In a game I have say 30 enemy NPCs walking about - they all make footsteps (positional audio, using jme3).
What should I do to make this sound ok? It’s horrible with 30 NPCs walking around using the same 3 randomly selected footstep noises. Really essential they all make noise though, for the player to be able to tell what he’s up against
Try just playing the most important N and (of course) make sure the samples are all at different points in the stream.
Yes, gut feeling is the human ear probably couldn’t distinguish useful information from more than about 10 separate footstep sounds.
Also could you slow down/speed up the samples to get more variety? Larger people generally walk with slower footsteps so that could be an audio cue about the size/HP of the NPC…
I had a similar problem with over 20 of the same enemy on screen constantly making movement sounds. What I did was make an intermediate audio player. When ever an enemy wants to make a sound, it calls the intermediate sound player. The intermediate sound player then looks at a list of timers to see if that sound has passed its minimum time before it is allowed to actually be played. It generally works fairly well if the minimum-time-limit is set so a second sound can start once the first is about 70% finished.
IE: for each sound i have the following variables: minimumTimeUntillRepeat, timeUntillRepeatAllowed.
You will still get the impression of a lot of activity without jarring the ears with chaotic noise.
If you have 3 different footstep sounds, you’ll have to decide whether they sound ok each being able to be played at the same time, or whether they need to be considered as the same kind of sound and grouped together.
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I’m gonna give that timing system a try, thanks.