is after all why today I made a map with a series of chambers occupied by walking NPCs. This is a larger issue.



1) fixing the animations will only be practical after I can complete my export/import to DAE work sometime later this year. This establishes a time frame for the completion of this initiative.

2) new footstep sounds are required. Where will they come from? I'd prefer to try to mine Shadow Tower or Echo Night or whatever is available from From Software's library before resorting to sounds completely unrelated to Sword of Moonlight. But how to do that? I don't know. Does anyone have experience in this? It would be sufficient to just isolate the sound in the game and record them...

Anyway, I am not uncomfortable with familiarizing myself with the game discs themselves, it just seems like a lot of trouble for a relatively straightforward task at this time. Eventually the sounds on the King's Field 2 disc will have to all be extracted to port KF2 to SOM, but maybe there is a simpler way to skate by for this comparatively minor initiative. I don't have a hard copy of Echo Night. I do know it has a sophisticated footstep sound suite. I will have to fire up ST to see what it is like.

To be blunt this is perhaps the most neglected corner of Sword of Moonlight. Some of the NPCs/monsters may be missing sounds across the board. Death cries may be missing for NPCs also, since that's another dark corner.

Holey Moley:
Last night before finishing up a movie on Netflix, while the PlayStation was on, I fired up Shadow Tower and Echo Night.

Almost all of Echo Night's walking sounds are very carpet-like, even over wood floors. I know it has some clanging sounds on metal sections.

I have a Shadow Tower game in the early area, stuck down in a hole. I explored a little bit, and actually collected lots of items and equipment during the process. It has a walking effect which is also quite muffled. It sounds closer to the sound used by SOM's heavy NPCs, than the standard one ... which I am beginning to think maybe it was taken from one of the zombies, where the pronounced limp might've made more sense!

Anyway, there is a loading screen door down in this hole. But it exits to a path blocked by a large boulder. But it connects to a different area, and even though it looks similar, it uses a different sound effect for walking, that sounds slightly closer to what the heavies use.


So a plan I've devised is to just try to record these two sounds and use them to make new sounds for SOM. So much of SOM is exactly like Shadow Tower, so it seems more befitting to use the ST sounds. I will also see if there is a different sound in the opening section of the game.

I am going to try to route the PS3 into a microphone jack on my backup computer probably later today, and see if that won't suffice for recording purposes. I rummaged around earlier for the necessary adapters and cables. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't. Thankfully its very easy to do, since ST and EN don't really have background music. Even if I try to look for the sound files on the discs, it would probably amount to more work to listen to each of the clips, even if it proved no work to gain access to them.

Verdite:
The ST sound effects for walking & falling are great. Have you tried relistening to the TAC footstep SE? Although they might sound a bit too Holland-ish (clogs)

I know that even the earliest M&B uses multiple different footstep sounds, including different sounds for different surfaces. I know we've discussed having sounds built into map tiles before, I just thought I'd drop it off here.

If you've no joy finding a good sound I'm sure I could rummage around in my sound files. I've a recording of walking around in a castle basement which yielded a few good results that could be used as a 'general' footstep SE.

Holey Moley:
I like the idea I had for approaching this. I want it to feel methodical. I had a good time turning my quarters into a makeshift recording studio. Although nothing fancy, just over wires.

Attached are the two distinct footsteps captured from ST by way of analog recording. This approach worked very well. If game makers need sound, I recommend drawing from these titles, because eventually they will all be systematically added to SOM's library, so it's not like you are pilfering from From Software. And in any case, they asked for it, by pilfering everything from ST to make SOM in the first place :yarr:


I forgot to check out the opening space. It may well have had better sounds, but these are fine. The first is from a cave area early on in the game. The second comes from a brownstone section, that looks very cave-like. My guess is the tile set is the same as the ones near the very beginning of the game.

I may assign the second to the heavy characters, just because it uses a separate "SFX" slot, and this will avoid having a duplicate sound (even though I'm sure there must be many slots with duplicate properties) however I am leaning toward all NPCs just using the single sound for simplicity sake, for the time being. I will have to decide if it's worth editing the PRM files or not. They will require some tinkering if the NPCs that don't have any sounds are to be repaired...

But what I mean to say is, there is a need for a second sound, and there is an extension for a sound to play when you jump up into a ceiling and bang your head. So my instinct is to use the second sound for this role, and also generically for falls and maybe jumping into walls, which is something that doesn't yet play a sound, but could. I think if it does play a sound, it probably should when you jump into a wall to climb it as well.

Right now I'm just trying to claw our way up to some basic measure of functionality. From Software left SOM into a kind of hole. So right now we are trying to reach the original PlayStation's era of functionality, although graphically we are doing alright by modern standards, if not better than everyone else in many ways. But to really take advantage of that I have to complete the work to transition some to DAE, and then it will just be up to artists to unleash their wildest imagination to really make SOM shine ... combined with a liberal borrowing from From Software's halcyon days.


--- Quote from: Verdite on February 04, 2016, 10:27:22 PM ---The ST sound effects for walking & falling are great. Have you tried relistening to the TAC footstep SE? Although they might sound a bit too Holland-ish (clogs)
--- End quote ---

I don't like discussing "TAC" on this website. Not just because I am not a fan. But also because the war strategy here is to coop (and record for posterity sake) classic artwork that is technically the property of big companies, and to make that a trend. And if that's going to happen I want to limit any such activity to the pre-PS2 era of 3D. In short, it's too soon, and until we conquer the earlier era, we haven't earned the right to go messing with classics like Ico and SOTC. The only real redeeming quality TAC has to me is it's the only other game that really bares a likeness to Ico and SOTC. These are games that I want to judge SOM by in the coming years/decades. Plus I want to erase TAC from the history of KF (my main flagship game project for SOM is a replacement for KFIV after all.)



--- Quote ---I know that even the earliest M&B uses multiple different footstep sounds, including different sounds for different surfaces. I know we've discussed having sounds built into map tiles before, I just thought I'd drop it off here.
--- End quote ---

You can already achieve this with events more or less. But yes it would be nice, but this would have to be a very comprehensive framework. You have to consider what are the sources of the sounds, how do the surfaces modulate the sounds, how much of the sounds are really due to impact, and not just due to shape of the spaces the sound is happening in, which is something else I'd like to consider... not so much because I think it's important to be accurate, but because it would eliminate multiple variables which would otherwise have to be baked directly into the sound samples, creating a much large sound matrix, resulting in unmanageable sound suites.

EDITED: Also some sounds can just be made by the model moving regardless of the surface. Those sounds would need to be attached to the animation, but not to the model of sounds produced by inter-model impacts ... or IOW, exactly how NPC footsteps must work for the time being, since theirs cannot be event driven. We will definitely ultimately move away from this approach. We cannot setup motion-capture studios, so the best we can be are puppeteers, or what you really do when you use your controller to play a game. So, yes, I'd like NPCs and PCs to be identical, so you can create stock animations of NPCs by using your controller, or recording dialog with messaging software with face recognition (which is something I'm considering doing for SOM because it would be useful, and because I've lost faith in peoples ability to communicate with text-alone without losing their goddamn heads) and that can only be done by moving to purely environmental sound generation.


--- Quote ---If you've no joy finding a good sound I'm sure I could rummage around in my sound files. I've a recording of walking around in a castle basement which yielded a few good results that could be used as a 'general' footstep SE.
--- End quote ---

I'm sure artists can produce better sounds than these (see attachments) but I am very hesitant when it comes to curating the original SOM art style. Although I more or less consider its style to be photo-realistic, and I expect it to slowly evolve in that direction. But I wonder if the standard definition models need be so, and if they cannot play a double role of offering a secondary art style if you want to limit the game to only low LOD (so that models which would normally only be visible from a vast distance would be approachable, and essentially this would be the "classic" SOM art style in the coming visual style matrix)


EDITED: I meant to say, to get these files, I just ran the PS3 into a microphone jack, and recorded with Window's Sound Recorder, which is just one of the programs around MS Paint and the Calculator section of the Start menu. I am sure further processing will be required to eliminate static and clip the sounds, and probably the actual NPC files will have to be timed for walking, and may have to have two steps per clip, I guess I will find out. But I am happy with the initial capture process.

Holey Moley:
Small Update:

It might be interesting to try to emulate ST. Or maybe that's best left to ST mode. But anyway, I had some difficulty trying to cleanup/clip these recordings. But in the meantime I looked at the monsters' walking sound effects.


Oddly the most NPC like monsters exhibited the same asymmetry. I don't understand it. The swordsman/woman seem to have unique sounds, but I am uncertain.


But there's one exception. The Talos monster. He looks like a person, and oddly has the most generic stepping sound, and it's more like a stepping motion than ST's sound, and of all the people walking sound effects, other than the heavies, he's the only one that is not asymmetric.

So now, just under the circumstances, this one ray of hope, I want to consider using this sound effect. I think it will work fine for all of problem NPCs (including monsters) although I have reservations about it working for the PC's variable movement, since it is complex, unlike ST's or EN's sounds. But it seems like a good place to start.

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