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.'"
Portal (Score:5, Insightful)
Some games on the the other hand, just slap a stupid rock-techo-pop beat on it, just for having something. (I'm looking at you C&C3)
Re:There are no great games without great sound (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure it can. On PC games I always turn music off- I'd rather hear Vent (in online games) or have an mp3 player on. I can't remember the last game I actually kept the music on for, other than guitar hero.
An oldie but goodie. (Score:2, Insightful)
I remember being blown away by Marathon's audio. It's crazy to think that it's been well over 10 years, but that game was groundbreaking.
LK
The only thing missing (Score:4, Insightful)
As I see it, the only thing missing is a decent 5.1 channel headset to hear it all on. Sure we can all afford 5.1 or 7.1 channel speakers, but most of us can't blast them while playing.
I've listened to more than a few 5.1 channel headphones. None of them meet my expectations. Game audio was meant to take advantage of multi-channel digital sound. Since 90% of the gamers I know use headphones or headsets, isn't this the next logical step? Most of the 5.1 headphones are only 5.1 virtual channels. Those few that are real 5.1, are so disappointing. The Razer barracuda HP1 set was just a complete waste of money. I'm waiting for the first company to come alone and make a true 5.1 channel digital headset with a removable boom mic. Then my games will come alive finally.
necessary features include these:
dolby digital certification.
very low impedance drivers.
comfortable closed circumaural design.
digital coax plug for phones.
discrete voice drivers and standard phone jack for them and mic.
robust and discrete woofer driver. Sony's 50mm HD driver used in its upper end MDR 7xx/9xx series should do the trick.
discrete synchronized positioned drivers for center channel.
positioned drivers for FL/FR.
discrete positioned drivers for RL/RR.
onboard DD decoding and DTS decoding.
high quality amplification components.
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.
If I had the time and the cash, I'd build a pair for myself, but they'd most likely be analog.
Re:If the same amount of DSP was devoted to audio (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, sound processing is moving *away* from specialized DSPs and moving toward software mixing and processing. The difference is that multi-core CPUs are standard, both on PCs and consoles. So, developers are simply allocating a core (or part of a core) to audio processing. I wouldn't look to DSPs. Just wait for general-purpose CPUs to advance in speed enough to be able to do all sorts of interesting things.
I wrote the new sound engine and tools for an upcoming title - we're completely ditching hardware acceleration in favor of the flexibility that software mixing gives us. The Creative X-Fi, while a great card, holds around 1% market penetration, according to our customer hardware survey. For most other cards, and for ALL onboard audio, there's no real advantage to dedicated hardware.
We're still nowhere near doing real-time synthesis for most types of sounds. Physical modeling sounds nice, but it would likely require a complicated and time-consuming process of programming and tuning these models. Even though true physical modeling isn't practical at this time, we're looking at ways of synthesizing combinations of sounds (such as impacts - footsteps is a prime example) as a way of reducing the combinatorial explosion of (terrain_type x avatar_type x movement_type x number_of_variations).
I see a future more of blended synthesis than pure physical modeling - that is, advanced filters applied to pre-recorded samples in order to create more dynamic and believable variations, and more advanced ways of mixing and blending raw samples to create new sound sets. This seems to be a much more straight-forward problem to solve, and would be far easier for sound designers to tune.
Incidentally, why do you say water and gas are out of the question? Oddly enough, while these are horribly complex to model using true fluid dynamics, these are typically the easiest sounds to recreate using fairly simple algorithms. A waterfall is pretty close to being pure noise (just requires a bit of frequency filtering to color it), for example. And things such as water drops, steam hissing - I've heard good modeling of all these things in instruments such as NI's Reaktor, in addition to their excellent SteamPipe physical modeling instrument.