A Living Park Nature sound challenge

[DrStephenMeyer]

Most games have background sounds that does not come from the game at all but just playing to give you a fake feeling that its real buts its not. I would like to enter a zoo and every sound made is coming from an animal some where in the area? So as you look through your zoo you can hear all sorts of things and try to listen carefully to find those noises. The Visitors will be best suited for this as they hunt for that sound and you actually see them go after that sound!

So thank you developer if you can match this realism so the sound or not fake animal noises but noises from the animals in the zoo. If you only have a small zoo then you will hear the sound of nature.

And this is something to also consider nature i hope you have an ecology connection where if you plant trees, flower you will attract certain animals, insects to your zoo! And in return they will make your zoo more Alive and give it the sound you want! This can become a challenge for the players and for the zoo reputation cause not all zoo should have the same sound! So if you load up one of your friends zoo you will hear different sound cause they built in such a way to attract certain birds, insect, etc to the zoo that you have not taught off and specific guess like that very much!

Why should creativity be limited to the visual? Why not extend it so you are part of the conservation and part of Nature? So its more dynamic more challenging and deeper? Make players think about the ecology they are creating cause in doing so they will gain benefits for their zoo.

So this means the developer will have to create these extra natural occurring events for the zoo cause its very much the life of a Zoo it not just the animals that make up a zoo. You want things like a pond to be alive. And the only way you can do that if you have critters, birds which has lives of their own. Why confirm it to zoo animals why not the wild life too for the zoo? When a pond is alive many other things can be alive such as a tree, bin, water holes, etc where there is food, cover, etc the critters will find a way.

I think this is one area the dev might have overlooked but i hope it will be included cause i want critters to live in my bush! Not just having it look pretty with a zoo animal.

 

[BaconTheDragon]

Stenella, as I read through some of your posts on this forum, its very clear to see you are ambitiously creative and your ideas for game development are of very high standards. I respect that immensely. But alot of your ideas require a dangerously unhealthy amount of time to create and some, to me at least, seem impossible to do with current technology. I say this only to put you in the right mind frame of expectations. I hope you are not too disappointed when the majority of what your saying isnt in the game. And its not because they are bad ideas or the developers are ignoring you, its just that they are impractical at this time. I hope I dont come off as rude.

 

[mjcarrier]

Here is an overview of the sound system:
Animal sounds
“We were also able to attend the sound recording studio to see how they created the sounds of footsteps and other details, as well as having an extensive digital library of real animal sounds.” ([MeriStation ) “…a technique called 'foley' was also used. This is known from the film world and means that sounds are simulated in all kinds of ways, and then added to the film in post-production. In games that can just as well be, and so the people of Frontier were busy with coconuts and washing powder for example to reproduce the sound of hooves on snow.” (tweakers) “The game constantly makes a calculation based on the position of the player, and switches audio sources on or off based on this. Each animal has multiple places that generate audio, and the game determines in real time what you as a player will or will not hear and in which mix. The more you zoom out, the more general this mix.” (tweakers)
An interesting thing is animal sounds in the game can convey to the player information.
“Players will even get to know what a particular animal call means, immediately identifying if a specific creature is in distress.” (PC Gamer Magazine – June issue)

If that is enough here is a long excerpt from Rock Paper Shotgun on how they produced animal sounds:
"Planet Zoo has many hippos, and they are glorious to behold and listen to. Zoom the camera on one and you’ll hear the crunch of its feet on grass, the air coursing through its submarine ribcage, the dusty, prehistoric creak of its hide. The game is committed to capturing the ambience of a zoo – intriguingly, it often seems more preoccupied with that ambience than the animal habitats most zoos seek to emulate – but as regards such small, intricate sounds, Frontier has exercised a little license. When the developer’s audio engineers set out to record animals at actual zoos, they found that all they could hear was the human onlookers. “It puts us in this difficult position – trying to be authentic, but giving these animals presence in the space,” Jim Croft, head of audio, tells me during my studio visit. “So how do we do that?” The answer, he goes on, is “hyperrealism”...
Hyperrealism as described by Croft and lead audio designer Matthew Florianz is something specific to audio capture. It covers techniques and technologies such as shotgun mics that are used to home in on a subject and isolate minute sounds – as Florianz puts it, “to get really close to the animal without getting really close to the animal”. Hence the delicate organic symphony that is the game’s hippo, lifted above the burble of the crowd. The twist is, you aren’t hearing hippo noises. You’re hearing audio technicians punching pieces of Xmas tree with boxing gloves to recreate half-ton footfalls, slowed-down human breathing and the artful rumpling of a leather coat, all of it recorded on a Foley sound stage. Actual zoo animals, you see, are inconvenient source material for any audio team striving for that extra level of finesse: the detail of their mouth, limb and bowel movements is smeared and smudged together as the animal goes about being, well, a living thing.
Nor are the game’s hippo sounds all specific to the recreation of the hippo: for greater efficiency, Frontier has created libraries of assets that cover several animals. “We don’t do [the sound of] elephant skin, we do leathery skin, or feathery skin, or rough skin, and then the animals that need that get the right skin.” Croft says. “And then the footsteps, we do small, medium and large hooves, we do claws.” Thus, when you hear hippos move about you are also, in a way, hearing rhinos or elephants. The only noises that are “typically” recorded from living creatures, and specific to those creatures, are their calls – and this is as much in the service of the game’s UI as giving each creature “presence”. Animal calls are an important part of Frontier’s efforts to put across information about the animals diegetically, though there’s a fearsome quantity of Sims-style mood and physiological status gauges to fall back on. Pull the view back out, and with a little practice, you should be able to deduce the overall health of your zoo by ear alone."