Ambient Sound

[Dahak]

Is there a way to change the ambient sound from within the game?

[Ephesos]

As far as I am aware, you can only toggle it on or off.

[Dahak]

Ah well.

[Niemand]

You can play a sound in the background, but you won't be able to get any notification of when it finishes to be able to loop it nicely.

[Nioca]

set_incidental_sound(x);

 

(Where x is the number of the sound you want to play.)

[Ephesos]

...according to the documentation, that only accepts values of 1 and 0, which turn it on and off.

[Nioca]

Crap. I know it's been done before... I'll have to get back to this one.

[nikki.]

Arancaytar did it in Express Delivery:

 

Code:

if (condition) == 1)	{	set_incidental_sound(1); // turn off normal sounds	play_sound(-150); // play another ambient sound	}

 

You could remove the condition, or set in a timer so that the sound will play again after a certain amount of ticks, or even turn incidental sounds back on.

[Niemand]

The trouble with this is what I mentioned above as far as I can tell. Your replacement sound will play once, then stop, and you'll get no indication of when that happens. Replaying the sound after a number of ticks is what I did in Stairway, but it doesn't really work very well since if the player decides to move around rapidly you'll cut off the sound to start it again, or if the player moves slowly there may be a lengthy period when the sound doesn't play at all. It functions, but not elegantly.

[Dahak]

And there is no is_sound_playing or current_sound calls... Bleh.

[Aran]

I did it like Niemand and Nikki said - restart it after a tick-timer that relied on an imprecise, empirical estimate of how quickly the party would explore.

 

If I had to do it again with more time, I'd probably just split the town instead. In my use case, it was done by walking through a door, which would have made a staircase feasible.

 

If you have a special event that changes it, duplicate towns are less nice - the mini-map will reset. I suppose the player might forgive the discontinuity if the intervening event (cutscene, big combat) is significant enough.