This has been raised several times in the last years and it's a feature not yet implemented: background music and better effect sounds.
- Why? We have absolutely *no* media currently available to use with such system. If developpers see users are supporting them, providing music and sound, they will implement with this the code needed to make all that come to life. We love crossfire and enjoy it's users, but it's time for player to show they support crossfire at their own level too.
- What can you do to help? There are several simple actions you can take, as a crossfire supporter to help us, developpers. No need to be a programmer, just the need to love crossfire. Practically here are simple steps you can do to help us.
- Find music and sounds on the web and on other open source projects that could be added to crossfire. Put a link here where to download that music, tell us which licence the music is in (GPL, artistic common, other). The licence information is important to us, as we need the right to distribute it. Once we get engouh link to music that could be added to crossfire, we'll analyze licences and propose a way to handle media licences (the GPL is known to be not very suitable for medias)
- Find artists that are ready to make free music for an open source project. You may have a band in you area that is trying to startup and could donate a bit for their time for a free music. You may be friend with some people making music using rythmboxes. If you can get their agreement, post a message here, telling how much music they are ready to make for crossfire, perhaps put a few seconds link to a demo, so we know the style, and explain what kind of licence they are ready to distribute it, in the case they make it.
- Use your webcam's microphone to record noises. I am sure you have lots of things on your destkop that can make various noises when hit together, shaked, scrapped, blown, whatever. It may be the rain in the street or your cat scratching your 100 years old desk. It takes 10 minutes to record hit, perhaps clean it a bit using a sound editor tool and upload it somewhere. Because no licence form is yet decided, we need you to be contactable later for fixing licensing terms. (If you don't want to be reachable from forum for whatever reason, send an email to tchize _at_ gmail _dot_ com so i can get back to you)
- Provide a recording studio to people that want to make music for crossfire. It's not always easy to record instrument music in proper condition. If you have either access to a home recording studio, or simply have at home a sound proof room (that maybe you use for home cinema), offer to let people use it. Give a mean to contact you and say in which area you are.
- record ambient sound walk around with some portable recorder that could be used to record ambient sound. Or if you know people in some media school, ask them if they could make some records for you. Walk in nature area with it, or at medieval convention (to get figthting ambient), at the market. Avoid areas where you hear airplanes, cars, trains, or electronic based annoucements, those will probably be unusable in crossfire. Record animal noises, those could be combined/modified to make great monster noise
- Offer your support If you are good at sound editing, mixing, offer people to contact you when they have brute records so you will cut, clean and normalize their sound, mix it together. (both you and recorder will need to be contactable later for licence fixing)
- Provide storage area on you home server or whatever, where people could store the music if they don't own their own storage area.
- Send people here.If you know people that could make any of the above points, send them here so they read this message and can provide us help.
- recommendations
- Always be contactable if you provide your own sound/music or offer technical sound editing support. We will need to fix licence with you. Otherwise your work will be unused and lost
- Use proper format for your sound files. If you provide a few seconds sound, use a non compressed format with high resoultion (cd quality). For music, use compressed format like ogg or mp3, but be sure to make them high quality.
- Always provide licensing information if you point to existing free music/sound. This is for same reason as above and will save me lots of time when i will be dealing with putting all proposals together.
- From my experience, meeting for other crossfire people is a rich social experience. The get together in Italia was great (thanks darkschneider). Don't fear to offer to meet people and make music together. There are even tools now to create virtual bands if you are too far away from each other.
- Don't fear to send people you know here, even if they don't know crossfire, but explain them properly why they won't be paid for their work (unless you pay them yourself) and that the music must be in a freely distributable licence.
With python.