planewalkergames.com - Rules and Mechanics: Portraits and Soundsets

Rules and Mechanics: Portraits and Soundsets

If you are a player who enjoys an easy way to tailor your gameplay experience, The Broken Hourglass offers easy options to add custom character portraits and homemade character soundsets. Although TBH will ship with an ample selection of both, tastes vary widely--and of course, for copyright reasons we are not allowed to include your favorite vampire slayers or starship captains. The privacy of your own home, however, is a different matter...

Introducing new portraits could hardly be easier. Images in PNG or JPG format can be placed in a special "portraits" directory, and are automatically catalogued by the game. No special resizing is necessary-the game will automatically scale images to suit the different sizes used by the game. In theory any image can be used, but those cropped to a standard portrait ratio of 11 x 17 will look best.

One of the game's default player portraits. Adding your own is easy!

Custom soundset creation is a little more intricate, but well worth the effort, be you an aspiring actor or simply somebody who can't get enough Bruce Campbell quotes in their games.

There are over two dozen types of soundset entries. Each is triggered by certain game events, be it "failing to pick a lock" or "high success defending against a magic attack", or more mundane tasks such as "confirming an order" or "being selected by the player." There is even a special line played when clicking on the soundset list--a chance for the soundset characters to introduce themselves to the player. Unlike some games which have a hard cap on the number of sounds per event ("four battle cries per customer"), in The Broken Hourglass, there is no specific maximum number of sounds. Want your stealthy character to have 10 different ways to say "I am hiding now"? If you can think of and record 10 such lines, it's all possible.

Sounds can be recorded either as standard Ogg Vorbis files (at any level of compression) or stored as uncompressed audio data. Each sound should have a completely unique name and may be placed in any SOUND resource directory in the game.

Each line in a soundset can be assigned a <i>rarity</i>. Rarity determines how frequently one particular line will be chosen compared to other possible lines for the same event.

Consider a stealthy character with three different ways to announce success at hiding. His soundset would look like this...

<xml>
. // other soundset lines
.
<Hiding value=~<sound resource="stealthy_hide1"/>No one will see me now!~ />
<Hiding value=~<sound resource="stealthy_hide2"/> <rarity value="uncommon"/>I am a creature of the night.~ />
<Hiding value=~<sound resource="stealthy_hide3"/> <rarity value="rare"/> They will never find me.~ />
</xml>

So, to prepare this soundset, we have our actor record each of the lines and save them as stealthyhide_1.ogg through stealthyhide_3.ogg. Then we construct the soundset, as shown above. The "sound resource" tag tells the game the name of the sound file (without any file extensions) and the text indicates the subtitle text displayed to the player, which should match what the actor recorded. The "rarity" tags are used to determine how often the game plays the line.

If no rarity tags are used, all lines are equally likely to be chosen each and every time this character hides. The Uncommon rarity is only 40% as likely to occur as a common line (one with no explicit rarity value.) Rare lines are only 10% as likely to occur as a common line. So in this particular case, with one common line, one uncommon line and one rare line, our character will say "I am a creature of the night" just 27% of the time when the character goes into hiding, and "They will never find me" a mere seven percent of the time. Rarity can also be used in conjunction with silent entries in the soundset list if you want your character to keep quiet some of the time.

A full list of soundset events will be included with the game's documentation, making it simply a matter of cut-and-paste to create new soundsets for your characters.

Last Updated ( Monday, 22 October 2007 )

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