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A mobile game I am working on needs some ambient background sounds - think caves, forests, and such. We're pretty strapped on resources.

I am coding, and have an audio guy. Rather than having him dictate exactly what I should do, I have been given some freedom to come up with my own ideas. We're really strapped on resources, and have no CPU for procedural sound generation, so we want to do something with very few instruments and channels (pitching up and down is not an issue).

To all you who played old games, are there any ambient sounds from low-spec games that you remember particularly fondly?

Old games generally had no sound at all..

anyway, given what you've described (no cpu to spare), your best bet would probably be to make some short ambient loops and fade those in and out. Your audio guy is probably the best source of ideas at this point =)

...aand here's an example of the above (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwCfco1JIUM) .. that DOES include a bit of (real cheap) real-time filtering though, but you get the idea.

I remember ambient soundscape from Fallout 2 particularly fondly.. Played 9 times through and it never got boring.

Instead of fading in and out:

A nice trick to loop ambience sounds seamlessly is to cut out the last snippet of a sound and make that snippet the start of the sample. Crossfade between the end of the snippet and the original start of the sample. Voila.

How much memory do you have?

Yeah, just render a minute or two into RAM and play (< 1% CPU) from there, if you can.

I meant fading a loop in, letting it loop several times, and then fading it out, not just having samples that fade in and out =)

It's for iPhone 4 and above - graphics are pretty heavy, and most players play without sound anyway. We have max 1-2 megabytes of RAM/assets to play around with here.

I like that sol!

graga: have you considered just using a ~1MB AAC loop? that should get you a decent length loop, and you push the playback onto the AAC decoder hardware. I don't know how much mem/cpu the system playback stuff will use mind.

psonice: Could be good! But I forgot to mention that we're already playing a music file (which is large, but set in stone due to how much time has been put into it already).

I've been playing around with sol's idea, and it works pretty well because the music is masking a lot of looping artifacts. For one ambient setting, we're just looping the same 2-3 second soundclip twice, varying the pitches at runtime (one going in a slightly higher than the other), and that actually works well. We have 1-2 more layers of sound for the same setting, and we might just try to do the same.

Your game development methodology is flawed.

You can also consider playing two or more ambient loops over each other. Prime numbers come in handy in this - if the loops are 5 and 7 second long, for instance, the exact same sound repeats every 5*7 seconds.