The CCataSound project uses the open-source Csound audio synthesis toolkit to design and generate game sound effects and music for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.
Sounds and music in this repository are represented as plaintext Csound files, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
This project is in the early development phase. So far only a few sound effects have been created as a proof of concept.
Install Csound for your platform, and run csound demo.csd for a short
demonstration of existing sound effects, including exciting low-fi renditions of:
- Walking on dirt and grass
- Opening and closing a door
- Whiffing a stick through the air
Or you can skip installing and go to wapcaplet's Csound IDE page to hear the demo in your browser, or experiment with your own Csounds.
In theory Csound can generate not just approximations of real-world instruments and sounds, but any sound we can imagine - strange, otherworldly sounds, impossible to make with physical instruments.
In practice synthetic sound effects and music tend to be quite distinct from real-world recorded sounds and instruments; their artificiality is clear to most listeners. Well-crafted synth sounds can be convincingly realistic, but even the simplest real-world sounds are rich with harmonic changes over time, and difficult to model with synthesizers.
Thus the design philosophy of CCataSound is to create sounds that are evocative and believable, if not entirely accurate or realistic.
Many Cataclysm phenomena - giant insects, electrified zombies, and portal storms - are weird and fantastic, and CDDA leans into that for gameplay effect. CCataSound should do as well, and take advantage of the bottomless reservoir of sonic possibility that Csound provides.
See the Style Guide for recommended Csound coding style.
Csound:
- The Csound FLOSS Manual (CC-BY 4.0)
- Csound Realtime Examples (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 International)
- Csound Web IDE and Demo by Steven Yi
- Cabbage cross-platform Csound framework (with examples licensed CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 International)
- The Csound Book, Chapter 1
- The Canonical Csound Reference Manual
- Csound Algorithmic Composition Tutorial by Michael Gogins
Pure Data:
- Pure Data FLOSS manual (GNU GPL v2)
Sound design:
- Designing Sound by Andy Farnell, with Pure Data Code Examples from the book