I put up an article on basic sound synthesis yesterday. It had been requested by some folks. Touches on fundamental aspects of sound in general as well as more specific details relevant to classic retro waveforms and the kind of stuff sfxr does.

Thank to DrPetter’s sfxr app I managed to get a decent heli sound. After wrestling the XNA sound app, I got it to pitch with the heli’s thrust value. I got rid of the polygon objects and focus now on rectangles. perhaps I need some springs… hmm. Oh and I got to get some gameplay, important that one. Anyways I gotta catch a train, there is a x-mas “smorgasbord” waiting for me 110km south… ta ta!

I ported DrPetter’s excellent sfxr (info) to SDL, so it can now be compiled and run natively in Linux!

Download: sfxr-sdl.tar.gz

Just type ‘make’ to compile. You need SDL and GTK 2.

Been tinkering with this over the last couple of days.

EDIT: I’ve put up a proper page for sfxr on my homepage: http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/hp/project_sfxr.html

As the audio geek I am, I find it a bit unfortunate that most LD48 entries are usually silent. I figure it’s probably due to the authors not having a quick ‘n’ easy application at hand for making sound effects and therefore neglecting that aspect of the game in favor of code and, usually, graphics. Even simple sound effects can add a huge amount of immersion and fun to a game, though.

What I present here is, if you will, an MS Paint for sound effects… or something along those lines. It’s meant to make it dead easy for anyone to whip up a few simple sound effects and save them as .WAV files for playback using most game/media libraries like SDL or pygame.

Basic usage involves clicking the left-most buttons to automatically generate random sounds loosely targeted at certain categories. For more advanced users it’s possible to spend some additional time to manually create fairly varied and interesting sound effects.

The interface is based entirely around sliders for controlling sound parameters, along with a few buttons. Even if you don’t want to spend time learning about all the sliders you can still have some fun just hammering away at them and listening to the various sounds that come out.

Hopefully this will mean that there’s no longer any valid excuse for anyone to get N/A in sound!

Download: sfxr.zip (win32, 48 kB) - Latest update: 2007-12-15 (see screenshot)

EDIT: Apparently it sort of works in wine 0.9.50, though with some stability issues. Fortunately though, the good Gerry JJ/mjau managed to port it properly. Here’s a copy of his post:

I ported DrPetter’s excellent sfxr (info) to SDL, so it can now be compiled and run natively in Linux!

Download: sfxr-sdl.tar.gz

Just type ‘make’ to compile. You need SDL and GTK 2.

Source code is obviously included in the portable archive, and anyone is free to use or modify it for anything they please. There’s no need to credit me, although it would be nice if you did. I would also appreciate a little email note if you do create something cool based on my code.

If I get around to making a little update I’ll include source code in the win32 archive as well.