Dynamic Footstep Surface

[ac-arcana]

For a previous project, I made a system for dynamic footstep sounds from different surfaces. I also pulled sound effects for a lot of different surfaces off of freesound, all cc0.

The system uses a raycast and if it hits an object it checks if the object has a Footstep Surface. The Footstep surface is placed on walkable objects, and it has a reference to an audio stream randomizer. By saving audio stream randomizers as resources, they can be assigned to a footstep surface.

Its a simple system but allows for new surfaces to be added easily with a new resource file.

Could I contribute this system to the project?

[Bezoika]

This is something I would love to be able to utilize.

[Phazorknight]

Great idea! Would love to have something like this in Cogito!

I'm curious about having to add a FootStep surface to walkable objects. This seems like it could get tedious over time.
I'm wondering if there might be a better way.
For example, would it be possible to create a Resource that stores a kind of dictionary or something to link up Materials with a Footstep Surface? That way, any object that has a Material applied can immediately be recognized by the footstep system without having to check every object.

Besides this, if you decided to work on creating something like this for COGITO, here are a few housekeeping items to keep in mind to make sure we could integrate this smoothly:

• Have its own directory inside the COGITO dir, so something like /COGITO/FootstepSystem/
  then any subdirs you need for scripts, resources and assets inisde that directory.
  Ideally include a small demo scene in there as well.

• If you include sounds, please double check licenses and attributions. Also keep it to a handful examples (3 or 4) with a small number of variations to keep the overall project filesize down. Using SFX in the .ogg format also helps a lot.

[ac-arcana]

For example, would it be possible to create a Resource that stores a kind of dictionary or something to link up Materials with a Footstep Surface? That way, any object that has a Material applied can immediately be recognized by the footstep system without having to check every object.

Yes, I'm sure this could be a separate resource file type as well. It shouldn't be too hard.

I have used cc0 sounds from freesound in the past. I'm certain what I grabbed is cc0 because I am often concerned with licenses, as attribution is important if requested.

I'll start working on this as a contribution :)

[ac-arcana]

I'm just writing some documentation before commiting.

https://youtu.be/OhGR8THzF54

[ac-arcana]

Pull request is in
#58

[Phazorknight]

Wanted to add this here:
@ac-arcana implemented this amazing system and as of this commit: f8d4f01

Thank you again for this amazing addition!

[BryceBarbara]

@ac-arcana @Phazorknight I wonder if we could expand the system to be used for things like dynamic impact sounds based on the material being hit? Here's a comment in the godot repo that is explaining how the source engine does it.

[ac-arcana]

That could probably done without too much difficultly to be honest. Off the top of my head the sound definitions would work the same way and we could do a raycast from the object when it impacts towards the impact direction to check for surfaces. It would not be very performant with large numbers of items though.

I've not found much time for programming this summer but I will look at this when I get around to coding. If someone else wants to tackle it first, go for it.