Three patches, and the last of the sounds that were asked for.
The thruster bangs when it lights and rumbles while it burns. The rumble
is this game's first HELD note: its gate goes down when a thruster lights
and does not come up until every one is out. Only the edges matter - a
rumble restruck every frame would never get past its own attack, and a
bang struck every frame is a buzz - and the condition is the flames':
a held button with a dry tank is a pilot doing nothing.
Arriving latches two notes quickly. Middle C then the C above for taking
hold of the station, the same pair reversed for letting go, and two
octaves lower for the ground - the same shape in a different register,
because setting down and taking hold are the same kind of event. The
second note is PENDING rather than played: at an undocking the pilot is
mid-burn, and stopping the world for an eighth of a second to fit a note
in would be felt as the controls sticking. Where the game is stopping
anyway, runPend simply pumps it out.
Four channels for five sounds. The bang and the latch share one, because
a lander arriving either arrives or does not, and a crash ends the run.
That leaves the thruster its two, which it needs: a held note struck on
the same channel as the ignition bang would cut the bang off at the
moment it was meant to be heard.
---- A held note outlives the loop that was holding it ----
Landing while the thruster was still down ended the flying and then
waited to be told the message had been read, so the frame that would have
noticed the button coming up never ran. The engine roared under the
verdict and went on roaring until the machine stopped. Anything that
stops to wait hushes it now, and forgets last frame with it, so a thruster
still held when the waiting ends counts as lighting again.
---- Three checks that had to be rebuilt around the new noise ----
A landing is not silent any more, so the crash is measured against the
second BEFORE it rather than against a quiet landing. The dust samples
moved eight frames later, because the latch plays first. And the warning
check lost its measure twice: counting bursts could not tell a beep from
a nag, and measuring total length stopped working the day the thruster
got a rumble. It burns, stops, and listens AFTER - warned once there is
nothing left, nagging the last beep is still fading. Nought against 5,679.
Two halves of the same number. The warning is the moment it happened and
the colour is how things stand: it fires on the way down through a
quarter of a tank and then holds its peace, and the gauge stays red until
a base fills the lander up, which also allows the warning again.
Once, because a lander is at its most careful in the last few seconds
before it touches, and something repeating in its ear through that is not
a warning, it is a distraction.
Checked where the fuel actually moves rather than once a frame - the tank
only changes in takeFuel and payFuel, so there is nowhere else it can
cross a threshold.
Channel two, with the crash on three. Separate channels rather than one
reused, because a crash while the warning is still sounding should not cut
it off, and on a machine with four voices there is no reason to be clever.
Half and a tenth are the obvious next thresholds and are deliberately not
here: one is enough to find out whether being told at all is welcome.
---- And the crash sound is the one that was designed for it ----
Crash.json, which carries voice_gate itself, so the program's own trigger
write is gone - it would have masked a deliberate choice rather than
backing one up. The note moved from 24 to 60 by ear, and the comment
saying it was low went with it.
---- A check that could not tell a beep from a nag ----
Counting bursts of sound cannot: without the latch the warning fires
every tick the tank drops, far faster than the sound decays, so the beeps
run into each other and a burst counter sees one long burst either way.
It measures the LENGTH now - 26,944 samples against 490,348 - which is
the difference between six tenths of a second and ten seconds of it.
Crash1.json, made in soundThing and converted by SoundPatch. Two noise
oscillators fifteen cents apart, a filter opened 11.6 kHz by the
modulation envelope, and the LEVEL shaped by that same envelope rather
than by the amplitude one - which is exactly the freedom the routed level
was for, and not a thing the engine could express a week ago.
It peaks at 10,501 and is gone in about six tenths of a second, inside
the eight tenths the pieces are in the air. The guessed one wandered
between 1600 and 8200 and sounded like a drain.
The patch predates the gate field, so the program's own trigger write is
what makes it a one-shot - which is the argument for having put it there
rather than leaving it to the patch. LowFuel.json is here too, saved from
the newer soundThing with the gate and LFO mode in it, and is not wired
to anything yet.
Both JSONs live beside the tables they produce. The build has never
needed soundThing and still does not, but a sound can now be regenerated,
or simply read, without going to find the editor first.
The bang was guessed at directly in bytes and came out as a low gurgle,
which is what guessing at bytes gets you: a cutoff of 40 looks small and
is 57 Hz, so the filter sweep ended almost shut. Voyager's sound device
is soundThing's voice engine with the editor taken off, so a patch
designed in soundThing - where there is a screen, a keyboard and a pair
of ears - makes the same sound here. What differs is only how it arrives.
SoundPatch converts one into the other. Every parameter the device takes
is a documented function of a natural value and all of them invert: times
are squared into four seconds, cutoff and rate are exponential, depths
and detune are centred on 128. It writes a table of a count and that many
parameter and value pairs, and playPatch hands it to the device - so
every sound after this costs a table and a call rather than forty lines
of its own.
Two things the conversion has to say out loud. soundThing has no field
for the level routing, because there it is always the amplitude envelope,
so the table says so explicitly - a channel keeps its patch between notes
and a leftover from a previous one would otherwise be carried in. And a
field the tool does not recognise STOPS it: a patch format that has moved
on would otherwise produce a table that quietly means something else.
THE BUILD DOES NOT DEPEND ON IT. soundThing lives in its own repository
and is not needed to build anything here; the tables are checked in and
the tool is for when a sound is being changed.
Lander's crash now plays Kick808 as a stand-in until a bang is designed
for it, and the difference is the point: the hand-guessed patch wandered
between 1600 and 8200 for eight tenths of a second, and this decays
3492, 2743, 2037, 1515, 1040, 614, 87, nothing.
The docs check caught the tool count in two manuals, which is what it is
for.
Anachronaut