I can understand objecting to it on moral grounds, although the edit I’m working on, you can’t really understand any of it anyway.
I doubt you’d find a decent radio loop from any movies or TV shows though. Not only are they rare (I can’t think of any), but they’d most likely be improperly done. I could scour some free stock sounds websites and see if they have anything.
The last alternative we have is someone having the right tools and skill to make their own from scratch.
That’s precisely why I didn’t feel comfortable with using those recordings either. They are real people in real situations which have undoubtedly had massive, powerful impacts on real lives. Using that to portray a silly alien war in a little video game just feels disrespectful to me. It doesn’t matter if the recordings are uneventful or whatever, it’s the context that’s important to me. I just don’t feel comfortable with it.
It’s a nice idea, but I’m not sure how practical it is. Using sounds and recordings from any other places will cause copyright/intellectual property issues, and creating my own from scratch/asking the community to do it is a lot of effort for a small amount of reward.
I think before any decisions are made in this area let the project progress a bit further. I still don’t even know how feasible adding this stuff is. It will require use of soundscapes rather than ambient_generics, and that’s a tricky entity setup, particularly when I’m so damn close to the limits on A2, B1 and B2 already.
I don’t think that’s the problem. The military are already set up around Black Mesa and fighting loads, the whole communication system would be a mess of transmissions. That wouldn’t be an issue.
Most of my thoughts on that whole ordeal can be found in this post and this post. I was initially pretty bloody angry. But as it unfolded the whole thing appears to be one big (or 4 small, take your pick) miscommunication. While still an unnecessary and silly chain of events, it appears to have not been intentional or malicious on their part, so there isn’t a problem there, in that regards.
I’m sure the NDA with Valve is complicated and restrictive. Particularly when there’s such a weird overlap of Intellectual Properties involved. They’re using Valve’s Engine, and Valve’s universe, publishing it on Valve’s platform, but they’re not affiliated with Valve in any way really. The legalities involved there must be pretty weird.
Personally, if I were the BM Devs, and I were able to (presuming and NDA didn’t restrict me from doing so), I would happily use all and any works from the community which I saw as being high quality. Hazard Course, Uncut Mods, Particle Improvements, Reanimation Projects - anything for me which would improve the quality of BM overall and the authors were willing to share and put a lot of time into improving. After all, it’s a bloody mod - isn’t the whole concept of a mod built around community development and involvement? To me it seems strange that a mod team would happily hire someone from the community based upon a portfolio of PREVIOUS WORK for OTHER PROJECTS, but then not want to use another community member’s RELEVANT and USEFUL work which is already sitting there, waiting to be examined and used. But that’s just me. Perhaps they don’t feel the community’s work/my work/whoever’s is up to scratch. Perhaps they don’t want to other peoples’work because of their own pride - whatever. That’s their prerogative. Nobody’s gonna stop them there. I certainly won’t presume the reason until I hear it outright, and we don’t know if there ARE reasons outside the NDA or not. But from a pragmatic perspective, I would always use community contributions.
Does that help?
Those are respectable grounds, and while I’m disappointed you don’t like the idea, I won’t push it anymore.
Don’t get me wrong! I like the idea, just not the implementation. If we can find better ways of doing it, I’m all for it!
Sorry, bad wording on my part. I know what you meant, you just don’t like using recordings from actual battles. I understand completely, I’m just not convinced it’ll be easy to find a decent alternative. But like you said, we may cross that bridge later.
In the mean time, I found 2 things while messing around in your maps earlier (testing my sound and cfg edits, but stumbled upon these as well):
I was able to reach this beam by stacking crates (boy, aren’t I trouble with those things!). Once up top, I can see 2 of the Soldiers, one invisible (note the floating shotgun on the left side) and one in ‘cover’ pose.
This is sort of related to radios, just not sound, but you should consider make all radios static (immobile). I know some in BM aren’t static, but that’s probably a bug. Looking on the bottom of the model, the texture on the bottom is bugged, it has a screen texture that shouldn’t be there. That plus the weight (very light for such a big radio) leads me to assume they were meant to be static.
The last one is an ST bug, which I’ll leave out for now.
You’re right. It’s too early in the creative process, it’s an idea to add atmosphere later on after you’ve streamlined the maps.
@ Someguy; your idea has merit, it’s just early in the process to consider adding them. Once the map(s) get optimized and we create our material, sure. We can create something out of it, and it shouldn’t be difficult.
I’m aware of the radio inconsistency, but where it exists in BM, it’s probably an “intentional bug”, so to speak.
It’s been a while since I’ve worked with them so I may be remembering incorrectly, but the radios in BM are compiled as physics props. If you put them on a map as a static prop, the game doesn’t make them show up. Hence, they HAVE to be physics props. Where the radios are “static,” in BM, they are just physics props with the physics disabled. This means that any inconsistency within BM is probably on purpose, for that reason. My reasoning with the radios is, if I’m going to incur the extra rendering/entity cost of having a physics prop, why not ACTUALLY make them have physics? Sounds ridiculous I know, but eh!
As for the stacking radios bug, that’s pretty hard to prevent aside from putting a trigger to wake the Marines up there as well. Fairly easy fix, but annoying!
B2 Progress
With regards to how I’m progressing on B2, this week I’ve actually got in a pretty good mix of revision work and mapping work. It’s still been going slowly but stuff has been getting done. To put it bluntly, I’m terrible with displacements, and a perfectionist. Meaning I’m taking ages to get the displacements looking right. But they will be looking right. I’ve been cross examining, and checking out just how the displacement work is done in the rest of BM to try and reverse-engineer it and I’ve been learning an awful lot. Still got a ways to go, but the outdoor landscape is looking more and more natural every day. Once that’s done, I can seal up the map and hopefully start lighting it!
Thanks Text for the reply.
Who knows what the NDA thing with the devs and Valve are about. Hell, they might have ported the game to a new engine version, or maybe they are preparing something I believe will be mind-blowing (I’d count out Episode 3 but hey, anything happens…) to us just waiting for the Second Release.
About the radio thing, I think I agree that it is morally disturbing to use such real-life recordings as it may cause disrespect, and God knows how much copyright s**t we have to deal with for using things from other works.
As for progress on the B2 map, take your time Text, and give those displacements the treatment they deserve!
I would record original military chatter for this project, but, unfortunately, among the things my grandfather didn’t bring with him after being retired from the military was a radio.
It’s reasonably easy to fake a radio effect. Mostly just high pass filter work and some audio noise.
Yeah, having multiple voices helps too. Dunno when I’ll find the motivation to get around to it yet.
I figured it would sound more realistic if I used an actual military radio.
I can do accents & multiple voices, but it hurts my throat if I keep switching between voice impressions too quickly, especially with “electronic” sounding voices (including electronically filtered organic voices). Granted, this is off topic, but I can do a perfect impression of Stephen Moore’s “Marvin the Paranoid Android” voice without any mechanical aid (the actual actor had to use a filter to do the voice). In case you’re wondering who Stephen Moore is, he voiced Marvin the Paranoid Android in the radio series & live-action television series versions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (which originated as a radio series, by the way)
I’ve begun the process of writing a script for the radio transmissions project. If any one has any blazing ideas they want to throw out, now would be the time.
And I may extend this project beyond this and allow the BM Dev team to use these VO’s (if they wish) to add atmosphere to the other maps inside of the campaign.
I would say to make it as unintelligible as you can, that way it can be looped indefinitely. If you can understand it, you can’t loop it or it’ll be way too obvious it’s repeating.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/87931465/sample.wav
I just had an odd, quirky idea, that some people may or may not agree with, and could just be downright bad depending on the “mood” the upcoming outdoor bit is trying to convey.
An air raid siren going off in the background. Hear me out.
Black Mesa is huge, and while the VOX obviously works well inside, I can’t imagine it carrying over the surface parts of the facility. So I’d imagine there’s something similar to an air raid/tornado/nuclear disaster system set up on the surface for emergencies. Around this point in the game, the true intent of the military is clear, so in a last ditch effort to warn people to flee the facility, the guards set it off?
Details aside, I just think it would add to the atmosphere, walking out into the vista, a huge convoy off in the distance, air vehicles, possibly, all topped off with a faint, distant wail.
In the strange case that you’ve never heard an air raid siren before,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=vco6gZPjPbg#t=180s LOUD NOISES, REMOVE HEADPHONES
While I do love me a good Air Raid siren, it seems like something that would either go off in We’ve Got Hostile’s in response to the Artillery, Surface Tension in response to Manta Rays, or Forget About Freeman in as a signal for evacuation.
Speaking of, I might try adding this to my FAF soundscapes now 
Edit: Recorded the sound, edited it to loop perfectly. Downside is I don’t know how to make them loop ingame, it’ll just play once when the soundscape starts.
Not so much. You can string random words together with the recordings, if it’s done right, it won’t sound like there’s continuous chatter, add in some complex script that chooses a random sequence of .wav files to play: Tada.
Random tangent, I actually just set the air raid siren to Forget About Freeman, and as long as the siren sounds off in the distance, it blends with the music extremely well. Like “someone should make this a thing” well.
As for it playing in WGH, I guess from a certain perspective it makes sense, but you’re on the surface for less than 2 minutes, you’re in a boxed in canyon, and there’s a bunch of aircraft flying overhead. Could it work? I guess, but I’m just suggesting it here because this is the thread to talk about OaR Uncut, not redoing the soundscape for every time you’re on the surface.
Great idea for ST uncut on C2a5I, it wouldn’t fit in for OAR uncut. I’ll forward your post to that thread.
Maybe, but you’d still hear the same sounds over and over, just in a different order.
Well, I recorded the sound, but I don’t know how to get it to loop in-game, it just stops after playing once. I don’t see any reason for that, but oh well. Maybe I’ll try to fix it if or when I reinstall my game, the crashes are getting so frequent on some maps that I can’t even get through the fight on c2a3b (FaF, when you first go to the surface).
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.
