The State of Game Audio 99
The extent to which a game's sounds and music can affect a player's enjoyment is often overshadowed by other characteristics, such as graphics or gameplay. That said, I'm sure most players have had an experience where the audio really contributed to making the game great, whether it was an epic soundtrack, excellent narration, or just intuitive sound effects. Rock, Paper, Shotgun is running a feature discussing the state of game audio in today's market, discussing how far it has come, and where it's going.
"Games present some unusual problems, like the mix having to adjust itself to suit a situation created by the player, rather than the static vision of a single director. Game designers have to have a flexible attitude towards factors such as the amount of time spent listening to the same piece of music and the potential for sonic overload if too many game sounds are played simultaneously. ... CryTek's Florian Füsslin explained that Crysis' lavish soundscape was defined primarily by what information the player needs to hear. 'We often went for the concept "less is more" or let's better say "important things first." We used a pretty solid priority system which cuts quiet or unimportant sounds in an audio busy situation like combat. Together with the right mix we were able to provide a dense soundscape in all situations players might run into.'"
Re:Portal (Score:3, Informative)
Then I got to the first cut scene and the music sucked from then on... I was really dissapointed, but it shows the influence that sound can have on a game.
Re:The only thing missing (Score:3, Informative)
There are good reasons why 5.1 headphones are hard to get right. One is that 5.1 sounds are meant to be played from speakers well away from your ears. Both of your ears are receiving sounds from all speakers, and it's the differences in phase and timing (not so much volume) that tells your brain where the sound appears to come from.
Playing the same signals next to your ear, with right and left sides isolated, leads to very different results. In any case, you only have two input channels for sound, and you should be able to get good results with in-ear monitors and a decent transfer function.
one of the real problems that most of the 5.1 phones face is their common ground conductor. This leads to joint stereo and muddies up the positioning.
Seriously? Every audio system I know of uses a common ground. If you're interested in a lecture in electronics, I can probably explain more ;)
And what the heck does "joint stereo" mean in this context?
Re:I particularly enjoyed Oblivion... (Score:3, Informative)
I actually wrote the battle music system for a major PC title (not Oblivion). It seems like a fairly simple thing to do, but because of the fast-paced and dynamic nature of combat in that game, it actually ended up being a real challenge to tune. For example:
* It sound bad if you start some epic battle music as your high-level party goes and kills a few low-level critters. I measured the collective party strength versus nearby enemy creatures to determine if the battle would likely be difficult enough to warrant battle music.
* It sound bad if ambient music just starts up, only to be immediately interrupted by more combat. Therefore, I set the threshold for ending music much lower than for starting it up. Nearby enemies will cause the battle music to continue, because it's likely the players will run there next and start the next battle.
* It sounds bad if a second piece of battle music start (our music didn't loop - I just started another piece of battle music) only to be cut off after a few seconds. Therefore, before another piece of music starts, it tries to determine if combat is soon to be over anyhow. If so, the ambient music continues.
You can see, it ends up being a lot more complicated than you'd think. And, it's difficult to tune it so that it works properly at all player levels and in all areas of the game.
Re:The only thing missing (Score:3, Informative)
99% of systems that use speakers have 2-conductor speaker wires per speaker. 99% of headphones have 3-conductor wires for the whole system.
joint stereo is such that when you turn the balance all the way to one side, you can still hear it in the other.
speaker systems usually don't do this.
Speaker systems also use a common ground. Only the cables between the amplifier and the speakers have separate ground wires, for obvious practical reasons. You might need to learn a bit more about electronics to understand what the ground actually does, and why a shared ground doesn't share the actual signals.
The problem with most headphones is that the signal wires are usually not shielded from each other. Instead, they are paired inside a common shield. There is inductive transfer between the two, which is why you can't silence one channel completely. It may also be that balance pots aren't perfect, as they are not usually designed for complete channel muting.
This is not a problem in practice, though. As I mentioned in the grandparent post, when you listen to speakers, both of your ears will pick up sounds from all speakers. Only relatively small differences are required to convey the stereo image. It's been estimated that a channel separation of about 20 dB is enough for headphones.