UGMT/Tutorial

Sound/Music

Let's explore the sound plugin (but don't select it yet). Suppose we want our group to visit Alf. We are not there yet, but using the travel plugin, we can quickly make them be there. Once your group enters the circle around Alf, his friendly dog starts to bark. Turn to the sound plugin and look at it's right panel. You will see three lines. The uppermost contains the name "Alf...". Check the right check-box to make the dog bark a final time. Each line starts with a check-box. If you uncheck it, the line vanishes. So don't do that, if you just want to modify a few things. Next you will see a selection box of all your sound to choose from. There are only two sounds pre-installed, but you can add any number of wav-, au-, and aif-files in the appropriate directory. The second selection gives you the so-called primary key. You can key a sound to weather effects, locations (such as Alf's) and Events from the Calendar. After you have chosen one, you need to give the name of the condition in the next field. You can enter any string you like, but be careful that you enter things faithfully, or you wont here a sound. For instance, the trailing "[9]" with Alf is important. There are only a few weather conditions, such as the blizzard shown, so you use a (safer) selection box, instead of an edit field here.

Since spelling such things is error prone, there is a more elegant way to key sounds. You can either go to the calendar plugin and make a popup appear on a particular event. Select "Sound Trigger" and a new line will appear in the sound plugin, keyed to that event. The sound plugin even comes to the front so you can edit the remainder of the line. The same is true for locations. Just choose the "Sound trigger" popup menu entry in the index plugin for the index entry of your choice. (Note that the entry should have a location on some map, otherwise the trigger would be set up in vain.)

The weather data depends on your own random generation process. But take a look when the next blizzard occurs and go there. Now you hear thunder and rain. You can also make Sparky bark in the rain, if you wish. Adjust the volume for each by moving the sliders. You will notice that the volume for the blizzard does not change. In fact, some encodings for sounds do not allow that you dynamically change the volume. For illustration, this is one. If you have a huge selection of conditions and sounds, the plugin will have a gray background for all actively running sounds to show you what's going on. Last, take a look at the base line, which always has gray background. You can turn your favorite background music on or off here. No background music is supplied, do it yourself. But remember MP3 is not supported.