Replace Crickets with Ambient Owl Sounds

[pango]

AmbientSoundPlayer supports loops, and random ambient sounds.
The former are not spatialized, and for now are used for crickets and rain.
The latter are spatialized at random locations around the player, playing random sounds from a list that depends on the current present, with a random delay (uniform distribution between 4 and 34 seconds) between each.
Lots of randoms!

In the patch above, I created two new presets (ColdDay, ColdNight), neither triggering crickets so during those presets only random ambient sounds can be heard (couldn't think of anything that could be used as a loop in classic assets).
For ColdDay I used "creepy bird" sound, for the lack of anything more fitting really, and for ColdNight I used distant howling wolf sound. I missed some night birds sounds, there's none in classic.
If they really come from unrelated sources, then delays along a Poisson distribution should be more realistic.
I kept the average time between random ambient sounds, so I added several wind sounds to the creepy bird and wolf sounds so they don't trigger as often. But that's a hack, it would be better if one could tweak the average time between runs for each sound individually...

I have another branch where I removed the lower bound of 4 seconds so that sounds can trigger almost simultaneously from different sources, something that a Poisson distribution can generate; It requires some more code because I used a pool of AudioSource objects for that.
And add some jitter to the delay between footsteps sounds, so it feels a little less robotic...
https://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfal ... eriments-2

That's only ideas I'm having fun with, complexity could grow fast as more cases are added and that's really mod material...

[TheHourMan]

Even though crickets make no sense in winter, insects are omnipresent and it makes sense that the sound would exist wherever you are (except in the middle of the ocean of something).

Owls are rare creatures in comparison. Having an owl sound follow you around would be quite odd. A wolf sound every 30 minutes in the wilderness would make sense. An owl sound coming from 1 out of 100 trees would make sense.

Yes, but this is a simple sound replacer. I can't add a 30 minute long sound clip for an ambient sound because that would just be too large of a file to be playing every time you are outside at night. The original cricket chirping sound was about 3 seconds long on a loop.

I suppose I could have made a 45 second long crickets sound, but upon doing a little research, I found out that owl do actually live in the desert as well. Several species burrow in the sand or into cacti and there are plenty of cacti in Daggerfall. In a setting like the Iliac Bay, owls still make sense for the most part. They do live in both frigid and arid climates. So that makes me happy with them being in the entirety of the region.

[TheHourMan]

And that is really cool Pango! I'll be sure to look into that and see what I can do eventually.

[jayhova]

various cricket sounds

[jayhova]

In a perfect world, crickets, as part of ambient nighttime sounds would start in late spring and run through mid summer. The volume and number would ramp up and down so that on the first day of late spring they would not be at full volume. The volume for any given night would be inversely proportional to the ambient light. This is so there is not that sudden switch on of crickets. In this perfect world the loop of ambient crickets sounds would be accompanied by directional cricket sounds occasionally in random directions and distances. The frequency of these occurring would be proportional to the volume of the crickets. The occurrence of crickets would be governed but the presence of foliage with a lack of crickets in the desert. Other night sounds should be present. Crickets should be significantly reduced in walled cities.

There should be other ambient sounds for morning, evening, day.

[King of Worms]

((( crickets )))