Interested in Joining the Project

[Kervate]

Hey everyone, I came across this project the other night and I was quite interested in joining and helping out.

I do code and have decent levels of ability with C, Pascal, PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS and shell scripting. However, as the game is written in C++, I feel I should take some time to familiarise myself with Object Orientated coding as well as C++ as my background has been totally procedural and functional with a lot of it being executed via a command line interface and I still find Object Orientated code slightly daunting. I do hope to able to help in this area soon however.

I'm also an amateur composer and musician and I thought I'd have a go at making some music tracks for the game. These were all created using LMMS (Linux Multimedia Studio). Two of them ("Rise of the Constructs" and "To Darker Depths") had a phaser applied in audacity with "To Darker Depths" also having reversal placed on the sound from 3:12 to 4:06.

Attached are the Ogg Vorbis files for the three tracks as well as the short summaries for each of them based on what inspired me to create them. The mmpz files are also available but not currently attached.

To War!.ogg

To War!

(1.69 MiB) Downloaded 391 times

Type: Digitally Created
Faction: Any/leaning towards humans
Context: Preparing for battle/marching to war/sounds like it would also work well for the main menu
Length: 1:27

Rise of the Constructs.ogg

Rise of the Constructs

(2.63 MiB) Downloaded 384 times

Type: Digitally Created
Faction: Constructs
Context: Faction track for the Constructs
Length: 2:32

To Darker Depths.ogg

To Darker Depths

(4.03 MiB) Downloaded 403 times

Type: Digitally Created
Faction: Any
Context: An ambient track for underground areas
Length: 4:21

Hope you enjoy and find a use for them. I'm always happy to improve upon them and I intend to make more with some being produced with live instruments and vocals. I am also happy to have a try at any voice acting that may be necessary.

[Skorpio]

Hi Kervate, welcome to the forum! We are in need of programmers, so it would be great if you could help us out. Maybe one of our older programmers, Oln and Paul, can help you getting started. However, they're both inactive due to personal reasons at the moment. We have a todo list with some general tasks here: viewtopic.php?f=45&t=3896
There are a lot of construction sites and in many areas we still have to make decisions. Feel free to share your thoughts with us.

As for the music, I think it's nice, but I have to say it's not really what I had envisioned for Open Dungeons. I'd prefer some classical orchestra tracks. Rise of the Constructs would fit great to a cyberpunk themed game and I like the effects and sounds that you used in To Darker Depths. To War is a bit overdriven (if that's the right term), I hear a lot of noise.

Voice acting would be cool, but I'm not sure what we actually need.

[Kervate]

Hi Skorpio, thank you for the warm welcome and the feedback on the tracks.

In regards to the coding I will have a read over the project's coding style and guidelines and take a look at the code. The actual innerworking of the code should be pretty easy to grasp it's just when OOP concepts like objects and classes come in that I'm currently a bit out of my depths.

I totally understand where you are coming from with Rise of the Constructs. From reading their faction summary on the wiki I saw them as quite an industrious and technological race but I will admit that the track sounds far too futuristic in comparison. If you have any suggestions on how I could improve it so that it fits more with the style I'd be happy to try and implement the changes.

Having taken what you said about To War! into account I've tested it out on some different speakers and when played on them, the track has a lot of the distortion you mentioned. I put the track into Audacity and sure enough the tops and bottoms of the sound waves were being clipped off which is the reason for the distortion. I've identified the cause of the problem however and some extra mixing and volume balancing should sort the issue out. If you do think the track would fit I can fix the distortion up and reupload it. Again if you have any suggestions on how to improve it or make it fit more, just let me know.

I'm glad you liked To Darker Depths, again, if you have any suggestions for improvement I am more than happy to try and implement the changes.

If you could give me a basic run down of what you envision for each faction and the overall feel of the music I can try and base any future tracks on them. I'll take what you said about the orchestral tracks into account as well.

Once again, thank you for the warm welcome and the feedback, I look forward to helping out with the project.

[Skorpio]

We actually have already some candidates for ambient and music tracks that Danimal has put together on Opengameart.org. Maybe you can find some inspirations there. I commented the tracks here.

Since you ask for suggestions, maybe some of the melodies could be worked out a bit more (especially this gamut at the end of Rise of the Constructs could be improved a little bit in my opinion).

Btw, I hope I didn't drive the other musician away with my criticism.

[oln]

Hello!
As mentioned, we don't have any active programmers at the moment, the one that was active announced just a few days ago that he had to stop due to personal reasons. So if you are interesting in working on the code, that would be great. It's a bit hard for me to write too much right now, but I can give you an overview of the code if you are okay with using skype (yeah evil I know) or another form of voip. Regarding getting into OOP and C++, we have had some discussion about whether it would be better to look at using an existing game engine rather than using what we have now. This might be more tempting now if we have a new programmer that isn't familiar with the existing technology or codebase anyhow, granted there is something usable out there.

As for the music, I think the tracks sound like they could fit in. Though, aside from what's already mentioned by skorpio, they do have a bit of a "midi-sound" (in lack of a better word), particularly the drums on the first track. Is this a limitation of using a tool such as LMMS, or is it simple to use different samples?

[Kervate]

I'll have a listen to the tracks and look over your comments. I understand what you mean about some of the melodies, the endings in particular are a bit messy in places. I think a fade out could work well on them so that's always an option.

VoIP would be fine although I currently have an issue with my microphone due to a recent kernel update. Audacity recognises it and can use it but other programs like webcam software and VoIP don't seem to be able to find it. I've been looking into a fix for it and from what I've seen it's just a matter of a few config file changes, it just isn't my number one priority right now.

Well, in regards to the language used I do think C++ is a good choice. While I'm not too familar with OOP myself C++ seems much more suited to game devlopment than basic C and from my research in the past, C++ seems the most common language for games and game engines. There are quite a few Open Source game engines out there, one that springs to mind first is FIFE which Unknown Horizons uses although I think the current game engine is probably a good choice to continue with. In that way the game engine would develop with the game and would be both optimized and specific for this project.

The tracks do have a midi sound to them although this is simply because of the samples I used, the ones pre-installed with LMMS rather than a limitation of the software. When I created the tracks I intended for them to be a demonstration rather than fully finished and optimized pieces. I do intend on improving the samples, especially the flute sample as you probably noticed how the sound cuts off rather abruptly and I also thought on the idea of adding additional sounds to the tracks, for example, wind in To Darker Depths and swords clashing together during the middle section of To War! as well as anything anyone else would suggest. The samples are also easily changed so if you like part of a melody or track but aren't fond on the sound, this is a very easy fix.