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I tried it just now, and got the same error. Thanks for writing about it. The server is being worked on, so stuff may go up and down. Please be patient ?

I was worried this would still be present. Well, that certainly gives some level of hope. Should I tell her to record a sample of the room audio from the room she uses for recording ? (There's enough time, she'll be away between the 21st and 25th, so no rush.)

I'm confident I could remove the hum. Just need a sample of the room audio to capture the hum, then use that sample to only filter the hum out. I did that with all my recordings back in the day.

It's a lot better, but you can still hear it. Close your eyes and see if you can tell when the file stops playing.

you should only sell royalty rights and not copy protect rights as that leads to a dark in dirty tunnel where the mod would be banned from using the sound effects and music that originated in the mod. Selling the other rights means the mod would lose the rights to use them.

In regards to the ambients I dug through the soundsahders and found the authors of each of those files you mentioned: gregorian - Muze ss_catacombs - ShadowSneaker ss_derelic - ShadowSneaker underground_darkness_loop - Schatten basement01_loop - Schatten church - mrDischarged As for tracking down those authors to purchase royalty rights? I'm unsure. Maybe someone else on the team can help out there, or a google search might point you in the right direction. Also for the sound effects that's a whole other ball of wax. Each of those are typically sourced on a commercial-free license and come from a large variety of places such as freesound and sometimes ones that individual authors have recorded. We don't have a purchase system setup as money never changes hands here, and tracking down the authors for those would take a long time. If you had individual sound files you were interested in, you might be able to track down those authors, but you would have to go to each of those. As i'm pretty sure we don't own any of the music/sfx included with the game.

Oh no, I don't mean to discourage anyone from testing, but there's a huge difference between any feedback and quality feedback – and that's dev's time. This is even more important in non-professional environment, since everyone here does it in their free time, so any effort not to waste it is very, very appreciated. Bugtracker is more for developers, so they can easily move through a logically structured documentation about problems and their causes. If you don't have time to contribute towards that, it's fine, you can always mention your problems casually in the forums, and at some point someone else will document it properly

Read frictional Games blog entries about what makes good horror, they are gold. This is some of the things i think about what makes good horror, in a horror game a good story is important, is used to catch the player and make him want to continue in spite of the fear. Good Horror gameplay to me is the following, never but never overuse cheap scares like jumpscares, never use monster closets, etc, horror should come from the situations/environment the player is in, not from sudden loud bangs and things flying at the player face. In a slow paced horror game never over expose your monsters, use the player mind against them, if they don't know what the full monster looks like their mind will fill the gaps and more times than not they will make them be more scary than they really are. Don't make the player into a killing machine that destroys any fear the player has about the monsters.

I found this awhile ago, and thought it was a really interesting look at what can make an effectively terrifying gaming experience: One of the things I try to ascribe to when designing spooptacular levels is to try to keep players in the dark (mostly figuratively, sometimes literally...). At times, the scariest thing you can do is let the player's imagination run wild, as mentioned in the above video. The Cradle from TDS, for example, does this perfectly; the opening section has no enemies to speak of, but the creepy ambient sounds, atmosphere, worried commentary, and scripted events give us a taste of what we can expect while leaving us guessing as to what we'll eventually find ourselves up against. First playthrough, most players are likely psyching themselves out, wondering what horrible thing is waiting for them around the corner. Doing this in TDM, you'd probably have to keep a few things in mind. 1. Fear stems from powerlessness. The more in control you are, the less afraid you'll be. To branch off that, veteran players will likely be harder to scare than newer players, since they're the ones who know how things work (e.g. I can consistently dance rings around the zombies in Thief, since I'm now very familiar with their behavior). This is why the alien in Alien: Isolation works so well; because it adapts to your actions, even seasoned players never quite know what it's going to do, therefore making it completely unpredictable and bringing back that element of tension. I don't know that it's possible to vary TDM AI behavior like that, but I will say that implementing something new or very infrequently seen could be an effective strategy for scaring players. 2. Jumpscares can be effective, but are ultimately cheap. I'd say limit them to maybe one per mission, if even. Any more just gets old. 3. Gradually easing players into it might potentially be effective. My hypothesis is that slowly building up tension (e.g. through notes that get progressively more disturbing as you go) vs dumping it all on at once can cause that uneasy feeling to creep up on them unconsciously, but that could be up for debate. 4. Environmental storytelling will likely play a big part in setting the mood. Just setting up a small scene in a single room (e.g. the fireplace is all charred, the tools have been knocked over, the grate is crooked, the curtains over there are scorched, and there's a trail of ash and burnt charcoal leading to that door over yonder...) can build on the sense of wrongness and get the player asking "what happened here... or do I even want to know?". 5. Different things will scare different people. Some folks are total arachnophobes. Others really hate creepy dolls, or shadow people, or undead, etc. I don't know if it's worth playing up those fears or not (especially considering you have no idea who's going to play your mission, when, or with what kind of mindset), but possibly worth keeping in mind. 6. Really good sound design can make a huge difference. Definitely a no-brainer, but you don't want something like Yakety Sax playing in the background But at the end of the day, TDM is an immersive sim, which means there's a lot of moving parts to consider, from interest curves to core gameplay loops, that could tie into a good horror experience. Personally, I enjoy more subtle horror that ramps up over time, but there's a lot of wiggle room and many viable ways to design a good scary mission.