Hello everyone!
Here is a recap of what I’ve done so far 🙂
(Original public post on Patreon with the video mentioned here).
The Gate
I’m still working on the editor but I also started to add sounds to the game, as you can see from the video.
Right now I’ve added sounds to the hero, I still have to add more sounds to enemies, doors, terminals and so on… I’ve enumerated them and they should be something like 80 sounds!
Some sounds will be “fixed”, like the hero sounds, some will be dynamic and dependant from the map, like the doors sounds, the enemy sounds and the ambience sounds.
I spent some time to plan how to handle them, because mapping all the sound effects to the limited 4 channels of the Amiga is not a joke, the main problem was to handle carefully looping sounds in a way that they are not interrupted by a one-shot sound, so I mapped looping sounds on channel 3 & 4 taking into account when I have the two looping sounds playing at the same time, for example I’m in this situation when the hero is running (footsteps is a looping sound) and at the same time he is using the shield (another looping sound) or the Regen tool (like showed in the video).
Initially I planned to use two channels for sound effects and 2 channels for the music, but with the built in AMOS Pro audio handling is pretty impossible unless I try to use an assembler real-time sound mixing routine like some really nice person has suggested on Mastodon.
I may try, I’m not new to assembler, but we are talking of many, many years ago and I don’t want to delay too much this game which is already out of my planned development time 😀
Countless hours has gone into the search for sounds, wav sounds, and converting them to the Amiga’s IFF native format: for this task I used Audacity and I thought to share the process I used with you because it something that could be useful to everyone 🙂
How to convert WAV sound for the Amiga
So, here is the process with a bunch of screenshots. Even if my GUI interface is in Italian you should not have problems following it:
[1] Open Audacity
Above you can see the main interface: it’s really important that you have an eye on the left lower “Project Frequency” box because it must be set to 11025 or your samples will be exported wrongly.
Sometimes it could be changed automatically after loading a sample, so check it often!
[2] Load a sample in any Audacity’sì supported format
In my case I loaded WAV samples, but you can load MP3 or any other format you want to convert.
Select “Open” from the “File” menu and load your sample:
[3] If needed convert to a mono audio file
If the loaded sample is a stereo sample you need to convert it to mono: it’s easy, just select “Mix from stereo to mono” from the “Track” menu, like this:
[4] Apply any effect you want
In my case I use always the “Amplify” effect to maximize the audio signal and make them all at the same level: even this step is pretty easy, just “Select All” to select the entire wave form with the menu “Select -> All” or hitting the CTRL+A combo:
Now you can select the effect to apply from the “Effects” menu, like this:
In my case I’ve selected “Amplify” and a GUI will be displayed to let you change the effect’s parameters: in my case you should confirm the default values that try to maximize the volume trying to avoid clipping:
[5] Export to Amiga format
After you have finished with your sample editing you can export to Amiga format.
Ensure that the project frequency is set to 11025 Hz and you are ready to export the sound.
From the “File” menu select “Export -> Export Audio…” option and a requester will be displayed:
Above you can see the save requester, it’s important to select the right options:
– Header : Amiga IFF
– Encoding : Signed 8-bit PCM
Type a name for your sample and you are done!
How to use converted samples with AMOS Pro
Now that you have all the samples in IFF format you have to create a Sample Bank from within AMOS Pro using the inbuilt tool called “Sample Maker”.
Open AMOS Pro and launch the Sample Maker tool from the User’s menu, like this:
The program will be loaded and will show you its interface:
Like all AMOS tools, even if really useful, are not very intuitive so I thought to give you some hints about the most common buttons that, unfortunately, does not have any captions.
Starting from scratch the Sample List will be empty, so the first step is to load one of the converted IFF samples using the Load Sample icon, a load requester will be displayed:
Select the file you want to load and the waveform will be displayed in the left black box.
I suggest you to give a name to the sample so that when you will insert it into the sample list you will be able to recognize it quickly.
To name/rename the current loaded sample push the button with the “Name” text.
Now, if you want to make some adjustments to the sample with the available tools you are free to edit it, when you are ready you have to insert the sample into the sample list (which is a representation of the Sample Bank you are creating/editing).
For this you have to:
[1] Select a sample (or the EMPTY text) on the sample list with ONE click[2] Push the big button with the red arrow pointing to the right to add the sample in the Sample Bank, it will be inserted just above the sample you selected in step [1].
Now load another sample and go on until your Sample Bank is ready.
The final step is to save the Sample Bank using the right button to Save or Save As the bank in Abk format.
Here is a screenshot of the sample bank I’m using with my game:
Other stuff I’m working on
There a couple of things I’m working on, here is just a quick list because I’ll write a proper post about them when they will be available.
- COMAL for Amiga : I’ve almost finished to rewrite the user manual originally provided as a plain text file, I’ll share it in HTML and Markdown format for better accessibility.
- AMCAF & TURBO Plus Extension : The same as above, I’ll share a browseable document as soon as I’ve finished with them.
- RPG Engine : I’ve resumed an old project written with Hollywood-MAL for an RPG Engine completely customizable, there is a plan for it, but I’m working on it when I have some spare time (rarely).
Here is a screenshot of the tool I’m using to rewrite the documentation mentioned above, it’s called TriliumNotes and it’s available for free (and it’s open source too).
I’ve decided to make this post public because I think it’s pretty important for every Amigans to know how to convert a sample in IFF format using a common tool like Audacity 🙂
Thank you guys/gals for the support!
