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Development Forum Interest in an Audio Overhaul For C3/DS?    Alkalide        2/22/2018  1 After nearly nearly 15 years away, I finally got back into Creatures, having bought Creatures Exodus on GOG just the other day. The game has aged pretty well visually, but the audio... not so much. Listening to the relatively low (and surprisingly inconsistent) quality of the audio samples had me importing the worst offenders into my audio editing program and trying to clean them up. Unfortunately, they're proving rather hard to clean up, it turns out. I'm not an audio engineer, but I do a fair amount of audio recording, mixing and mastering (as well as designing synthesizer patches) for my personal electronic music production. Given that, I was wondering if there was anyone else here in the Creatures community that would be interested and/or able to contribute to an audio overhaul project for C3/DS. At the moment, I'm just collecting high(er) quality freely-available sound effects and making attempts to synthesize others in my DAW, but there're some things I'm just not equipped or trained to handle (like vocal sound effects, for example.) Ideally, I'd like to replace every sound in each game with high quality ones that meet CD-Quality standards (44.1 kHz, 16-bit PCM .WAV files.) Any suggestions for the project or interest in contributing would be great. Let me know what you think, and if you'd like to help, that's even better!   Patient Pirate ylukyun Manager   2/22/2018  1 It's a great idea. However, the engine has certain hard-coded limitations when it comes to playing .WAV files, so I'm not sure how far you'll get. More info here: http://creaturescaves.com/community.php?section=Resources&view=77   xan   2/22/2018 I don't think it's a bad idea. Even if the current engine has a bitrate cap, a future replacement engine might be more capable. But I think you might be mistaking some sloppy audio for random ineptitude when it's actually just nostalgia; much of the more compressed audio is brought directly up from Creatures 1, eg. the voices you've already noticed. Which isn't to say replacing that sound has no value-- plenty of people never played C1, especially now. (Maybe you have and it just makes your ears itch anyway.) But it would be wise to keep in mind while remastering. You may actually be able to indirectly answer a question I've had for a very long time -- much C3DS audio is clearly either based on or directly from stock, as I've heard it in countless other games, movies, TV series over the years. Tracking down that stock source may yield higher quality samples with no recording overhead.   Alkalide     2/23/2018 Looking at the audio format the engine uses, I guess it's not possible to upgrade sounds to CD-quality like I'd hoped. That's a bit disappointing, but not surprising, given the games' age and the hardware limitations back then. But, I can at least make the new sounds as high-quality as the engine will allow, and standardize them to that.   Pixis     2/23/2018 Finding the stock sounds might not be a bad idea. I always find myself caught off guard when I hear a sound in a game or movie and think "Oh, jeez, that sound is in Creatures!" I would definitely be interested in trying out some kind of audio overhaul, if it works. It would be pretty interesting to see (hear?), anyway!

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