Resignation
 

I've decided to leave the Era staff team. At this current moment in time, it doesn't strike me as a server that will benefit music and sound effects aren't a high demand there either. There's not really any point if I just sit there on RC day after day answering questions and uploading custom uploads really is there? They have staff for that :P I'd like to say thank you to Naack for hiring me in the first place, and a big thanks to Tim_Rocks for being an excellent manager. And also a big shout out to the staff, who constantly act as if they're high on steroids. Love you all, and thanks for the opportunity! People who I won't (maybe even can't) forget:

• Tim_Rocks
• Name
• Reproduced
• Zach!
• Booger
• Mesh_P2P (AKA Too Pro For Mofo)

If Tim_Rocks allows it, the new Sounds and Music team admin will be Booger who has proven himself to me to be an amazing musician, and generally a friendly guy all round. Congratulations to him!

omg way to steal my sig :mad:. I expect this from alf, but you..... DISAPOINTED

Sounds positions on servers are such jokes.

edit: lol a resign thread for only working at the server for a (noticeable) couple months?

^ ^ ^ That's like having a History book full of Math problems; USELESS.

but...but... D:

hey you stole my piano!! ;[

I disagree :(

Same here.

Believe it or not guys, but Sounds are also a heavy part of bringing atmosphere.

Even some 8bit music in the background for a server can bring a nice feeling for a gameplay experience if it's subtle and enjoyable enough.

If we had a resignation thread for every time someone quit a job (not even of managerial position) on a server our forums would just be a spam box. Can't you just quietly go, tell the people you care about that you are leaving, and then vanish? Why must you beg for peoples attention.

Don't give your attention to it, then. There are tons of threads here that I completely ignore every day through the "New Posts" search. 1 more wouldn't kill me if I didn't desire paying any mind to this one.

Also, yes. A SFX staff member is equally as important as an LAT. You take for granted that which you care so little about. Shoot your gun and there's no sound? You'll complain even harder.

Your work is appreciated, Emera.

Depends on the quality of the work to be honest. A Sounds member who searches youtube for "gun sounds" should not be as looked up upon as a level designer or graphic artist.

But Emera did his work and made some nice sounding music which is indeed equally important as a LAT.

"Sounds positions on Graal are such jokes because it's an often neglected field of development that barely reaches a bar worth noticing," is probably more accurate.

Sound is an important part of Graal. Proper sound effects make actions feel more alive, and fitting music can improve the atmosphere of an area tenfold if done right. However both of these fields are mostly just tossed aside when developing and when they are given any attention rarely do you see a quality person doing the work, meaning probably doing more damage than if there were any sound.

So basically what you're saying is because people don't know when the sound is usually appropriate towards the game itself, it's neglected? Am I getting that right?

It would be nice to have a "idle" background sfx, something relaxing, then when you starting pking, or are in pk-heavy areas, or a group of pkers are near coming near you, a heavy more sfx background can be used. but don't make it rap or death metal etc, it would have to be simple orchestra/jazzy tempos.

I'm saying that when people work on a server, or even in game development itself, music/sfx are usually put on the back burner to focus on more important things like graphics and coding. This is especially true on Graal where there aren't very many sound artists floating about so you either have to settle with crappy stef midis or no music at all. It's neglected because it's rarely given the attention of other development fields. Especially when money is involved... "hmm should I split my budget and get a graphics artist and a sound artist or put all my money towards graphics? Sound isn't that big of a deal, graphics are what sell the game..." sort of mentality is pretty common.

Graphics > Sound mentality is generally because people in games consciously will care more for the video games, but think of how many games are actually good for the fact their music was as well, it's more of a subconscious notice for most then others. At least that's my belief.

But what is the entire point of what you're trying to stay, Graphics are usually taken higher in priority then Sounds due to what the people believe they want?
I'm merely trying to understand entirely what you're stating, sorry If I seem ignorant on getting it.

It's not so much that graphics take priority as sound is just... forgotten and/or neglected. Most of the time it's not even something that is heavily considered. When you first think of a server what do you do? You think up gameplay... maybe some story and you think of how awesome it could potentially look. But how often do you think about what it would SOUND like? Probably not often.

What I'm saying is that other fields of development get much more attention then sound, if sound even gets any. That's pretty much it in a nutshell. I say this because Graal's reputation with sound is poor and thus reflects poorly on the entire development field... while in reality sound can be just as important as any graphics or gameplay.

Considering I'm an animations guy, I do extremely often, because of the fact these animations by themselves are garbage, Think how the default ganis all have some form of sound, Example: Walk; this gani has a rather repetitive movement sound that sounds like someone is tapping their finger on a desk, this isn't quite right when you're moving over dirt, grass, mud, sand and Etcetera. Because of the fact I don't even hear what's quite going on as I move, I become quite confused and assume to just turn off my sound. There shouldn't even be a walk sound in the walk gani, that should've been handled by some form of tile detection script to play a sound for as long as you're on that type of tile for said level/gmap and such. Of course I'm going to think of gameplay, that does take some more priority than sounds, but sounds aren't that far down on the chain (For me)

Personally this is my Point of View of how development could/should chain down for a Graal RPG styled server.

Story/Concept Work(Pre-Planning Work) > Scripting == Graphics > Levels > Animations > Sounds

Yet Graal's usual standard (From my PoV, not talking for all) follows more to..
Graphics == Scripts < Levels>Animations(If Touched at all!) < Story/Concept Work(If Touched at all!) > Sounds(If Touched at all!)

Of course feel free to agree or disagree with me on that, but that's how I think it should go for a Team of people who are trying to create a legitimate game of this base.
I agree with you 100%.
Graal does have a ****ty reputation for sounds, because the default ganis have terrible sounds in place, I bet if better sounds replaced the default, it would be more acceptable and enjoyable to play with sounds on. Now it's up to everybody else to think about whether it's acceptable for everything (Imo, it's not the best way to go).


Also, Don'tcha think it would make more sense to have this kind of discussion in a seperate thread? lol

I think there is a pretty large gap between LAT and sound as far as necessity.

sound/music creators are a huge part of any game, but and if only major contributions were made...
in this case i do not know what or what not Emera did, just stating my opinion on a sounds administration position.


also for people saying sounds are non important. think about logging in to your favorite server...just sitting around in the start level or the home town or favorite hang out of your server....is that melody playing through your head right now? yup, it is.

Bomboria music is still in my head!

Graal's sounds have always annoyed me, so my SFX and music volumes are all the way down and I just put on my own music. Just me.


Don't you think threads should be able to change topic? Go with the flow in a ways? I believe what is being said is on topic anyways even if it doesn't have much to do with Emera.

I think they can, but it would allow a further extension of the current portion of topic at hand. Does that answer your question?

Well what is being said is relevant to the original topic so there is really no need to make a new thread then :)

That's debatable.

Most "sound effects" people (that I've encountered) just take the effects from places online, that is why it's a joke position to me. I can steal my own sound effects tyvm.

Also would like to hear what was actually accomplished by being a sounds admin on Era.

Great, more things for Tim to make a mute for and reasons for me to use my mute Graal hotkey.

`-`

Bye though, you were a cool guy to have around.

so u didnt even change any gun sounds?

Good bye! <3

I wasn't aware there were any sounds that needed to be changed.

Like I said, sadly comes down to bad reputation. And someone touched before about most people muting Graal, and that's also true. When I start developing I think about fitting music and I'm not sure if I can ever get that accomplished but then reality sets in that if I make the sound experience the best possible, no one's probably going to hear it because the rest of the game sounds like **** that forces everyone to mute.

Just to throw in some statistics, here's the current distribution of "SFX" volumes on Era (76 players online):

http://uploads.graalcenter.org/upload/sfxera.png

The horizontal axis is the range percentage; I grouped players at similar range levels to simplify the graph. The vertical axis is the number of players who fell in that range.

Era has some of the worst sound effects on Graal, so I'm kind of surprised by this—I always play with sound off and figured more players did as well.

But does this take into effect people who simply have their computer muted, or have Graal muted in their mixer? (Rherotical, since I know you can't grab this data)

I know I typically just have my computer muted when I play Graal. Though I NEVER have music in Graal turned on. Sound effects are tolerable, but it'd be nice to see that same graph with the specific sound formats(midi, mp3, wav).

PS you're turning into Google.

You're right that some players may mute their computers, there's no way to test this, but I kind of doubt it's a lot of players.

http://uploads.graalcenter.org/upload/erasfxfull.png

This is with 78 players online.

Those are some ballsy players, but on the other hand I guess not many servers use midi/mp3s at all. Hell even mines are turned up to like 20%.

i bet a lot of those players have sfx on by default but aren't hearing anything because of the 64bit line they didn't enable

Likewise.

This is where a lot of people confuse opinion and fact in this thread and other threads where opinions run wild. Believing that since they do something, "more people do it, too". I agree that the SFX on Era is rather terrible, but my volume levels in-game only reflect the volume levels I can stand blaring in my ear with headphones in while the Stereo Mix level on my computer is set at 75% on top of that.

Everything buy SFX is at 0% for me, SFX is normally at 60-80%.

sfx rly means nothing since any modern computer can go from 0 to 100% volume
and volume has zero use on era, i advise anyone playing to alternate volume on/off every half an hour in order to limit monotony