AudioGaming have unveiled their innovative plugin ‘AudioWeather‘ for FMOD and other audio engines, and will be demonstrating the plug-in in action live at FMOD’s Game Developers Conference booth (1532) in San Francisco, March 7th -9th.

AudioGaming introduces the first procedural and dynamic audio weather system. Based on specific acoustic modeling we produce realistic as well as unrealistic sound effects computed in real time. Game designers get high level control and Sound designers / Programmers get expert control on the generated audio.

For the sound designer, the natural interaction between a scene and its parameters will dramatically enhance the speed of sound conception, its dynamic integration as well as the number
of sound design possibilities. The interactive audio synthesizers developed by AudioGaming represent an innovative complement to audio samples that can usually impose tedious processes (edition/tagging/integration) for interactive media creators.

A downloadable demo of AudioWeather running in Unity3D is available from their website for both Windows and OSX here. The demo allows you to experiment with variable wind and rain parameters and hear their effects in real time

Do you know about “Oblique Strategies”? Originally developed by Brian Eno, consists in a deck of cards containing ideas and phrases to help you on “breaking” the lack of creativity on any project you’re working on.

George Spanos, from GameSoundDesign has created the “Sound Design Strategies” based on the same concept, but here all the phrases are oriented to sound design. Just click on the button and you get something like this:

• “Do not rely on any processing for this sound”
• “Add only one more sharp sound”
• “Distort it”
• “Remove one layer”
• “Use a sound that is the complete opposite”

There are a lot of them. Really useful when you need some creative help.

Sound Design Strategies

George Spanos has published a nice talk he had with Vance Dylan, sound designer with work on titles such as Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins, and Sonic Chronicles. Vance talks about specific games, his career and how he creates sound. Let’s read:

Let’s start off with the ubiquitous question: when did you decide to pursue a career in sound?

Vance Dylan: I was inspired by my Uncle Eddie who was a singer/songwriter who would often open for Bill Haley and the Comets way back in the day. My dad was also a great closet musician who never did pursue his dream but damn he was a sweet guitar player.I tried a few things, became a decent drummer, tried to write songs but sucked at it but the whole time I was very interested in hooking up gear and messing around with recording things. I think my first recording was that of my sister playing her recorder back in he 70′s using a Candle cassette recorder.

With the success of the first Mass Effect, where there any sound implementation changes that were necessary for Mass Effect 2?

Vance Dylan: There were massive changes in audio from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2. We used the (Creative Labs’) Isact audio engine on the first one which limited what we could do, we are now using Wwise which in my opinion is the best audio engine on the market today. We also had a big shift in our team as we brought in Rob Blake as the audio lead and added more team members to handle the load. I think we had 10 guys working on ME2 at one point. As far as implementation, it was a whole new ball game using Wwise. For example in ME2, I was responsible for all the vehicles in game and in cutscenes and all that and we were able to do stuff like making sound more intimidating if you were more paragon. The idea being if you were more renegade then you wouldn’t be as scared or the sound wouldn’t be as scary to you. Things like that took only a few minutes to set up using Wwise where before it just wasn’t possible at all.

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