Field Recordings / Dark Ambient Music / Level Design / Coding

[Wolfmond]

Hello, my name is Wolfmond, I am 41 years old and I come from Northern Germany. I am your new member. In my youth I played Thief: The Dark Project with great enthusiasm. Recently I discovered and started playing The Dark Mod and I am very happy that there is still an active community around this beautiful game. I am especially interested in level design and creating my own campaigns. 

In my spare time I like to walk around, record sounds (field recording), make dark ambient and experimental music, and code. My dark ambient music is available for free at https://wolfmond.bandcamp.com

I'm currently working through the Youtube Tutorial from @Springheel and I'm really enjoying learning level design.

I look forward to getting in touch with you and contributing my skills to the community.

Best regards, Wolfmond

___________________________________

Hallo  

Ich heiße Wolfmond, bin 41 Jahre alt und komme aus Norddeutschland. Ich bin euer Neuzugang. In meiner Jugend habe ich mit großer Begeisterung Thief: The Dark Project gespielt. Vor kurzem habe ich The Dark Mod entdeckt und begonnen zu spielen und bin beigestert, dass es immer noch eine aktive Community um dieses schöne Spiel gibt. Mich interessiert vor allem das Leveldesign und die Erstellung eigener Kampagnen. 

In meiner Freizeit gehe ich gerne durch die Gegend, nehme Geräusche auf (Field Recording), mache Dark Ambient und und Experimentelle Musik, und programmiere gerne. Meine Dark Ambient Musik gibt es kostenlos auf https://wolfmond.bandcamp.com

Aktuell arbeite ich das Tutorial von @Springheel durch und habe große Freude daran, Leveldesign zu lernen.

Ich freue mich darauf, mit euch in Kontakt zu sein und meine Fähigkeiten in die Community mit einfließen zu lassen.

Viele Grüße,

Wolfmond
 

 

[JackFarmer]

Cool ambient sounds, IMO very fitting for Dark Mod missions. "On The Edge Of Dawn" would have been the perfect ambient for a certain section in my last project. Couldn't you have come here a year earlier?

Anyways, good luck with your mapping projects, however, I would recommend to start with a single mission before venturing into larger projects.

 

Edited April 17 by JackFarmer

[jaxa]

I listened to Palingenesis, and it definitely sounds like a track you would hear in a TDM mission. Well done.

Clicked on "On The Edge Of Dawn" and it sent me straight to the second track, "Dawn Fades". It's good but may be a bit busy/loud by TDM standards. YMMV.

I'd like to use this thread to point out that T1/T2 made use of short ambient loops, repeated, mixed up, and layered. This was probably due to technical limitations, but it can contribute to the hypnotic feel of the soundtrack, and isn't often replicated by the usual completed tracks we hear now. I don't know if any TDM mappers have taken this approach, but boiling down ambients to their smallest components might be a good idea from a creative standpoint.

For example, I downloaded Thief 2 to this computer. Ambients are in RES/snd.crf/SFX. You can open it with 7zip, sort by size or name, and start loading them in your media player without extracting.

One iconic mission, Framed, uses these:

m04ring (36s)
S0400 (24s)
m04lo (23s)
s0401 through s0407end in snd.crd/MiscVOs/english

Some areas in missions are only/primarily playing a short loop in the background, such as:

voicel1 (13s)
SUBSON1 (4s)
m01drone (~1s)
Lhouse (4s)
L7baseM (4s)
L2_base1 (6s)
voxloop2 (4s)
brassL (6s)

Some sounds may be played randomly (not sure), such as FB1 through fb10.

The largest file, swells2.wav, is used in Shipping and Receiving and another mission, and it's still only 44 seconds long.

Another fun thing are the "twangs", "openers" or whatever you would call them, that only play at the very beginning of the mission. There are two main ones in Thief 2:

ambstart.wav (6s)
BELLTHMP (6s)
I think there's a third variation, might only be in Dark Project

My point in bringing all this up is that to get that Dark Project/Metal Age feel, maybe we need to go back to the basics.

Edited April 17 by jaxa

[datiswous]

4 hours ago, Wolfmond said:

I am your new member.

Finally! A new member. Welcome new member.

[Wolfmond]

Hi @JackFarmer thank you very much for your nice welcome message ^^ If you want to use any of my soundtracks, feel free to do so. My songs are all under a Creative Commons license. Thanks for the idea to start small. I'm particularly interested in programming things; buttons, switches, machines. But first learn the basics ^^

@jaxa Thank you for your detailed message and your explanation of the ambient loops. The link you clicked did indeed take you to “Dawn Fades”, as I chose that track as a starter track for people listening to the album for the first time. The songs are partly my diaries. For example, the song “Hiob?” https://wolfmond.bandcamp.com/track/hiob ... in it I was processing my thoughts and fears about a medical diagnosis of my wife, which worried us a bit. I worked with granular synthesis for the first time in this track.  The Background Sounds at https://wolfmond.bandcamp.com/track/sandkrug I've recorded in a local supermarket, in stealth mode ^^ couldn't wear my usual equipment there to not get kicked out

For a while I uploaded sounds for Freesound.org. At the moment, I still have a lot of sounds waiting to be reviewed and edited. A lot of houses are being built where I live. There are a lot of metal machine noises, which sounds quite interesting. One of my latest purchases is a contact microphone. It can record very interesting metal noises; maybe I'll show you some when I have them ready.

____

Many thanks for your kind comments and those to come. I look forward to getting to know you all.

Greetings to all of you,

Wolfmond

____

Edit: @datiswous thanks for you welcoming ^.^

Edited April 17 by Wolfmond

[JackFarmer]

5 hours ago, Wolfmond said:

Hi @JackFarmer thank you very much for your nice welcome message ^^ If you want to use any of my soundtracks, feel free to do so. My songs are all under a Creative Commons license. Thanks for the idea to start small. I'm particularly interested in programming things; buttons, switches, machines. But first learn the basics ^^

For a while I uploaded sounds for Freesound.org. At the moment, I still have a lot of sounds waiting to be reviewed and edited. A lot of houses are being built where I live. There are a lot of metal machine noises, which sounds quite interesting. One of my latest purchases is a contact microphone. It can record very interesting metal noises; maybe I'll show you some when I have them ready.

 

I've always wondered: who are these people who record all these noises/sounds for freesound.org? And now one of them is here, thus, thank you for contributing there as well!

If you need help when it comes to mission building with Dark Radiant, you can post your question(s) here.

[Wolfmond]

1 hour ago, JackFarmer said:

I've always wondered: who are these people who record all these noises/sounds for freesound.org? And now one of them is here, thus, thank you for contributing there as well!

If you need help when it comes to mission building with Dark Radiant, you can post your question(s) here.

Hehe thank you so much ^.^ Yes, my love for recording Field Recordings has started as I discovered https://mynoise.net - one of my main resources to find peace in this loud and fast world. Professional recorded sounds, built into really useful generators, that really catched my interest. So I bough (affordable, "beginner") Equipment (Zoom H5) and started my own journey. It's super interesting to catch noises and sounds; when I'm outside and focus on sounds, anything is like a big orchestrated melody. There's so many stuff going on that our normal hearing isn't capable of hearing or even recognizing, but that can be made hearable / layed a focus on, by recoding it with a good microphone and recoder.

Thanks for linking me to the newbie section ^^ I've also roamed a bit through the wiki. At the moment I'm at lesson # 5 of "TDM New Mappers Workshop" by Springheel and I've created my first room. Yay!  ... what I really need to know asap is how to make readable books. That's super fun ^^ I'm going to find out, soon. What I already managed is to import a selfmade texture; a .tga image on a thin brush. That's all newbie stuff you all certainly just can slightly grin about; but for me it's a huge thing, as I'm learning totally new stuff here. I already have some experiences by using an level editor for OpenSimulator (opensource equivalent to Second Life), that's a small advantage in handling the camera angles and editing. But EVERYTHING is new to me at the moment and super interesting. Can't await to learn more and tryout more. I'm super hooked at the moment and can't await to build and construct and tryout things ^^ 

 

[kingsal]

Welcome! Your ambient work is very cool and I'm excited to see what you make for TDM.