game.audio.Soundscape

Everything the hill sounds like. One instance, on mount_audio.

local sound = entity.find("mount_audio").component.get("game.audio.Soundscape")
sound:say("open1")   -- speak a line of the Old Henter's now
sound:hush()         -- cut her off and clear the caption
sound:report()       -- what the soundscape is doing, without ears

What it runs

The bed. bed_night and bed_dawn, two eight-second loops baked as uncompressed PCM and closed end to end — the noise in them is filtered circularly and every partial is a whole number of cycles long, so the last sample runs into the first with no step. They play together and crossfade on Core.state.dawn: wind and a low earth-drone in the deep of the night, thinner air and a warm sustained chord by first light, and the whole bed sits a little louder at the crest than it did at midnight. They loop on the Audio component's own looping field.

The calls. A nightjar churrs out on the dark moor; a curlew answers as the light comes up. Placed at a random point on the hill, spatial, heard from the AudioListener on the CameraRig, on their own irregular clock.

The burn. A peaty moorland stream runs through the deepest hollow on the playable field — found by sampling Core.ground against its neighbours, so it sits where water would. Spatial and looping, closed the same way the beds are (its own tail crossfaded into its head, then baked as PCM), so crossing the hollow is something you hear before you see.

The crest. A synthesised swell rises through the last seventeen seconds before the sun clears the cairn, and the generated cue lands on firstlight. The swell is authored here, so the moment is scored whether or not the cue generated.

The voice. The Old Henter speaks on her own long-lived source, so a line can be cut cleanly. Every line goes out as a line event carrying its TEXT as well as its clip — the words reach the caption band whether or not there is a recording behind them, and a muted player still gets the line.

When she speaks

Each is spoken once per round. say(id) overrides that, which is how staging places the opening lines against its own camera move.

The mix

Set here every frame through audio.setChannelVolume, on five channels: voice on top, then sfx, ui, music, ambient. The bed and the music duck to about a third under the narrator and come back over a quarter of a second, so she is never fought. Pausing drops the bed rather than cutting it.

Fields