Sound Effects

[alexanderson1993]

There are two categories of sound effects.

UI Sound Effects

First, UI effects, which happen when you click or hover on buttons, change cards, drag sliders, etc. These sounds will be configured as part of a sound theme, or maybe associated directly with the theme itself. A sound player function will intercept click and hover events and play the sound if it exists.

UI Sounds include:

• Button Click
• Button Hover
• Card Change
• Notification
• Login
• Drag Slider
• Zoom

As the UI is built out, we’ll add more sound effect options.

Simulation Sound Effects

Second is simulation sound effects, which is everything that happens as part of the simulation - phasers firing, engine whine, torpedos, tractor beam, transporters, explosions, etc. These are defined and configured on a system-by-system basis. As events happen during the simulation, signals are sent to all of the connected clients to play the corresponding sound effects. These signals include starting a sound, making a sound loops, canceling a looping sound, or changing the properties of a playing sound.

These sounds need to be highly configurable to work for all possible sound effects. Possible configuration options include:

• A list of possible sound files to choose from
• The range of volume levels
• The range of playback rates
• The range of pitch change
• Whether the sound loops
• Whether new range values are chosen randomly for each loop
• Which audio channels the sound plays on, and how the sound is mixed.
• A delay between when the sound is triggered and when it plays.

Ranges will be chosen at random when the sound plays. It should also be possible to layer multiple sound configurations on top of each other to create composite sounds.

Most of these are features that are already present in Thorium Classic. They just need a nice way to configure them. I anticipate most setups will have a simple configuration, but adding advanced configuration doesn’t take much extra work.

Configuration

Individual clients should be able to configure how sounds work on their station:

• Set volume or mute for
  • All sounds and music
  • Music
  • UI sounds
  • Simulation sounds

This makes it easy for each client to choose how they want to handle sound effects. This lets individuals playing over the internet keep the whole aural experience with music and sound effects, players in a dedicated space just keep UI sound effects, and players with more than one client only have the music and simulation sound come through one of the clients.