Dungeon Level editing - Footsteps 01

Footsteps are arguably the most repetitive sound a player will hear in most first person games. Keeping them interesting and fresh whilst also varied is a tough challenge for a sound designer with very little memory allocation. If executed poorly the player may become distracted from actually playing and enjoying the game and thus breaking immersion. Even the prettiest graphics can't detract from annoying footstep sounds.

First step forward  

Footsteps within UDK are played back by detecting the foot collisions of the player whilst they move around. These collisions can only take place when an item in the game such as a static mesh reference a 'physical material' such as 'stone' or 'gravel' for example. In order to playback custom footstep sounds I firstly had to create a new physical material within UDK, this material could then be referenced by the floor mesh within the level. 

Physical material creation for a wooden floor

Once the floor mesh was referencing my new physical material (done using the material editor) then it could call the custom footstep sound cue associated with that physical material.

The footstep sound associated with the physical material had to be coded within the unrealscript by defining the new material and the path to the relevant sound cue.

Using some of the footstep recordings that were added to the assets I created the sound cue which was set to play back the footstep sound when walking on the wooden floor material around the level. This included breaking the step sounds up into heel and toe sections which were then married together using the concatenator node within the sound cue editor. Two random nodes were used to play back of heel and toe sounds as well as adding modulation nodes to both sets of sounds. This resulted in a great deal of variation in the footstep sounds being played back.

This was enhanced further by adding in some creaking floorboard sound effects which were also randomised and modulated.

This resulted in a much less repetitive footstep system, however at present, the pace at which the steps are played back are too fast for how I want the player to move. It sound more link a jogging speed and a walk is more desirable. There are no settings within the kismet that I have managed to find which can define the footstep playback frequency so this may be a coding problem to solve. The next task will be to resolve this issue before anymore footsteps are created.