Discussion: Audio system overhaul

stickgrinder commented 3 months ago

Topic

We feel that the audio tab and in general the audio functions in Popochiu got less love compared to other section.

Godot 4.3 will also bring a load of new features on that side, that we could leverage to achieve iMuse/FMOD-like dynamic background music, or more advanced audio effects.

We can discuss the topic here with the community, and decide on a roadmap for the new features.

Goals

The goals of this discussion is, in order:

Identify the real use cases that we must, should, could and won't address
Define the overall architectural direction of this effort
Spawn a set of issues that will make their way to the product roadmap in the future

Your proposal, in detail

We have no clear ideas but we know that we want our audio section to be a user-friendly gateway to the complex but awesome set of nodes in Godot 4.3.

The concept of AudioCues that @mapedorr inherited from other engines may (or not) become obsolete, but we'll probably have a set of PopochiuObjects that will allow the game designer to easily and quickly configure things like:

Dynamic background music that can fade to and from different versions of the same piece, FMOD style, with the help of engine functions.
A set of variations for SFX that can be executed randomly or round-robin, to be more believable (say: footsteps, birds chirping, drops, etc)
A set of samples to be played at random (within a given range) frequency like wind stirring treetops, or whatever.
A way to create loop sections in the same music so that one can start the music playing an intro, then the music gets into a loop until a specific function is called, and the loop will end into an outro.

More use cases must be identified, the UX has to be imagined and priorities have to be defined. That's what this discussion is about :)

Record of decisions taken

To be discussed

mapedorr commented 3 months ago

I'll try to bring a friend who is an audio designer to this discussion so he can give us ideas of what kind of tools might be helpful for someone in that role.

grahfmusic commented 2 months ago

Hi all, this is something that is key for me in projects using this framework. I studied audio engineering at university as well as music performance so I'm glad to be of service to get this fully robust.

stickgrinder commented 2 months ago

Thanks for your contribution @grahfmusic!

I would start from asking you what's your most common use-cases, beside the basics (playing music and sounds).
The list in the issue comes from my personal experience and desires. What about you? What would you expect an AG framework to provide?

stickgrinder commented 2 months ago

Linking #119 as related

stickgrinder commented 2 months ago

Linking #116 as related

stickgrinder commented 2 months ago

Linking #120 as related

stickgrinder commented 1 month ago

@grahfmusic we just linked three issues that were lying there since a while now, namely:

H1aving loop markers to support intro/outro or similar in music
Playing random sfx from a set (to create a bit of variety or to support random environment sounds)
Adding support for actual voice-over (with per-string audio file)

We'd really like to understand how much more we may want to do. Would you like to have a discussion on Discord about this with me and @mapedorr ?

Or maybe, if you have some clear ideas about specific use cases, would you mind to list them here? Let us know ;)

carenalgas / popochiu