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Crusader Kings III Dev Diary #54 - A Sound Plan

A Sound Plan

Welcome to another Dev Diary from the Audio Department! Now that Northern Lords is out in the world, we can share some behind the scenes on what went on during development for the Flavourpack.

We are going to talk about Field recording, The Sound design of the Event Images, some 1.3 patch updates, and of course, the music from Andreas Waldetoft.

So if that is your cup of tea (or mead), then be our guest and follow along in this Dev Diary!

SFX
Field Recording:
We decided early on in the production that we wanted genuine ambiences for the event backgrounds, which meant that source recordings were required.
The recordings were conducted over a span of two days in a cold desolate “Vik” (Bay area) in the west coast called Onsala as it is currently known (Coming from “Odin's Sala” which translates to “The Halls of Odin” in Viking times) Which is my home area where I grew up.

First of all, is preparation, what do you need for the recording session, and how light do you need to travel? (You don’t want to carry an entire audio studio on your back if you are tracking through forests and fields. Light is fast, and your back will thank you).

I ended up using two handheld recorders, some lightweight stands, and an Ambisonic Microphone (a 4-way microphone array that captures audio in all directions, not unlike a VR camera, but for audio)

That way I can position the location in post-production, and not worry if I did or didn’t capture something outside the audibility of a regular microphone.

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Picture 1: equipment test and packing day

During the pandemic, there were minimal planes, cars, or any activity for that matter, which made it ideal for recording audio. it was just me, nature, and my recorders.

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Picture 2: Recording rig deployed on one location site.

Placing yourself among Vikings wasn’t hard at all, and at times almost serene. Listening to the waves roll in on the shores is something quite special and I highly recommend it, if you can spare the time.

Northern Lords Audio Field Recording Session

Event-images
After the field recording was concluded, the source material was processed and implemented to be the backgrounds for the event images that appear in the Northern Lords Pack.
Each event image has a unique evolving loop that places you right in the center of the area. Whether it is out on the windy ocean, the stone pebbled shore, or in a pigsty prison!
Videos of the different event images in the game during development:


All of these are crafted in our sound design tools and then “performed” by Fmod.
It can scatter the birds you hear, the insects that pass you by, or how windy the ocean is. All to make each event appearance as unique as possible, while still being in the same “space”.


Map Ambience
As part of the 1.3 update patch, winter now affects the map, and so does the audio, as shown in Dev Diary #49: A cold Embrace. Have a look at how the Winter sprawls with heavy snowstorms, and how the audible townspeople disappear from the outside and into the hearths and the warmth.

We also updated the ambience system to a procedural system. That we call the
Map Ambience System. (Highly technical terminology at play here)

It is driven by the game camera, that scans the terrain of all visible provinces, determines what amount of a specific terrain type the camera can see at any point in time, and generates a percentage value that then gets translated into a Fmod parameter that is connected to the Master Ambience Event.

All this fancy talk boils down to, rather than us having us placing hundreds of audio emitters on the map at strategic locations (we did, and let me tell you, that is labor-intensive!) The game tells the audio middleware (Fmod) what to play, when, where and how much.

And now, over to Andreas, our Senior Music Composer!


MUSIC

Hi all, Andreas Waldetoft here,

I’m glad to be talking about the music that we wrote for the Northern Lords

In this Flavourpack, we recorded authentic old instruments from the time era, like the lovely Mungiga (translates to Mouth-Harp or Jaw-Harp) different kind of flutes, Swedish bagpipes, fiddles such as a Keyed Fiddle and Hardanger Fiddle, a Throat singer and not to forget a Viking Choir singing in Norse.

Recording anything in a pandemic is not an easy feat, especially with varying amounts of lockdown, for example, Kalabalik, our medieval session musicians and skalds for hire, did a fantastic job recording themselves from a home setting. Below are some images of the instruments that made an appearance in the score:


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Picture 1: Mouth Harps

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Picture 2: Closeup Nyckelharpa

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Picture 3: Overview of some of the live instruments included in the soundtrack

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Picture 4: Studio Deepwods, Also known as my composing lair

We are all so happy and grateful for the result and prove that music can be done anywhere, and what matters is that the soul of the music is there.
What you as the player will hear are Three new mood tracks called Drakkar, Scandinavia, and The Feast and One new cue track called The Raid.
The nifty thing with our music system is that both Scandinavia and The Raid have different versions that vary between themselves, so there will be variations that play intermittently during a game-session.

I'll leave you all with this, The cue called The Raid. Enjoy!


That is all from us in the Audio Department, until next time!
 
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Slightly OT, but I am always intrigued by how many totally different cultures have used a mouth arp of some kind (the mungiga, the guimbarde in France, the marranzano in Sicily... and I'm sure I am forgetting others).

Does anyone know more about the history of this fascinating instrument?
 
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I haven't got northern lords yet is the music there better than the one from the base game? Because I feel the ambience music from the base game is not particularly exciting. I prefer music with a bit of a melody.
 
I hope you bring back Sabaton, CK and sabaton go together like peanutbutter and jelly, bread and chocolate spread, it works! :D
I hope the Christmas music pack is in there. But I doubt it I feel they went with incredibly generic mood music instead.
 
People play without the sound on?
I could even say that the music itself is considerable part of what attracts to PDX games. It was definitely true in my case. I have all possible FLACs copied and added to Rhytmbox (Linux).
The other soundtrack that makes the game unique is Factorio one.
The first thing I do with any game I install is turn off the music. I remember refunding Call of Duty many years ago because of Activision's moronic decision to not have a separate music volume slider or any other way to mute it in the game. Some people love the music, some people don't care either way, and some people don't want it at all. That is why options are so important.

Which leads to another area of my disappointment with CK3. Having all the sound effects bundled inside of proprietary .BANK files without any other method to turn off individual sound effects in the game ( ie. configuration text files ) means that to avoid certain persistent ambient sounds that annoy me I basically have to disable all of them by removing the .BANK files themselves.
 
The first thing I do with any game I install is turn off the music. I remember refunding Call of Duty many years ago because of Activision's moronic decision to not have a separate music volume slider or any other way to mute it in the game. Some people love the music, some people don't care either way, and some people don't want it at all. That is why options are so important.

Which leads to another area of my disappointment with CK3. Having all the sound effects bundled inside of proprietary .BANK files without any other method to turn off individual sound effects in the game ( ie. configuration text files ) means that to avoid certain persistent ambient sounds that annoy me I basically have to disable all of them by removing the .BANK files themselves.
You're telling me you played AoE II with no music?
 
You're telling me you played AoE II with no music?
No, I didn't play AoE II. Regardless of that, no, I don't play any game with music on. If I had played AoE II, I would have turned the music off. I don't like music while I'm playing a game, period. Hell, I was looking for ways to mod the radios in Fallout 4 to always be off so that I didn't have to listen to their music when passing by them.
 
Never realized how much work went into the audio of games. Always nice to peek behind the curtain.
 
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had to make an account just to say, THIS SHIT IS STRAIGHT GAS! northern lords is such a small area and time frame before the christ god destroys everything but it feels like a whole different world. i'm singing and dancing and turning up in my chair while i hit the DUCHY CONQUEST war. while i hit that GRAND BLOT. when i swerve that, MATRILINEAL MARRIAGE TO SWEDEN. WHEN I FEAST. SON KILLS A COMMONER ON THE HUNT? NAH. NAH. I AINT BOUT DAT. LOOKS LIKE THE WOLF GOT YOU BOTH, LIL DAWG. YOOOOHH! AEI AEI OOOHG AYYY! AEIUH HOO AYY! EE AEI AEI OO AYY! EEE AEIUH HOO AYYY!
 
had to make an account just to say, THIS SHIT IS STRAIGHT GAS! northern lords is such a small area and time frame before the christ god destroys everything but it feels like a whole different world. i'm singing and dancing and turning up in my chair while i hit the DUCHY CONQUEST war. while i hit that GRAND BLOT. when i swerve that, MATRILINEAL MARRIAGE TO SWEDEN. WHEN I FEAST. SON KILLS A COMMONER ON THE HUNT? NAH. NAH. I AINT BOUT DAT. LOOKS LIKE THE WOLF GOT YOU BOTH, LIL DAWG. YOOOOHH! AEI AEI OOOHG AYYY! AEIUH HOO AYY! EE AEI AEI OO AYY! EEE AEIUH HOO AYYY!
Understandable, have a nice day