Request for Weather-Related, Room Echo Submissions

[Cerebus]

I am working on making some buildings come alive during storms, and I'm soliciting contributions.

Contributions can be sent to me via email. Here are some examples of the sort of things I would like to see:

The wind picks up outside the building and moans.
The building creaks and groans as the wind whips outside.
A draft of air brings sand and heat into room through a crack in the wall.

Thanks for your participation.
Cerebus
cerebus@armageddon.org

[John]

Thanks a lot for this addition to the game. It's really annoying someone asking you "what's the weather like outside" and you've emoted watching outside and you go "I dunno"

[Avril]

I'm assuming that you'll allow a list of echoes, rather than just one of them, to be played in the same room in identical  circumstances... Other than that, there is one thing I'm unsure about. How many details will be taken into account when deciding what echo to choose? In other words, will there be a sub-list of echoes for different wind directions, wind strengths and storm strengths, or just a single list for every room? I ask this because I know of at least one place where, taking its position and the presence of other buildings into account, a powerful windstorm from the north would have a far greater effect than a storm of similar strength that came from the south. While it might tell people there's a storm outside, it wouldn't be that realistic to describe sand flooding the northern entrance when the wind could have been actually throwing it northwards from over the roof. Without too much difficulty, I could imagine several other places, and several situations that can be affected by the intensity and/or direction of a storm/wind, and specific echoes that take this intensity into consideration would allow players to better use the environment for their RP.

Since I'm going to take a small part in this project, I must know this... Should I bother making situation-dependent echoes, or should the echoes just take the existence of a storm (no matter how powerful) into account?

[Angela Christine]

Hmm, does anyone even know what kind of noises stone and mudbrick buildings make?  I associate groaning with wood, groaning stone would be . . . I don't know, kinda spooky.  I suppose the building might have creaky wooden support beams despite being mostly stone or mudbrick.  From some research I did a few months back, it looks like mudbrick is still being used to construct new buildings in parts of australia, so maybe John or others from that kind of climate have been in an actual mudbrick building?  

AC

[Meep]

Since windows can be oilskin, even parchment or tortoiseshell or arrowslits you'd probably hear the sand and small rocks pelting against it pretty well and with arrowslits, some tiny piles of sand might even blow in.

[Bardex]

Adobe homes tend to be pretty silent when it's windy. However, when there are big gusts blowing by, you can hear things rattling outside, and if the gust creeps into the building from an open window it can whirl around the rooms and create an interesting echoing kinda low-sounding sorta noise.

This is especially true if the corners of the room are rounded rather than squared.

[John]

maybe John or others from that kind of climate have been in an actual mudbrick building?

Well I've only been in a mud brick house once and it wasn't during a sandstorm funnily enough.

Wouldn't the sound of sand against the house be pretty noisy though?

[Angela Christine]

Well I've only been in a mud brick house once and it wasn't during a sandstorm funnily enough.

Wouldn't the sound of sand against the house be pretty noisy though?

Excellent, I can work with this.  Go back to the mud brick house on a windy day.  Take a few dozen buckets of dry sand with you.  Have someone stand outside and chuck sand at the house, in the direction the wind is flowing.  Assuming the home owners haven't kicked you out yet, camp out in their livingroom for a few weeks so you can see what the house sounds like in a variety of weather conditions.  

By the time the experiment is done it will be far to late to help with the atmospheric sounds project, but at least you'll be able to provide me with definative answers.  You will also know your mudbrick dwelling friends much better than you ever wanted to.

AC

[John]

Yeah! What a great idea! And I can pop over to the beach and get the sand from there! Why didn't I think of that? [/sarcasm]

I don't live anywhere near a beach, and the person who owned the house was my grandmother who lives in Queensland (I live in New South Wales) and plus she doesn't live in the mud brick house anymore.

Besides all that it was a good idea though.

[Cerebus]

I plan to make varying degrees of echos that are dependant more on the windspeed than the amount of sand in the air. They will be situational, and hopefully will also take into account the particular building itself. However, I'd like it to be generic enough that I can use it on more than one building with only minor tweaks.

The buildings will be mostly of the stone sort, but in some places will include wood. I will not be doing echos for tents at this time. The buildings may or may not include openings to the street with people coming and going. Send me as many as you like, but try not to make each individual echo longer than a line or so. I hope that answers all the questions.

Thanks for the contributions,
Cerebus

[John]

Well, writing item descriptions and NPCs isn't my thing. But echoes just pop right into my head Thanks for answering the questions Cerebus, I'll start jotting down ideas as I think of them.