Sound editing software

[snwboardn]

Hey I wanted to see what you guys use to make your custom sound files. I am planning on just using what is in the DCS A-10C\Sounds\Speech\Sound\ENG\ folder.

 

I was hoping to find a program that I could just drag and drop the voices that I want and automatically put them in one after the other.

 

Also, is there any benefit to using .ogg files as opposed to .wav files?

[Nate--IRL--]

I use Audacity, it is free and open source.

 

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

 

Nate

[Grimes]

Ogg typically have a lower file size when compared to Wav.

[snwboardn]

Right on I will definitely check that out... I have Corel Movie Studio which I am pretty sure I could do it with, but I figure it is really overkill for just adding sound files together.

 

Thanks for the info guys... Speech and radio chatter really adds more depth to the missions.

[Speed]

At least in AVS audio converter, I can make .wav A LOT smaller than .ogg with the GSM 6.10 codec. I recently got a 9 minute song down to 1MB... and I could have made it even smaller, probably around 800kB, if I had dropped the quality even more. It's thus reasonable that you could have up to 30 or 40 minutes of sound in a single mission. An hour of sound could equal only 5MB!!!!

 

For my sound files, personally, I use use AVS audio converter for conversion, Audacity for sound combining, and a MATLAB script I wrote that I feel does a better job than Audacity for adding various radio effects. Pretty useless unless you have a copy of MATLAB, sorry.

[jeffyd123]

hey speed...

 

How well does that MATLAB script work? I have been torturing myself trying to make a lot of CAS calls (about 30 or more) for a mission Im working up. Audacity is torture but it does work. Maybe I could use the MATLAB demo after I get all of my CAS calls recorded.

 

One thing Ive been experimenting with is making the sound quality lower and lower as an effect too, but it isnt giving me what I want.

 

One trick Ive been using is to have the test tone (the one that slowly gets higher) in the background to simulate local interference.

 

the main effect Im looking for is mic distortion from the guys screaming into the mic (theres a lot of gunfire in the background)... cant seem to get what Im looking for.

 

One last thing Im thinking of trying is TARS which is pretty close to what I want ( aside from the mic distortion).

 

thanks

 

Jeff

Edited July 20, 2011 by jeffyd123

[Speed]

hey speed...

 

How well does that MATLAB script work? I have been torturing myself trying to make a lot of CAS calls (about 30 or more) for a mission Im working up. Audacity is torture but it does work. Maybe I could use the MATLAB demo after I get all of my CAS calls recorded.

 

One thing Ive been experimenting with is making the sound quality lower and lower as an effect too, but it isnt giving me what I want.

 

One trick Ive been using is to have the test tone (the one that slowly gets higher) in the background to simulate local interference.

 

the main effect Im looking for is mic distortion from the guys screaming into the mic (theres a lot of gunfire in the background)... cant seem to get what Im looking for.

 

One last thing Im thinking of trying is TARS which is pretty close to what I want ( aside from the mic distortion).

 

thanks

 

Jeff

 

You kinda have to know how to script in MATLAB in order to use it. If you DO, or would like to try even if you don't, I can send it to you. It's pretty much just a MATLAB m-file that I change the variables in depending on what effects I want.

 

Here's some effects that I've found sound "radio-ish":

 

white noise:

White noise can be generated by simply playing random numbers. True white noise is uncorrelated, the previous sample has nothing to do with the value of the current sample, and it has uniform noise power at all frequencies. So basically, just output the values generated by a random number generator to your speakers and you get white noise. However, white noise is usually filtered in some way due to real-life effects... often it will be low-pass-filtered, "pink" noise

 

Modulated white noise with modulated voice volume:

 

Basically, just modulate the magnitude of white noise on some interval randomly, so that it gets stronger sometimes and weaker at others. Additionally, modulate the volume of your "voice" signal so that it gets fainter when the white noise is stronger.

 

High pass filter:

 

For whatever reason, high pass filtering makes voices sound like they are on the radio. Which is odd, since I thought that radios would typically do a low pass filter on the input signal to keep it from aliasing when they forced it within a certain range of sideband frequencies.

 

Often it is ideal to just use a bandpass filter.

 

Tones:

For whatever reason, I haven't really thought of why, I often hear tones on radio transmissions. So you could add in faint sinusoidal signals on top of your voice signal.

 

Clipping:

Loud sounds can clip, so the ability to add in clipping to your signals is good.

 

Down-sampling without lowpass filtering: If you down-sample without low pass filtering first, you can alias a bunch of crap into your sound files.

 

8 bit .wav and 8kHz sample rate

Convert your .wavs to only 8 bits @ 8kHz sampling rate to get even crappier-sounding. :)

 

Anyway, I can do or not do all those effects in the MATLAB file, but as I said.. it's basically just a raw m-file so you need to actually edit it every time you want to change an effect.

 

I think that's the limit of the effects that I know how to create... however, how would one add things like clicks and pops? I still can't get the perfect radio effect... but it's close enough. Maybe headspace can tell us how he simulates some of his radio effects... doubt he'll find this post though.

 

Anyway, I'm uploading a little comparison of before and after using many of the above mentioned effects, applied using MATLAB. Notice that before I applied MATLAB the sound file was about 10 times larger. I think I down sampled and reduced the bits/sample as well... but I also may have run it through AVS Audio converter. I don't remember.

comparison.zip

[snwboardn]

Very nice, the white noise actually makes the bullets sound more realistic, they sound like they would being transmitted over a radio.

 

The gunfire reminds me of this video I saw elsewhere on these forums.

 

If we could get that type of excitement in the voice overs... Ohhh man that would be very engaging. Give you a sense of urgency.

[SmokeyTheLung]

I set one up using that very audio clip, so did StrongHarm back in the day iirc.

 

If you're using existing audio you're accepting that your mission will be very scripted (not necessarily a bad thing if you ask me) however I could never get this one to work well. The triggers and audio conforming to the movement of the ground forces was easy enough. It was making the whole thing properly interactive that was the tricky part.

 

Of the few I made with real world audio, people seemed to prefer the ones that weren't CAS, but instead Strike style missions. The need to "interact" with the voice you're putting to your AFAC/JTAC won't be as high with the latter.

[snwboardn]

Yea I just took a shower and was thinking about how you would go about it (yes I think about DCS in the shower). The only way I was thinking of was setting up like 20 little triggers areas right next to eachother and have them and the units constantly evaluated. Then set up just a crapload of triggers...

 

If group (blue) in zone X and group (red) in zone Y then this sound

If group (blue) in zone X and group (red) in zone Z then this sound

If this member of group (blue) killed by (red) then this sound...

 

So on and so forth...

 

I was actually thinking one could completely replace JTAC with a new radio menu of ground forces radio, once you enter the "warzone" and the player is on the right channel he will hear radio chatter from all of the ground forces. Well more of a realistic JTAC than just random chatter. They could make their own desperate calls for air support...

 

I just feel that the 9-line is great for new players and learning the sim but quickly looses it's engrossing feel pretty quickly.

 

I am definitely going to play around with it... If anything it will broaden my horizon and make myself a better over-all mission designer, as I only have 3 weeks of DCS mission building under my belt...

[Speed]

Yea I just took a shower and was thinking about how you would go about it (yes I think about DCS in the shower). The only way I was thinking of was setting up like 20 little triggers areas right next to eachother and have them and the units constantly evaluated. Then set up just a crapload of triggers...

 

If group (blue) in zone X and group (red) in zone Y then this sound

If group (blue) in zone X and group (red) in zone Z then this sound

If this member of group (blue) killed by (red) then this sound...

 

So on and so forth...

 

I was actually thinking one could completely replace JTAC with a new radio menu of ground forces radio, once you enter the "warzone" and the player is on the right channel he will hear radio chatter from all of the ground forces. Well more of a realistic JTAC than just random chatter. They could make their own desperate calls for air support...

 

I just feel that the 9-line is great for new players and learning the sim but quickly looses it's engrossing feel pretty quickly.

 

I am definitely going to play around with it... If anything it will broaden my horizon and make myself a better over-all mission designer, as I only have 3 weeks of DCS mission building under my belt...

 

If you want to expand upon this idea a lot, like with more and more zones, it will quickly end up becoming an incredible hassle compared to learning Lua and implementing it through Lua, and furthermore, with Lua you can re-use your script over and over again in new missions. With zones, you cannot, not without setting up a template, and templates just aren't flexible enough anyway.

 

You can end up saving yourself a lot of time by learning Lua. In the mission I made called Kashuri CAS, using Lua scripts, ground forces detect line of sight and range to enemy units, and if they are line of sight and within 5km, they make "radio" calls for CAS, and the actual position of the enemy units is broadcast via a chat message. You could pick up the units in the mission editor and move them somewhere else, and the mission would still work perfectly fine, because no trigger zones were used. In fact, I was thinking of doing that very thing- just picking up my units and moving them to a new battle field area. It will be like getting a second entire mission for basically no new work :)

 

Back in battle field commander days, I had a mission where the players got like 12 tanks and 16 arty guns to command, and had to defend against a large enemy attack. In order to have enemy artillery follow the battle commanders around on the battlefield, I ended up implementing over a hundred zone on areas where I thought the battle commander might position his units. This ended up requiring not only like 500 triggers, but it didn't even work very well because the enemy arty fire was just too damned inaccurate.

 

I now have the same thing in Lua, except it is vastly more flexible, vastly easier to debug, vastly more expandable, the artillery is vastly more accurate and can even lead moving targets, etc, etc. It's only 200 lines of code (compared to 500 triggers and like 120 zones), and once I make that code, unless I need to debug it or add to it, I never have to mess with it again other than copying and pasting it into the missions I want to use it in. I just use the function calls it creates to make artillery automatically engage distant units. Unfortunately, artillery is broken right now so this particular script is rather useless :(

 

So yea... zones for the kind of implementation you are talking about... yea they work, but if you add more and more, it quickly becomes way too much of a hassle, and vastly easier and more simple to implement through Lua, and you get the added benefit of being able to reuse your work in new missions.

 

Anyway, I intend to eventually publicly publish derivatives of those scripts with extensive documentation on how to use them sometime after 1109 so everyone can have the opportunity to use them.

Edited July 20, 2011 by Speed

[snwboardn]

I have been putting it off... I might try to find a cheap ebook and go through it. Are there any good lua compilers? I know you mention notepad++ but for a lua newb it doesn't seem like the easiest way to learn.

 

From what I have read it seems like a fairly easy language, you don't have to define variables before you use them, the same thing for arrays.

[Speed]

Well, all I do usually is to write the Lua in notepad++ (which is able to recognize Lua syntax, common functions and data structures, etc), then run it in DCS, then look for debugging messages and print() outputs in dcs.log... not the best system, but it works.

[snwboardn]

You may be at a level where notepad++ is just easier for you... I found an IDE that for a newb like me might make it a bit easier to get into lua...

 

First download "lua for windows" http://code.google.com/p/luaforwindows/

 

2nd download IntelliJ Idea (community edition) from http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/index.html

 

Then download the lua addon for Idea at http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?idea_ce&id=5055 and put it in JetBrains\IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition 10.5.1\plugins

 

And last start Idea and there you go... There is a nice vid here to explain how to link the lua SDK into Idea

 

It is pretty nice from a lua noob standpoint, with things like auto complete and what-not. With the right tools maybe even I will be a scripting genious like you Speed ;)

[Speed]

I ought to try some of those out. I'm not a "scripting genius", I need all the help I can get... though I have gotten good enough that sometimes I can run like 100 new, untested lines with DCS and it won't generate a syntax error... though that's still pretty rare.

 

The problem with some kind of IDE is that it needs access to all of DCS's global functions to even run your code. When run independently, it won't know what the hell is meant by Coords.LOtoMGRS, for example. So your external Lua app needs to access DCS's memory, from, potentially, multiple different environments. I don't know how to set this up. What I did try which was supposed to do this was Decoda, and it didn't work. It was supposed to allow interactive debugging, but yea, no-worko.

 

So while those IDEs will be great for syntax checking, you will not be able to run any code in them unless it contains no DCS-specific functions (unless you want to create dummy functions of the same name... would be a lot of extra hassle), that is, unless you can figure out how to get them to interface with DCS!

 

However, you could implement your own debugging features into your mod that either get removed or disabled on any final "product" you create. For example, in what I am currently working on, I've implemented a function that reloads the Lua file my code is in so I can make changes and test the new changes without having to close the game. One could also make a few "dev" mode functions (which obviously would be turned off in any mods that were actually released) that would allow you to input single, short lines of Lua code through things like a multiplayer chat message. Would probably be better in that case to just tell it the name of a Lua file to open and run (dofile function).

 

So, in the end, because correcting syntax errors only take up like 5% of my debugging time, and because I cannot make an IDE interface with DCS, I just do my debugging using the game and dcs.log. Lua errors are reported to dcs.log, and you can always use print functions to figure out exactly what is going on.

Edited July 21, 2011 by Speed

[snwboardn]

Yea I am just going through a book right now... I can definitely see where the IDE's fall short, it isn't like Visual Studio by any means, even following along in the book. Whenever they do a read.io for whatever reason this particular ide won't display the print function before it asks for the argument...

 

I hear you talking about dumping alot, especially for the function pdf you are trying to create. I could of swore that you had a link to a dump script but I can't remember, how exactly are you doing that?

[snwboardn]

I take that back on that program I recommended... I played with it a little bit and it was a little buggy... But I definitely recommend getting the "lua for windows" http://code.google.com/p/luaforwindows/ it has a program in there called SciTE and it is very clean... Plus it has a Lua console built into it...

 

I attached a picture of how you can load the lua mission script that you are working on and then fiddle with the outputs, so you know for sure that you don't make a mistake... The tables are pretty deep... Once again for anyone just starting out it is very helpful.

 

In this picture I am getting the table location of the x, y coordinates for my Sa-11 so that I can link the table to the x, y coordinates of a trigger... That way if I ever move the unit the trigger moves with it... A very simple task but a beginning point.

 

 

 

I may end up making a complete newbie guide to DCS scripting if I ever learn this all... :smartass:

Edited July 22, 2011 by snwboardn

[Speed]

The problem with the mission Lua environment that you are working in there is that it has almost no data-getting functions, and its data-setting functions are usually designed to only work with pre-defined information. So you can get the initial position of a unit, but you can't get its current position, for example. Additionally, most of its functions that do actions and modify the game world are based on mission editor pre-defined stuff. So you can tell a unit to do a task, but only from the set of pre-defined tasks in "triggered actions" that it gets at mission start. You can change a units waypoint in the "mission" table, but it won't change it in game. So for the most part, Lua in the mission environment only has slightly more capabilities than mission editor triggers, at least compared to the server environment, which has vastly more data-getting functions, the ability to dynamically create group tasks, among some other things. It's the server environment that is the 180,000 line _G dump monstrosity. But if you actually look through those 180,000 lines, you can rather quickly tell what's useless and what's not.

[jeffyd123]

That video (and its use in Strong Harms mission) motivated me to make my mission. I used a couple fo guys from my wing to do voices and they werent bad. trying to get the yelling right was very hard for them to do properly.

 

I am using several different trigger types to make the calls random-ish.

 

There are also 4 overlapping zones (like a cloverleaf) so the ground forces will call out " we see you to the east..." sort of thing. these are combined with about 6 - 8 random CAS calls then about 4 more triggered calls that the enemy forces fire.

 

the voices are recorded in audacity using change pitch and speed, then barrys satan maximizer, then 4x4 pole allpass.

 

the track is then inserted into one audacity profile that has about 10 tracks in it with various sounds (people yelling, gunfire, increasing pitch tone, mic clicks)

 

I wound up using my own voice in the mission so far as its just for testing and content usage. Ive had a lot of issues trying to get the triggers to fire the way I want but they are working better now.

 

The mission is attached. One area (AFGAN - ATC will direct you to it) is mostly completed (not the voices) if you want to see how I did the triggers.

Get Home-testv01.miz

Edited July 22, 2011 by jeffyd123

[snwboardn]

The problem with the mission Lua environment that you are working in there is that it has almost no data-getting functions, and its data-setting functions are usually designed to only work with pre-defined information. So you can get the initial position of a unit, but you can't get its current position, for example. Additionally, most of its functions that do actions and modify the game world are based on mission editor pre-defined stuff. So you can tell a unit to do a task, but only from the set of pre-defined tasks in "triggered actions" that it gets at mission start. You can change a units waypoint in the "mission" table, but it won't change it in game. So for the most part, Lua in the mission environment only has slightly more capabilities than mission editor triggers, at least compared to the server environment, which has vastly more data-getting functions, the ability to dynamically create group tasks, among some other things. It's the server environment that is the 180,000 line _G dump monstrosity. But if you actually look through those 180,000 lines, you can rather quickly tell what's useless and what's not.

 

I started getting deep enough into it and I was starting to come to that realization. All it is, is what the mission editor loads. I work nights so I was messing around with my mission at work last night. You should have seen me jump out of my chair and fist pump like a Jersey Shore douche when I got that return to come back.... Like I read in one of your older posts you kind of have to just dive head-first into it.

 

I was thinking though with those X and Y coordinates you could get the X, Y location of say 4 different triggers in a box and then for the X, Y of a unit either point them to load a script and set some kind of math.random and then use a range inside that box to make unit placement 100% random... If one was willing to do it right they could even set up the external script to exclude the x, y location of houses and dense trees. You can have the units you want but their location will be random.

 

I am not quite sure what this server log is but I am going to DL your exporter, so hopefully it will answer some questions... I will get back with you when I know the right questions to ask ;)

[snwboardn]

That video (and its use in Strong Harms mission) motivated me to make my mission. I used a couple fo guys from my wing to do voices and they werent bad. trying to get the yelling right was very hard for them to do properly.

 

I am using several different trigger types to make the calls random-ish.

 

There are also 4 overlapping zones (like a cloverleaf) so the ground forces will call out " we see you to the east..." sort of thing. these are combined with about 6 - 8 random CAS calls then about 4 more triggered calls that the enemy forces fire.

 

the voices are recorded in audacity using change pitch and speed, then barrys satan maximizer, then 4x4 pole allpass.

 

the track is then inserted into one audacity profile that has about 10 tracks in it with various sounds (people yelling, gunfire, increasing pitch tone, mic clicks)

 

I wound up using my own voice in the mission so far as its just for testing and content usage. Ive had a lot of issues trying to get the triggers to fire the way I want but they are working better now.

 

The mission is attached. One area (AFGAN - ATC will direct you to it) is mostly completed (not the voices) if you want to see how I did the triggers.

 

Thanks for sharing that Jeff. I will definitely take a look at it... I think many of us envision that kind of engrossment in every mission that we play... I am thinking of adding desperation calls when they lose a unit, or when the ground fight just isn't going well for blue. This way the player not only knows he isn't doing well but also feels some motivation to help out his comrades.

[jeffyd123]

thats exactly what I thought too... the team is in a desperate struggle with about 30 - 50 enemy pushing in on them.