Status Update - Let there be sound!

Ah the power of sound, from the whip-crack of thunder, to the sweet lullaby of a nurturing mother, the ability of sound to influence us is evident.

Throughout the years Anarchy Online's creators spent a fair bit of time crafting all the creaks, cracks, whistles and thumps that go into the sound landscape of Anarchy Online. I have seered into my mind the sounds that the starter Engineer droids make ("do dooo do do do").. the confirmation your war droid gives when he's slain another target.

But one question has been how do we tap into the sound effects system of the Anarchy Online client, to allow for custom sound effects? At first glance this may seem like a trivial endeavour. A quick parousal of the `cd_image` directory will reveal a handful of sounds that can be customized. Replacing existing sounds may interest some, but whats most interesting to us is creating new sounds and triggering them from our servers. This will allow for more robust content creation at a future state (more on that next month). So the work needed to add new sounds to the client required a fair amount of developer grease to make happen.

Once we began to dig in we realized the client actually plays most sounds independently of the server, meaning the server does not explicitly tell the client to play a sound usually. But in some rare cases, the server does actually instruct client to play sounds. The team and I brainstormed on examples of this when we thought of some of the NPCs in the starter area. Low and behold we found a method in which the playfield engines can trigger sounds on player's clients. But once the request reaches the client, how does the client know which sound to play? It requires we rebuild the client's index of sound files to allow for additional sound entries to be added.

With a few days hard work, we've now got server triggered custom sound effects, ready to be recorded and introduced.

But where will we be using these sound effects? Old content? New content? More on this topic next month as we dig further into our new encounter system.

Until then, Portaler out!

Portaler

Developer | Co-Founder