I think what Rainseeker's getting at, Zwei, is having a "background chatter" sound looping during certain ongoing events. So what you hear isn't "The Dwarves are having a party" every three seconds, but rather a bunch of muffled chattering and laughter and music and clinking of mugs and banging of fists looped through itself for the party's duration. This would be in addition to the existing announcement in the log (and, perhaps, the existing announcement in Soundsense). The loops would not be part of the log, but rather would simply start when the log mentioned a party beginning, and end when the log mentioned it ending.
This concept, when taken to the other sounds listed in the category (waterfall, invasion, tantrum, running water) can do a great deal for immersion. It's not a matter of making announcements based on the log; it's a matter of setting up ambiance.
And unholy Armok, ambiance would be awesome. Looping active workshop noises would make your industrial sector really, um... loud, though. And cluttered, sound-wise. But it would still be cool to roll your view over it and hear the scrape of tools on wood, the tink-tink-CLANG of a blacksmith hammer-and-anvil, the hiss of hot metal dipped in water, and the steady sawing of a carpenter's workshop? All far in the background, of course, because such constant noises shouldn't be foreground. They'd blot out the important stuff. Ambiance is important, yes, but it requires proper volume differentiation. With the volume properly scaled back, and good sounds chosen, you could even make a loop for mining that wouldn't be annoying. Mining would be a hard one, though.
Um... I got off-topic there. Zwei does have a point. If we have a continuous loop of, say, "Dwarf working as a mason," then it would go like this:
- Dwarf starts making rock blocks.
- Masonry sound fades in.
- Dwarf finishes a rock block.
- Masonry sound fades out.
Right? Now imagine that it's a Legendary+5 Mason making those rock blocks in an uncluttered workshop. Now your sound is fading in even while it's fading out and things get really messy. Zwei may be right that a "Starting Work" sound is better than an "At Work" sound, at least when your dwarves are working at high speed.
Unless... the sounds couldn't overlap themselves, so no matter how many different mason workshops are running, for instance, you only hear the sound once. I can see how this would get difficult on a technical level. Suddenly instead of tracking a single event, it has to think "Are any events like this going on right now?" Which makes it an active check for something rather than simply reacting to a log file. At best, I could see the sound fading out only if a certain amount of time has passed since the last work started in a workshop.
But then, I don't really know that much. I'm just a forum-goer with an opinion and a rusty, bare-bones knowledge of VBASIC (and a VERY rusty, bare-bones knowledge of other, older computer languages).
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Topic: SoundSense: a sound engine for dwarf fortress. (Read 579838 times)