Water Sounds - Kismet

The main source of water in the level is found within the cave area where there are various sized waterfalls and flowing surface water all leading into a pool in a deep pool.
However there are also areas where water is dripping through openings throughout the dungeon.

The Cave

The Tower Room

Dripping Sounds

To handle the dripping I used a base layer of water trickling which was looped within the sound-cue editor. To introduce some variation into the sound and make it less repetitive there was also some randomised single water droplet sounds mixed in which were played back on a randomised delay loop. These were also modulated to further increase variability. 

The notepads shown here are the objects that were used as a source for the dripping sound cue to emit from and are hidden during gameplay. Placing one in each corner of this tower room has proven to be the most effective method of creating a convincing spatialisation of the area. Almost mimicking a quad surround sound set up. To mitigate the effects of phasing by having four instances of the same sound trigger off at once a small delay was set between each cue as seen below in the Kismet window. 

A Trigger Volume was also placed around this area which was used to turn ON/OFF these sounds as the player moved in or out of the area. This is to try and limit the amount of voices used by the system at any one time.

Cave Water

For the cave section two sound cues were created to populate the space, one of which for the water flowing down the cave wall and across the path of the player and another for the pool in the middle of the cave where all the water eventually falls into.

Water_Flow_Cue

Waterfall_cue

Both are fairly basic but the nature of running water didn't require much variation to be included. The three core audio samples were made up of various water sounds of different durations, this helps the sounds loop round at different points thus creating some variation.

Again as with the dipping sounds multiple versions of the waterfall cue was used in cave's central pool. This is to minimise the mono feel of a single cue which is something that can be an issue within UDK where the system pans hard left or right depending on player position. Two waterfall cues allow for stereo width to be retained whilst the player turns 360 degrees.