This has not been forgotten about, btw. Hopefully I can address this soon; a cause for the delays has been my failure to get in touch with some other wesnothians who are in finland.
@LokiF: right - what you've got there is nearly perfect. I've been discussing this with a couple other guys on wesnoth, and they'd like to actually have these in their pre-mixed-down state as separate audio tracks, so we can dynamically mix them in-game. I imagine a number of other projects would benefit from that as well.
The minimum would be to split the "cicadas". "flies", "frogs and other creature noise" and "water bubbling" into separate tracks. It's good for each of these tracks to modulate in strength, as you did here. Just having the raw audacity file would be best, and we can probably help with figuring out a way for you to upload it somewhere.
If you have a better (realtime) way to get in touch, please do - I'm in irc.freenode.net #opengameart as "Jetrel"; my availability is rather erratic, so leave your client connected 24/7 for me to get back to you, if IRC is your preferred way of getting in touch. Otherwise I'm on AIM/MSN and such.
Right; the jury's still out on whether this is compatible with our license (we're going for PD because that's compatible with everything, whereas in this case I think CC-BY isn't compatible with GPL, because GPL doesn't respect the attribution clause). However, this is very useful as a foil for C&C.
- This is very nicely mixed, no mic noise, etc. Great work!
- The mosquitos are "foreground noise", and we'd like to avoid that because "foreground noise" makes them sound like active game elements. In fact, samples like what you used are exactly what I'd want if I was going to make sound effects for a mosquito enemy in the game. If fly-buzzing is a background element, we shouldn't be hearing a few individual flies near the camera, we should be hearing a distant sound (waxing and waning) of huge swarms of them.
- This is a little too varied. Really, you're almost transitioning between several different soundscapes, whereas we just want one. There are major elements (like the frogs croaking) that completely leave the picture after a while. Some change is desirable for interest's sake, but this is a bit too strong.
- The bubbling mud sounds too much like bubbling water (it appears that's actually exactly what you used). You might be able to fix this by pitch-shifting it downwards, or equalizing it, but right now it's a little light in pitch. This isn't really a make-or-break point, but we'd definitely prefer a more mud-like sound if we can get it.
Bear in mind that extracting audio from youtube vids (with permission!) is a very, very viable option. Mud pots are a rare geographic feature, so you might consider using a recording from some family video of someone who's been there, assuming you can find one with clean enough audio. If you explain that you're using it for a non-profit/hobby videogame, most average people would probably be willing to give you permission to use it as public domain. Also, videos released by the US government (such as the parks and wildlife dept) are under public domain, and they might have some on yellowstone.
"I'm afraid it could happen that somebody pulls a sound from freesound.org. The money's worth it. Caution! :)"
If it fits the bill, it's nearly worth paying just for them having done the work of discovery. I've spent days dredging freesound.org and haven't found what I wanted. Also, I'm quite fine with people taking existing clips and paying them for the work of remixing and compositing them.
"Please just take care that it doesn't become like 99designs once it gets bigger, or at least it is very clear that it is an competition. Letting artist spend good time on the work to get rejected afterwards is probably no good idea on the long run. I hope they use their "right to approve or reject the work based on their own discretion" wisely."
We're absolutely unabashed about being spec work. There are just too many amateurs in this field, and wesnoth has far too little money, to risk irrevocably forking over $200 to someone who might be eager-to-please, but clueless, or worse someone trying to take advantage of us. We need to protect ourselves. Furthermore, this is a tiny (4hr, in my estimation) project, with little-to-no investment on the artist's part, and they retain all rights to it either way.
If you happen to be a genuine professional, with an extensive portfolio, then yes, we might consider an actual contract. Feel free to contact us about that - I don't know where to hire foley guys, so anyone who knows about that, as well, is free to contact us.
"While I understand this may at first seem like a betrayal of the open source mentality, I personally don't see anything at all wrong with paying people to create high-quality open source content. It raises the standards of open source content across the board, and as long as it's licensed under an open source license, who cares whether or not the creator was paid to make that content? The one requesting the content gets what they want, the creator is rewarded for his efforts, and the level of available FOSS content increases. Seems like a win-win-win scenario to me. :)"
Eloquently put.
This is why we accept donations; because, with the staggering complexity of stuff that goes into a game, there are some things our core team will just never have the manpower or skills to do. Either we pay someone to do it, or it never gets done. In fact, we just had someone complaining about this the other day, on our forum: http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=32747
I know that some people would love to live in a fairyland where nothing gets touched by that dirty "money" stuff, but it's the single most powerful tool there is to finish unpleasant tasks that no one likes or knows how to do. If open-source didn't pay full-time developers, there would be no ubuntu, no mozilla, no apache, no blender, no android ... in fact, basically every huge and successful OSS project has only been successful after they've gotten money involved, because there are just always going to be crucial things that no one wants to do. Python is bankrolled by google (guido van rossum is a full-time employee to do just that), and several other projects (webkit, cups, launchd) are staffed by dozens of full-time apple employees, and tons of work on the linux kernel is done by fulltime guys at IBM and redhat.
"by the way, why no link to an official statement by wesnoth on this?"
Because this is all I've gotten up, yet. We really ought to start using wesnoth's homepage as a recruiting tool for helpers, but we haven't gotten that worked out quite yet. Sometimes we are lazy.
All SD character models will inherently look (vaguely) like babies - in fact; that's to a certain degree, the point in doing SD. We are hard-wired to find those proportions cute, because that's about the only thing that makes babies look cute to us (which is a major and necessary survival trait).
This is the most useless OGA contribution I've seen yet. Even the most clueless, complete non-artist can generate something like this in the gimp in all of five minutes - and in fact, would be more likely to just use untextured, or procedurally-textured geometry instead, given how primitive these are.
Hey, thanks man - I really appreciate someone finishing the transitions for those cobblestone tiles of mine.
These are really nice work.
More importantly, these are really generic, widely-useable work that'll fit oodles of different games - exactly what OGA needs. Great stuff!
This has not been forgotten about, btw. Hopefully I can address this soon; a cause for the delays has been my failure to get in touch with some other wesnothians who are in finland.
I'll check out the zip file.
@LokiF: right - what you've got there is nearly perfect. I've been discussing this with a couple other guys on wesnoth, and they'd like to actually have these in their pre-mixed-down state as separate audio tracks, so we can dynamically mix them in-game. I imagine a number of other projects would benefit from that as well.
The minimum would be to split the "cicadas". "flies", "frogs and other creature noise" and "water bubbling" into separate tracks. It's good for each of these tracks to modulate in strength, as you did here. Just having the raw audacity file would be best, and we can probably help with figuring out a way for you to upload it somewhere.
If you have a better (realtime) way to get in touch, please do - I'm in irc.freenode.net #opengameart as "Jetrel"; my availability is rather erratic, so leave your client connected 24/7 for me to get back to you, if IRC is your preferred way of getting in touch. Otherwise I'm on AIM/MSN and such.
I look forward to hearing from you. :)
Right; the jury's still out on whether this is compatible with our license (we're going for PD because that's compatible with everything, whereas in this case I think CC-BY isn't compatible with GPL, because GPL doesn't respect the attribution clause). However, this is very useful as a foil for C&C.
- This is very nicely mixed, no mic noise, etc. Great work!
- The mosquitos are "foreground noise", and we'd like to avoid that because "foreground noise" makes them sound like active game elements. In fact, samples like what you used are exactly what I'd want if I was going to make sound effects for a mosquito enemy in the game. If fly-buzzing is a background element, we shouldn't be hearing a few individual flies near the camera, we should be hearing a distant sound (waxing and waning) of huge swarms of them.
- This is a little too varied. Really, you're almost transitioning between several different soundscapes, whereas we just want one. There are major elements (like the frogs croaking) that completely leave the picture after a while. Some change is desirable for interest's sake, but this is a bit too strong.
- The bubbling mud sounds too much like bubbling water (it appears that's actually exactly what you used). You might be able to fix this by pitch-shifting it downwards, or equalizing it, but right now it's a little light in pitch. This isn't really a make-or-break point, but we'd definitely prefer a more mud-like sound if we can get it.
This is exactly what I'd like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3145eB_DCU
Bear in mind that extracting audio from youtube vids (with permission!) is a very, very viable option. Mud pots are a rare geographic feature, so you might consider using a recording from some family video of someone who's been there, assuming you can find one with clean enough audio. If you explain that you're using it for a non-profit/hobby videogame, most average people would probably be willing to give you permission to use it as public domain. Also, videos released by the US government (such as the parks and wildlife dept) are under public domain, and they might have some on yellowstone.
Official Wesnoth Response:
"I'm afraid it could happen that somebody pulls a sound from freesound.org. The money's worth it. Caution! :)"
If it fits the bill, it's nearly worth paying just for them having done the work of discovery. I've spent days dredging freesound.org and haven't found what I wanted. Also, I'm quite fine with people taking existing clips and paying them for the work of remixing and compositing them.
"Please just take care that it doesn't become like 99designs once it gets bigger, or at least it is very clear that it is an competition. Letting artist spend good time on the work to get rejected afterwards is probably no good idea on the long run. I hope they use their "right to approve or reject the work based on their own discretion" wisely."
We're absolutely unabashed about being spec work. There are just too many amateurs in this field, and wesnoth has far too little money, to risk irrevocably forking over $200 to someone who might be eager-to-please, but clueless, or worse someone trying to take advantage of us. We need to protect ourselves. Furthermore, this is a tiny (4hr, in my estimation) project, with little-to-no investment on the artist's part, and they retain all rights to it either way.
If you happen to be a genuine professional, with an extensive portfolio, then yes, we might consider an actual contract. Feel free to contact us about that - I don't know where to hire foley guys, so anyone who knows about that, as well, is free to contact us.
"While I understand this may at first seem like a betrayal of the open source mentality, I personally don't see anything at all wrong with paying people to create high-quality open source content. It raises the standards of open source content across the board, and as long as it's licensed under an open source license, who cares whether or not the creator was paid to make that content? The one requesting the content gets what they want, the creator is rewarded for his efforts, and the level of available FOSS content increases. Seems like a win-win-win scenario to me. :)"
Eloquently put.
This is why we accept donations; because, with the staggering complexity of stuff that goes into a game, there are some things our core team will just never have the manpower or skills to do. Either we pay someone to do it, or it never gets done. In fact, we just had someone complaining about this the other day, on our forum: http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=32747
I know that some people would love to live in a fairyland where nothing gets touched by that dirty "money" stuff, but it's the single most powerful tool there is to finish unpleasant tasks that no one likes or knows how to do. If open-source didn't pay full-time developers, there would be no ubuntu, no mozilla, no apache, no blender, no android ... in fact, basically every huge and successful OSS project has only been successful after they've gotten money involved, because there are just always going to be crucial things that no one wants to do. Python is bankrolled by google (guido van rossum is a full-time employee to do just that), and several other projects (webkit, cups, launchd) are staffed by dozens of full-time apple employees, and tons of work on the linux kernel is done by fulltime guys at IBM and redhat.
"by the way, why no link to an official statement by wesnoth on this?"
Because this is all I've gotten up, yet. We really ought to start using wesnoth's homepage as a recruiting tool for helpers, but we haven't gotten that worked out quite yet. Sometimes we are lazy.
All SD character models will inherently look (vaguely) like babies - in fact; that's to a certain degree, the point in doing SD. We are hard-wired to find those proportions cute, because that's about the only thing that makes babies look cute to us (which is a major and necessary survival trait).
This is the most useless OGA contribution I've seen yet. Even the most clueless, complete non-artist can generate something like this in the gimp in all of five minutes - and in fact, would be more likely to just use untextured, or procedurally-textured geometry instead, given how primitive these are.
Not to be a jerk, but these are very poorly done.
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