Players ask for help: "When I play mc, I always trigger that ambient sound effect inexplicably no matter what, and every time it is the most frightening one, each time it scares me to the ground... So is there any way to turn off this sound effect? ”
Almost everyone has had this experience: whenever you get darker, Minecraft will always give you a weird sound effect just right, making you feel cold on the back of your neck, hair on your scalp, sweaty hands and feet, and feel unparalleled fear in that moment.
The question is: Have you ever wondered how Minecraft does this?
01
176 "weird" ambient sounds;
In fact, there is a special sound effect in Minecraft, called ambient sound. It's a sound that can only be heard in a given situation. For example, changes in the environment, changes in the weather, changes in the air, changes in the brightness of the sun, and so on. The known Minecraft has a total of 176 different ambient sounds that act in different environments.
According to the role of its ambient sound effects, it is divided into three categories: caves, underwater, and netherworlds. Among them, there are 19 kinds of cave sounds, 22 kinds of underwater sounds, and 135 kinds of nether sounds. So you get the idea? Why is hell so eerie? In fact, in addition to ghasts and other weird sounds and creatures, the rendering of ambient sounds is the most important factor in your fear.
02
Minecraft's atmosphere detection mechanism;
What the atmosphere is, a sight that gives people a strong feeling in a particular environment, brings a physiological hint. For example, black will make you feel frightened and depressed, and daylight will make people feel relaxed and safe. This is one of the most subjective human feelings. Theoretically, a game can detect this atmosphere just right, which is difficult to understand.
In Minecraft, there is such a very advanced "simulated atmosphere" mechanism, (to say advanced, it is actually very simple) Minecraft rewrites the "atmosphere" to the value of the interval 1-100, and strongly correlates this value with brightness and square transparency. When the brightness is lower and there are more non-transparent blocks around, the ambience value will rise sharply and eventually reach 100. At this time, the system will randomly play a sound effect, taking the cave sound effect as an example, the system will randomly select one of the 19 cave sound effects for playback.
In the wiki, such a string of code is recorded to simulate the atmosphere mechanism. The code randomly selects a block centered on the player in the 17*17*17 range to detect the brightness value of the block, whether it is a transparent block, and so on. Code is run once per game to detect and determine the final ambience value to determine if to play a "weird ambient sound" sound.
03
Weird noise;
What is "weird noise"? Some people say that this is the formation of slimes underground to form a strange noise; some people say that this is the sound effect of some unknown strange creature underground; some people say that this is actually Herobrine.
As you may have seen, the atmosphere algorithm we mentioned above is actually aimed at caves. If you turn on subtitles for Java Edition at this point, the bottom right of the screen will prompt "Weird Noise". Many people used to think that this was the sound effect of some strange creature coming from the ground, but in fact, its real role was also to render the atmosphere. So many years, if someone hadn't told you, you would never have known where this weird noise came from.
But in fact, the "weird noise" is just telling you that you have activated the cave environment sound effect. Horror, eerie, and horror background sound rendering + weird subtitle reminders. It's starting to make your survival in Minecraft uneasy.
So why does Minecraft always get just right and make people feel intimidated? Because Mojang made an extremely clever simulated "atmosphere" pseudocode. Mc turned into a horror game!