Death sounds from ship are really cheap #151

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opened 2026-08-29 12:00:35 +00:00 by metaheavens · 1 comment

metaheavens commented

2026-08-29 12:00:35 +00:00

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metaheavens commented

2026-08-29 12:40:28 +00:00

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Done in 9cf032c. Both fair, and the synthesis is rewritten rather than tuned, because the shape was the problem.

The shot was a bare descending sine - which is the sound every toy ray gun has ever made. The ship death was one band of filtered noise with a sine under it: thin, and over before the eye had finished with the explosion.

What the rewrite adds, and why each part is there:

Layers, not a waveform. A bang is a crack, then a body, then a tail, and they have different lengths. One envelope over one source cannot be any of those. The explosions now run three clocks: the crack is done in a fifth of the length, the roar runs most of it, and sparse debris keeps falling afterwards so there is an aftermath rather than a stop.
A sub. Below about 80Hz is where "big" lives; without it an explosion is a hiss however loud you play it. Measured: 74% of a ship death's energy and 86% of a structure's now sits under 200Hz, against almost none before.
Saturation. Soft-clipping folds in harmonics, so a sound reads as loud rather than merely being loud - and stops the peak normalisation flattening everything into the same quiet mush.
Detuned partials on the shot. Three of them at deliberately wrong ratios beat against each other and read as a mechanism; the single sine was the whole of the toy problem. A noise transient and a sub thump underneath give it something to hit with.

Lengths went up with the weight: ship death 0.85s -> 1.45s, structure 1.6s -> 2.3s, both audible to the end rather than gone in the first third.

All of it is still audio/make_sfx.py, so if any of these is now too much it is a number and a re-run. And the CC0 packs listed on #146 remain a drop-in if you would rather have recorded sounds - Sfx.gd does not care which.

Done in `9cf032c`. Both fair, and the synthesis is rewritten rather than tuned, because the *shape* was the problem. The shot was a bare descending sine - which is the sound every toy ray gun has ever made. The ship death was one band of filtered noise with a sine under it: thin, and over before the eye had finished with the explosion. What the rewrite adds, and why each part is there: - **Layers, not a waveform.** A bang is a crack, then a body, then a tail, and they have different lengths. One envelope over one source cannot be any of those. The explosions now run three clocks: the crack is done in a fifth of the length, the roar runs most of it, and sparse debris keeps falling afterwards so there is an aftermath rather than a stop. - **A sub.** Below about 80Hz is where "big" lives; without it an explosion is a hiss however loud you play it. Measured: **74%** of a ship death's energy and **86%** of a structure's now sits under 200Hz, against almost none before. - **Saturation.** Soft-clipping folds in harmonics, so a sound reads as loud rather than merely being loud - and stops the peak normalisation flattening everything into the same quiet mush. - **Detuned partials on the shot.** Three of them at deliberately wrong ratios beat against each other and read as a mechanism; the single sine was the whole of the toy problem. A noise transient and a sub thump underneath give it something to hit with. Lengths went up with the weight: ship death 0.85s -> 1.45s, structure 1.6s -> 2.3s, both audible to the end rather than gone in the first third. All of it is still `audio/make_sfx.py`, so if any of these is now too much it is a number and a re-run. And the CC0 packs listed on #146 remain a drop-in if you would rather have recorded sounds - `Sfx.gd` does not care which.

metaheavens closed this issue

2026-08-29 12:40:28 +00:00

metaheavens referenced this issue from a commit

2026-08-29 13:22:02 +00:00

#150, #151: the sounds were a toy and a puff, and both were fair

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metaheavens/spaceship#151

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