New Angband Sound Collection

[Dubtrain]

Hey all. First time poster, long time 'bander.

Started on Rogue & Hack in the early '80s. Playing Angband & NPPAngband since about 2000.

Lots of newsgroup & forum lurking, following the gameplay and ongoing maintenance & development discussions with great interest. You all rock.

I've been working for a while on an entirely new sound collection for Angband & NPPAngband. Good, hi-quality, non-copyrighted original sounds, built by hand in my very own studio. Free for use & redistribution, under a Creative Commons license.

Inspired by Takkaria's wrangling of the whole Angband Vanilla project (and the work of everyone else, too), I've finally completed this moderately large project.

Please download the sound pack (18 megs) from my site at:

www.Dubtrain.com/angband

and let me know what you think!

- pete

[takkaria]

Hey all. First time poster, long time 'bander.

Started on Rogue & Hack in the early '80s. Playing Angband & NPPAngband since about 2000.

Lots of newsgroup & forum lurking, following the gameplay and ongoing maintenance & development discussions with great interest. You all rock.

I've been working for a while on an entirely new sound collection for Angband & NPPAngband. Good, hi-quality, non-copyrighted original sounds, built by hand in my very own studio. Free for use & redistribution, under a Creative Commons license.

Inspired by Takkaria's wrangling of the whole Angband Vanilla project (and the work of everyone else, too), I've finally completed this moderately large project.

Please download the sound pack (18 megs) from my site at:

www.Dubtrain.com/angband

and let me know what you think!

- pete

You (and the samples) are fantastic. I'd been wanting to do this for a while. Good work!

[buzzkill]

The sound level seems a little low on my laptop (in WMP, haven't tried in game yet), even with the volume cranked up.

[Magnate]

You (and the samples) are fantastic. I'd been wanting to do this for a while. Good work!

Seconded - that's a fabulous contribution. Thanks Dubtrain!

CC

[Big Al]

These are excellent! I've never really played with the sounds on before; I'll try it more now...

[Elsairon]

I did a few sounds for my personal use, but nothing of this quality. Excellent!

Thank you Dubtrain!

[Donald Jonker]

They really do add a lot to the atmosphere - the creaking doors opening and that serene bell/gong sound on going down a level. Even the ultra-purists and skeptics should give this a try. Great stuff.

PS: It's really great to finally find a sound collection that doesn't primarily rely on grainy clips from The Simpsons.

[Lebannen]

These are superb. A great range, and a good variety of sounds for some of the more common actions, so it's not repetitive. Excellent, excellent work!

I need to play more with them - my only initial request is perhaps a bit more variety for the combat sounds? However getting them to layer well for lots of hits must be very tricky Also - could we perhaps get an mp3/(other compressed version of your choice) version for those clients which support multiple sound formats? That would help lessen sizes a bit - and while I could do it from the wavs I wouldn't want to lose any of your lovely fidelity!

Really glad the mac version supports sound.cfg now or I'd be missing out, thank you very much

[Dubtrain]

Glad you all are enjoying the sound pack!

I've been working on it (on and off) for over 2 years. The protools session is unbelievable.

Close to 350 cues built (from over 500 raw effect sources), edited, cross-faded and volume levelled, then bounced with unique names for organization into the config file. I trimmed the set to about 215 files in the final collection.

The levels are all set a bit low, but they are well-balanced relative to each other, and should be at a nice audible but not in your face level with your computer volume around 60-70% max. I hate it when super-normalized sound effects yell at you.

I don't think the angband sound engine supports mp3. I tried using them, but nothing happens. If anybody smart wants to look into this, I can definitely provide mp3 versions. I experimented with lower sample and bit rates, but the results were less than stellar.

I figure if you're the kind of player who likes sounds, you'd want the sounds to be good.

Combat sounds were rough to assemble, because the patch code sort of arbitarily chooses which sound it's going to play at any given time.

For instance, if you shoot a monster with an arrow you could end up with any of the following:

The "drop" sound (arrow drops to floor), the "break" sound (arrow broke), the "shoot" sound (arrow leaves bow), the "hit" sound (arrow strikes target), the "flee" sound (a yelp as the monster flees in terror), or the "monster_dies" sound (you killed it).

I have no control over this at all. I did try to choose the combat sounds carefully so that, no matter which one you got, it would still be "in context".

If some coder wants to work on the sound patch more, I'd be more than happy to consult & contribute on the sound engineer end of things.

Thanks all for such an awesome game.

[andrewdoull]

Hey all. First time poster, long time 'bander.

Started on Rogue & Hack in the early '80s. Playing Angband & NPPAngband since about 2000.

Lots of newsgroup & forum lurking, following the gameplay and ongoing maintenance & development discussions with great interest. You all rock.

I've been working for a while on an entirely new sound collection for Angband & NPPAngband. Good, hi-quality, non-copyrighted original sounds, built by hand in my very own studio. Free for use & redistribution, under a Creative Commons license.

Inspired by Takkaria's wrangling of the whole Angband Vanilla project (and the work of everyone else, too), I've finally completed this moderately large project.

Please download the sound pack (18 megs) from my site at:

www.Dubtrain.com/angband

and let me know what you think!

- pete

This looks great. However you've released these under a non-commercial license, which make restrict the ability of people to use and distribute these with the main Angband binaries (Some linux distributions may not like a non-commercial license attribution). Are you able to rerelease these under a Creative Commons license of some kind?

Andrew

[Dubtrain]

Are you able to rerelease these under a Creative Commons license of some kind?

I can rewrite the license to whatever will allow this collection to be distributed in the same way that Angband is. I'm a little fuzzy on the exact nuances of the CC license, so I'd definitely appreciate any advice!

[Magnate]

I can rewrite the license to whatever will allow this collection to be distributed in the same way that Angband is. I'm a little fuzzy on the exact nuances of the CC license, so I'd definitely appreciate any advice!

Please, try to avoid writing your own licence if at all possible (www.gnu.org/philosophy - I can't remember which article explains why). I'm no expert on CC licences, but isn't there a stock one which will do?

CC

[Dubtrain]

I looked into the CC licenses a bit, and I think the way I worded it in the readme is the one I'd like to stick with for the time being.

The CC license is a BY-NC-SA type; BY means distribution must be accompanied by my attribution. NC (non-commercial) means nobody can sell it, which is how I'd like to keep it for now. SA means share-alike, which means if you make a derivative work, it must be released under these same terms.

The non-commercial part seems pretty crucial - the collection could easily be bundled with the game and sold without this restriction. Not cool man.

I've added the appropriate CC badge to the website.

[azfalt]

Just wanted to say the sounds are awesome - especially the atmospheric effects.

Same critique as some others about combat - more variety would be nice (especially human vs non-human), though I can see how that's also a limitation of the sound patch.

Are there different sounds for elemental breath attacks?

[Dubtrain]

Are there different sounds for elemental breath attacks?

OMG no - there are like 20 or so separate breath attack tags, and it was hard enough finding just one effect that sounded like a decent breath attack to begin with.

Anyone who wants to take a crack at differentiating between a nether breath and a chaos breath is welcome to it.

Re the combat sounds, there is a different sound for each of about 24 monster attack types (with one notable exception: the common "bite" event has 13 sounds instead of one), and unique sounds for each of the 6 levels of player hits.

Dying is not differentiated, though, so I've got about 5 death sounds defined for the single "monster is killed" event. More would be great - that's definitely going on the list for the next update.

You can look at the config file to see what kinds of events are tagged, if you are curious.