Wesnoth offering $200 for environmental sound loop
From the Battle for Wesnoth team:
Wesnoth is sponsoring a $200 bounty for an environmental sound loop.
We're looking for background audio, explicitly NOT MUSIC, but just recordings of the sound made in a natural environment. We're asking for this because the available sounds in public-domain libraries, that we can find, are not suitable for our needs - we probably want you to go out and record something new. We may post a series of these bounties, if this pans out nicely.
Specifically, we're looking for a recording of swamp or marshland that conveys a gloomy, fetid atmosphere. Not a healthy, normal marshland, in which you'd hear the breeze, the rustling of the wind, and an immense amount of birdsong, but a rotting, "evil" marsh, filled with dying plants, and an overall sense of decay and wrongness. For a literary/film reference, something like the "dead marshes" in lord of the rings.
Probable components would include the sound of bubbling mud (like in yellowstone-style mud pits), gurgling, the sound of steam, and maybe the sound of clouds of buzzing mites and flies. It is entirely possible that you won't necessarily have to record a real marsh to get something that sounds like the above, and can just composite stuff together (in fact, it may even be necessary, since the intended effect isn't strictly natural).
We need a loop that is about 3-5 minutes long. Unlike many other game genres, wesnoth stays fixated on the same environment for a very long stretch of time (30-150 minutes per level), so we need a long loop with enough variety to not wear itself out. The final clip should be provided in either wav/ogg at 44kbps, with stereo sound, and will be released under the public-domain (CC0) license.
We reserve the right to approve or reject the work based on our own discretion.
If you have any questions (or a submission for review), please reply to this post here on OGA.
Comments
I'm afraid it could happen that somebody pulls a sound from freesound.org. The money's worth it. Caution! :)
3-5minutes long... er... why?
Just collect 10-20 different 2-3s sounds and play them (intelligently) randomly.
I am glad you found a project that is willing to fill their art assets with good money. I think it is a very good approach when used thrifty :)
Please just take care that it doesn't become like 99designs once it gets bigger, or at least it is very clear that it is an competition. Letting artist spend good time on the work to get rejected afterwards is probably no good idea on the long run. I hope they use their "right to approve or reject the work based on their own discretion" wisely.
I can see why you are offering money with something like this. time is money, But time + rejection = nothing D:
WTF??? they searching a simple ambient sound? and they pay 200$ for this? Oh, I forgot they will soon hire industry artist for money....And when i will see Microsoft advertisements ingame? We$noth sells his soul. We$noth lost me.
"that we can find, are not suitable for our needs"
LOLed, this is usually in open source game development.......
Your troll grade: D+.
My advice if you want to do better is start out with a more sound premise. String people along for a bit and lead them into your contraversial opinion, don't just jump out there with it. Much to learn you still have.
where is your contraversial opinion?
You just defend your blog....
I am very much on Bart's side here ...
Creating an Open Source game is a very hard thing to do. The organization of a game is hard enough by itself, but organizing an open source game can be even harder. IMO one of the major differences is that you don't pay people to do the work, they do it for fun. Which is a perfectly good thing, but it also means that people tend to do what they like most instead of what the game needs most. FOSS games often have problems like having great graphics and horrible sound at the same time, great code and almost no quality media or just very good art mixed with some rather amateurish art that destroys the whole picture. Most projects just seem to be better at some part instead of delivering coherent good quality.
So basically there are 3 things you can do at that point as far as I can see:
1. Do it yourself --- but most likely you have no time, as you re already very involved in the game. Also the bad quality parts are just most likely to be the parts you re not good in.
2. Try to convince others to do it --- but seriously, they would have done it themselves if that was the fun part for them. Convincing other people to do stuff they don't like much probably will cause no good quality as well as people not having as much fun developing the game, which is crucial to creating FOSS games
3. Pay good money for it --- well, at first this doesn't seem fitting to a FOSS game, but to me it is a practical and good decision. You can gather some donations or your money, if you re willing to, and pay someone who really understands what he or she does. You can fill the quality gaps of your game easily and also might attract some pretty good artist (you wouldn't pay them if they weren't) to help out your game a little after wards. I don't really see much of a bad side of paying someone. Of course this makes it seem less ideological and also there it can replace some art that was done for free by an enthusiastic contributor. But that is for the best of the game and would be replaced anyways, once a better artist came around.
And I just want to mention that Open Source as we use it is pushed by many commercial companies who invest a lot of money in it since a long time. And the Linux kernel is in no way selling out, just because the most developers are by paid for it.
So now I want to see why you dislike it, as I can't see any obvious reasons myself. And while we re at that, please just write your name below your message, so we can at least see that you actually mean what you write and not just want to troll.
--remaxim
While I understand this may at first seem like a betrayal of the open source mentality, I personally don't see anything at all wrong with paying people to create high-quality open source content. It raises the standards of open source content across the board, and as long as it's licensed under an open source license, who cares whether or not the creator was paid to make that content? The one requesting the content gets what they want, the creator is rewarded for his efforts, and the level of available FOSS content increases. Seems like a win-win-win scenario to me. :)
...and will be released under the public-domain (CC0) license.
FOSS does not equal anti-commercial. Can't see how they have "betrayed" anything, although I can sympathize - if not neccessarily agree - with the notion that it's similiar to arguably exploitative "design competitions" like 99-designs.
i am not really familiar with creating different sound clips for games, but would it not be possible to make a generic swampy sound and just make the other sound effects like bubbling bugs buzzing a random occurrance? this would allow you to cut back on the length of the original clip and also guarantee that you will not hear the same cycle of sounds ever. I am only 1 year into a game programming degree so i am not too familiar, but it seems possible and if it is, i think this would be the best option.
by the way, why no link to an official statement by wesnoth on this?
4nick8:sure, but you would have to have a lot of high-quality sounds to create a loop from. This is probably not less an effort than going in a swamp and recording it.
Official Wesnoth Response:
"I'm afraid it could happen that somebody pulls a sound from freesound.org. The money's worth it. Caution! :)"
If it fits the bill, it's nearly worth paying just for them having done the work of discovery. I've spent days dredging freesound.org and haven't found what I wanted. Also, I'm quite fine with people taking existing clips and paying them for the work of remixing and compositing them.
"Please just take care that it doesn't become like 99designs once it gets bigger, or at least it is very clear that it is an competition. Letting artist spend good time on the work to get rejected afterwards is probably no good idea on the long run. I hope they use their "right to approve or reject the work based on their own discretion" wisely."
We're absolutely unabashed about being spec work. There are just too many amateurs in this field, and wesnoth has far too little money, to risk irrevocably forking over $200 to someone who might be eager-to-please, but clueless, or worse someone trying to take advantage of us. We need to protect ourselves. Furthermore, this is a tiny (4hr, in my estimation) project, with little-to-no investment on the artist's part, and they retain all rights to it either way.
If you happen to be a genuine professional, with an extensive portfolio, then yes, we might consider an actual contract. Feel free to contact us about that - I don't know where to hire foley guys, so anyone who knows about that, as well, is free to contact us.
"While I understand this may at first seem like a betrayal of the open source mentality, I personally don't see anything at all wrong with paying people to create high-quality open source content. It raises the standards of open source content across the board, and as long as it's licensed under an open source license, who cares whether or not the creator was paid to make that content? The one requesting the content gets what they want, the creator is rewarded for his efforts, and the level of available FOSS content increases. Seems like a win-win-win scenario to me. :)"
Eloquently put.
This is why we accept donations; because, with the staggering complexity of stuff that goes into a game, there are some things our core team will just never have the manpower or skills to do. Either we pay someone to do it, or it never gets done. In fact, we just had someone complaining about this the other day, on our forum: http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=32747
I know that some people would love to live in a fairyland where nothing gets touched by that dirty "money" stuff, but it's the single most powerful tool there is to finish unpleasant tasks that no one likes or knows how to do. If open-source didn't pay full-time developers, there would be no ubuntu, no mozilla, no apache, no blender, no android ... in fact, basically every huge and successful OSS project has only been successful after they've gotten money involved, because there are just always going to be crucial things that no one wants to do. Python is bankrolled by google (guido van rossum is a full-time employee to do just that), and several other projects (webkit, cups, launchd) are staffed by dozens of full-time apple employees, and tons of work on the linux kernel is done by fulltime guys at IBM and redhat.
"by the way, why no link to an official statement by wesnoth on this?"
Because this is all I've gotten up, yet. We really ought to start using wesnoth's homepage as a recruiting tool for helpers, but we haven't gotten that worked out quite yet. Sometimes we are lazy.
You have a pretty big amount of people helping though. Cant they help you with the sounds?
@Jetrel: Thanks for answering to all that stuff.
My warning was actually more towards OpenGameArt, as I don't expect you to do this on a bigger scale. The whole thing only starts being abusive when it is done on a bigger scale like 99designs ... my whole definition of "wisely" was actually just taking it, if it actually fits what you had in mind, instead of trying to get as many options as possible to choose from.
I doubt using freenode is an option, as the licenses are not compatible as far as I can see. Simply the fact that you demand CC0 and therefor no attribution should be a problem already. I don't have any idea if you can convert the sampling licenses to CC-BY though.
Edit: Of course there is an option to simply ask the creators of the original sound, but I doubt they will be willing to put it under CC0 that easily.
Is there a deadline?
@Pequod: Before anyone else does, I'd imagine. :)
I just uploaded a track to get things rolling, I hope you guys like it :) Even if it doesn't win, I figure it'll serve as inspiration for the other people working on it and be a cool resource for game developers to use :)
http://opengameart.org/content/swampy-atmospheric-ambient-noise
Right; the jury's still out on whether this is compatible with our license (we're going for PD because that's compatible with everything, whereas in this case I think CC-BY isn't compatible with GPL, because GPL doesn't respect the attribution clause). However, this is very useful as a foil for C&C.
- This is very nicely mixed, no mic noise, etc. Great work!
- The mosquitos are "foreground noise", and we'd like to avoid that because "foreground noise" makes them sound like active game elements. In fact, samples like what you used are exactly what I'd want if I was going to make sound effects for a mosquito enemy in the game. If fly-buzzing is a background element, we shouldn't be hearing a few individual flies near the camera, we should be hearing a distant sound (waxing and waning) of huge swarms of them.
- This is a little too varied. Really, you're almost transitioning between several different soundscapes, whereas we just want one. There are major elements (like the frogs croaking) that completely leave the picture after a while. Some change is desirable for interest's sake, but this is a bit too strong.
- The bubbling mud sounds too much like bubbling water (it appears that's actually exactly what you used). You might be able to fix this by pitch-shifting it downwards, or equalizing it, but right now it's a little light in pitch. This isn't really a make-or-break point, but we'd definitely prefer a more mud-like sound if we can get it.
This is exactly what I'd like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3145eB_DCU
Bear in mind that extracting audio from youtube vids (with permission!) is a very, very viable option. Mud pots are a rare geographic feature, so you might consider using a recording from some family video of someone who's been there, assuming you can find one with clean enough audio. If you explain that you're using it for a non-profit/hobby videogame, most average people would probably be willing to give you permission to use it as public domain. Also, videos released by the US government (such as the parks and wildlife dept) are under public domain, and they might have some on yellowstone.
A word on license "compatibility":
The FSF has specifically stated that it's okay to bundle non-GPLed content (such as game assets) with a GPLed program, provided that the license allows for free distribution. Every license we allow on here is Debian approved, so no content on OGA will ever prevent you from getting your work included in a major linux distro.
Bart
@Anonymous
Troll rate: A
because of you we have here the most interested discussion on OGA, for long.
IMHO
ups, this time it was me ;D
A similar sentiment to Anonymous's was expressed over at Wattm when I posted this: http://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/fm6qo/the_battle_fo...
@p0ss:
I didn't read the whole thing as he just wrote way too much ... but it seems rather similar to my point. Crowdsourcing *is* evil. In this case it is small enough that no big harm will be done and I don't think that we will have disappointed contributors afterwards...
His point of view seems to be a bit extreme, but he has a point ... and crowdsourcing is really a quite big problem. On the other hand Anonymous spoke bad about involving money in OSS game development, which is a very different thing to me.
I think the only way to make crowdsourcing social, is by being completely open about it and also explain the consequences of it. But as said, we don't really have a big "crowd" yet.
p.s. If he had some other bullshit afterwards or I overlooked something I am sorry... it is just way too long
edit: Reading a bit more I feel like this guy is quite extreme and doesn't want to see that he talking about completely different scales
Honestly, the way I prefer to "crowdsource" on OGA is to *let* people submit stuff freely if I haven't officially given someone the job, but also offer to officially guarantee the job to someone who applies for it (assuming I like their portfolio). That gives me the best of both worlds -- I can "crowdsource" in a way that lets people casually submit things without applying, but also give artists a guarantee that they'll get paid if they're interested in taking the time to apply.
btw, that bubbling sound seen in the yellowstone video could probably easily simulated by recording boiling tomatoe-sauce ;)
My idea was to buy a block of dry ice and place it in the middle of the sink to block the hole and then run some water and fill it up half way so you get the Bubbling from the extreme tempature differences and water vapors. It even looks like swamp smog.
Here's my go at it. A little late, I guess.
http://opengameart.org/content/swamp-environment-audio
@LokiF: right - what you've got there is nearly perfect. I've been discussing this with a couple other guys on wesnoth, and they'd like to actually have these in their pre-mixed-down state as separate audio tracks, so we can dynamically mix them in-game. I imagine a number of other projects would benefit from that as well.
The minimum would be to split the "cicadas". "flies", "frogs and other creature noise" and "water bubbling" into separate tracks. It's good for each of these tracks to modulate in strength, as you did here. Just having the raw audacity file would be best, and we can probably help with figuring out a way for you to upload it somewhere.
If you have a better (realtime) way to get in touch, please do - I'm in irc.freenode.net #opengameart as "Jetrel"; my availability is rather erratic, so leave your client connected 24/7 for me to get back to you, if IRC is your preferred way of getting in touch. Otherwise I'm on AIM/MSN and such.
I look forward to hearing from you. :)
Currently, I have a bunch of the sounds isolated and uploaded here as a zip on the same page. They're all ogg 48kbps. I don't use audacity, although I could probably put the audio into an audacity file if that's best. And if you're OK with email, my address is pan.f.coma(at)gmail(dot).com
I'll check out the zip file.