(seen via Game Audio 101 and Twitter ( @EngineAudioTom )

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Support for Android, PlayStation Vita and WiiU

Altiverb “Outdoor and More” Impulse Response package

Keyboard Shortcut Manager

Fades and automation for Music Clips

Some changes to Music Transitions:

• Transition: Cue names can be used to specify precisely where to jump in to a destination music segment.

• Stingers: Cue names can be used to specify at which custom cue exactly the stinger should be triggered.

• Callbacks: Callbacks return the name of the cues to the game which opens up new gameplay possibilities.

LFE control merged with main volume control

Wwise Gain Effect

These new features, plus bug fixes and other information on the update are included in the Wwise 2011.3.1 release notes

Audiokinetik has announced a new partnership with Audio Ease. Altiverb IR packages on Wwise.

Audiokinetic Inc. and Audio Ease B.V. announce a partnership where Audiokinetic will distribute award winning Altiverb Impulse Response packages for the Wwise convolution reverb plug-in. The first package will be available before the end of this year and will contain 49 impulse responses mostly oriented for the reproduction of outdoor environments. Reproducing outdoor environments is probably one of the most difficult tasks for sound designers today and this package arrives at the right moment for professionals seeking quality and realism in their games.

“At the design phase of our convolution reverb, we set a very challenging goal that we could have the best technology from the post-production world running in games, said Simon Ashby, VP Products at Audiokinetic. Given that our convolution reverb operates with high performance and that we proudly partner with Audio Ease, which is certainly the most respected player in this field, I think we can say that we have achieved our goal”.

“Convolution reverb approaches the real world so much better than synthetic reverb that it had no trouble taking over Hollywood film sound. I hope this set of movie post-pro Altiverb IR’s will help convolution reverb do the same in game sound, added Arjen van der Schoot, Co-owner of Audio Ease. We had been waiting for the right opportunity to start applying our IR’s in real time in games. When Audiokinetic came along, we did not hesitate. I believe we have chosen to partner with a company as devoted to impressive sounding audio as we are.”

Audiokinetik | Audio Ease

Sound recording:

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Sound design:

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Realtime vehicle audio simulation is one of the trickiest implementation challenges and definitely has the most moving parts. While most agree on the complexity and necessity for special handling when it comes to vehicle sound, the approaches can vary widely. From recording techniques to tools and implementation, Track Time Audio has been providing a resource for enthusiasts interested in the sound of fast cars and has been exposing some of the tricks behind making them sound good in realtime.

The current interview with Greg Hill from Soundwave Concepts includes some great insights into the process and passion involved with taking sound from the track and getting them in the game.

Track Time Audio Interview: Greg Hill

All SKUs are created equal…right?

It is a common question every time a new game is released on the console platforms: “I have both systems. Which version should I buy?”

In a perfect world, any game created for the consoles would run just perfectly on them, without any performance edge leaning towards one machine or the other. Perfect frame rate, glitch free in every way and beautiful experiences for all!

But of course we do not live in that world. Though things have improved with the current generation of consoles overall, it is still often said that the smart choice is to find out which console the game was developed for first and you’ll most likely have your answer.

Darkwatch: Curse of the…middleware?

“Darkwatch” was a great game to work on. Blending the Wild West with vampires seemed like a perfect fit for an FPS back when the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox ruled the living room. Both machines were great in their own rite, but were quite different in their design. So naturally, they had very different requirements for getting sound into the game.

Unlike today’s market where the Xbox 360 has had a significant head start on the PlayStation 3, the inverse was true for the previous console generation. With this being the case, when Sammy Studios began development with “Darkwatch”, their initial eye was on the PS2. For authoring sound in the game, we were using Sony’s proprietary audio tool called SCREAM.

The PS2 had a whopping 2 megabytes of memory for sound – a ridiculous limitation even for the time, especially when we had allotted 8MB on the Xbox (and that felt like a luxury). We also had streaming-from-disc support to play larger files like music and ambience that simply couldn’t fit otherwise. If memory serves, we had a total of 4-6 streams to cover music, dialog, ambient beds and other 3D flyby and player-positional sounds. All of the rest of the game’s sound had to fit in that crazy 2MB.

Every sound we created for the game was ultimately divided up into the smallest possible slivers of sounds, often at wildly varying sample rates. Nothing other than music was 44.1 or 48kHz. Ambient beds were 24kHz (better than that raspy 22.050). The initial blast of a gunshot might have been 28 or 32kHz to maintain it’s bright attack, while the canyon echo tails at the end of the sound could be reasonably knocked down to 12kHz before they started sounding too nasty.

The weapons were dynamically loaded, and we could only have 2 loaded at any time – usually the pistol and whatever other larger weapon you had on you. By doing this, we had to block out a chunk of memory that the heaviest gun, memory footprint-wise, defined. When that particular weapon wasn’t loaded, there was always a bit of precious space floating around in there that we knew we’d never get back.

One benefit of using such tiny sounds was the ability to re-use them for the creation of other sounds. Some new sounds weren’t created in Pro Tools at all, especially towards the end of the project when we had a lot of material already. We’d just piece together something out of the palette, using SCREAM’s ADSR envelope, and save some memory while we were at it.

The Other Shoe

About mid-way through the project’s development, we needed to start getting our assets ready for the Xbox. We were going to use Microsoft’s tool XACT, so after getting it all set up, away we went.

Initially, I thought I’d just begin re-creating the sounds in the same manner as we did with SCREAM, since we already had all of our little sound slivers exported from Pro Tools that way. XACT was pretty different from SCREAM, but I was sure it would work.

Boy was I wrong.

SCREAM had a cool feature called “child sounds” that we used quite bit in our design. Since building a sound out in SCREAM with tiny slivers of audio was tedious, this was one way an already-designed sound could be played along with a different sound. This way we wouldn’t need to keep re-creating that sound over and over again. For example, the spurs we had on Jericho’s footsteps were child sounds. The footsteps would play their random variants for heel and toe, and the spur sounds would also play.

XACT did not have this feature, which made the process of re-creating the work very tedious. This, in turn, added a lot more “events” to every sound that was created.

XACT’s events were how every sound or parameter change for a sound were used in the tool. As I began stringing things together to regenerate what we had created for the PS2, most of these XACT sounds ended up using many, many events.

We quickly realized this was going to be impossible. XACT only had a bandwidth of 50 or so events that could play during any given frame of gameplay, and once we started playing the game, whole sounds or parts of sounds were dropping out all OVER the place. Quite the disaster!

Back to the Drawing Board

In the long run, we had to fire up the months-old Pro Tools sessions to re-export as much of the audio as we could in larger or whole files to lessen our event overhead with XACT. That is, the ones we could locate if the sounds were old enough to have been worked on by people that were no longer at the studio.

The sounds that were assembled solely within SCREAM were the trickiest, as we couldn’t always locate the original sliver exports. This was a real pain in some instances; the only way we got around it on rare occasions was to literally re-record the sound out of SCREAM itself. Not ideal by any measure, but a necessity due to time.

Despite the challenges, and the fact that the PS2 was the first console “Darkwatch” was developed for, I still feel the overall better-sounding version of the game is on the Xbox. We didn’t have to crush the sample rates nearly as much and the whole system seemed to “breathe” easier as a whole.

In short, it’s the copy on my shelf.

Twice is Not Always “Nice”

Nowadays, I would hope to think that we are mostly past this issue of having to use totally-different tools for each SKU for a game that is released. Much of the audio middleware out there seems universally compatible with all of the hardware, and programmers have kept an eye on this when designing proprietary engines, requiring minimal fuss on our end in working with them.

It’s enough work to create a game; no one should have to do it twice!

Ben Long has released a new eBook called “The Insiders Guide to Music & Sound for Mobile Games“.

Mobile is by far, the fastest growing sector of the video game industry. New mobile devices appear almost weekly, each promising heightened user experience. This has created new challenges for audio professionals. Join Ben Long as he reveals the creative, technical and business aspects of audio in mobile games, including:

• The #1 secret to mixing audio for mobile apps
• New methods of breaking into game audio
• Free music & sound resources for developers

+ Learn unpublished techniques for working with game audio on multiple platforms.

The eBook is available at $39,95 (retail price $77). For more information and articles of Ben, visit Game Audio 101.

Richard Stevens and Dave Raybould have finished a new book the will be published by Focal Press. It’s called The Game Audio Tutorial, described as “a practical guide to sound and music for interactive games”. They’ve also launched a website where the readers will be allowed to enjoy some cool stuff, including a unique tutorial game level, twenty 10-minute tutorial videos, a library with hundreds of sound files and all kind of articles and resources. So great, huh?

It’s available for pre-order on Amazon and others at $48,95 and will be available on March 29, 2011. Its price is $48,95.

Details:

This practical guide to Game Audio puts the means of production into the hands of Sound Designers, Composers, and Game Designers. If you want to be part of the future of Game Audio you need to learn how to produce Interactive Audio, not just one shot sound effects or music loops. Better use of Audio makes a better Game and it’s your job to make this happen. You can do this by talking, but you can do it better by showing. Get your hands dirty by seeing what you can do, and how far you can go, in a real Games Engine to demonstrate your ideas effectively. Each section of the book links to an area of the accompanying Game Level where you can experience the principles in action before getting stuck in yourself with over fifty practical exercises.

Chapter 1 : Basic training

Readers will be introduced to the chosen platform for demonstrating the principles within the book, Epic Games ‘Unreal Development Kit’ (available to all readers for free at http://www.udk.com/). They will learn about the importance of ambient sound in adding character and immersion to game environments. Via a number of simple tasks they will learn how to navigate the UDK interface and how to implement basic sound ambiences.

Chapter 2 : How big is the van ?

This chapter will deal with the issues of memory when developing audio for games. A number of solutions to non-repetitive design will be discussed, illustrated and accompanied by tasks to embed knowledge. These techniques and principles are particularly applicable to platforms where the memory is a significant restriction such as the NDS, PSP, iPhone or other mobile devices, but are also equally important for other consoles such as the Wii, XBox360 and PS3 albeit on a different scale.

Chapter 3 : Making it sound real

This chapter will deal with a number of acoustic principles, as applied in games, and their implementation. It also will discuss the need to create a realistic, consistent and believable sound world through the implementation of sounds to accompany the physical interaction of gameplay objects.

Chapter 4 : Making it sound good

This chapter will deal with the crucial issues of how sound can support gameplay and narrative not only through adding characterisation to objects and characters but by also being reactive to game events via the use of interactive mixing.

Chapter 5 : Music systems

This chapter will cover music implementation in games. It will deal with a number of different approaches going from simple crossfading systems to more generative techniques.

Chapter 6 : Dialogue

This chapter will begin by looking at some of the tragic history of dialogue in games and posit some reasons for these continuing crimes, before proposing some suggestions and techniques for improving things in the future.

Chapter 7 : Advanced Sound system design

This chapter deals with complex interactive systems for game sound design such as vehicle and weapon design. In this chapter we will dig beneath the usual user interface of the game development tool and look at some of the key concepts relating to the scripting and programming that go on under the hood.

Chapter 8 : Next steps

This chapter will look at career opportunities within the games industry. It will include interviews with industry practitioners, advice on the roles available within industry, and advice for creating an appropriate demo reel.

Appendix A :Sound FX design

This chapter will look at practical sound FX design for games. Taking the reader from basic recording principles to processing and digital audio manipulation for the creation of sound FX.

Appendix B: Sampling and resampling

This demonstrates the application of this important technique via a freely available audio editor package.

Appendix C: Loops and Looping

This demonstrates the application of this important technique via a freely available audio

editor package.

Appendix D : Quickstart Page

This provides a summary of the key techniques for those readers who already have some familiarity with Game Design tools.

Appendix E : Keyboard Shortcuts.

This provides a useful reference for keyboard shortcuts.

Appendix F : Template levels

This appendix contains a description of the Template level included with the book that can form the basis for readers further experimentation.

Appendix G: Sound Library Contents

This appendix will outline the contents of the small sound library which accompanies the book.

Appendix H : Basic terms.

This covers the basic terms that the book will use for any readers unfamiliar with common computing terms.

Damian Kastbauer and Anton Woldhek have published a new episode of Game Audio Podcast discussing stuff from the recent GDC 2011.

In which Damian & Anton discuss highlights from the 2011 Game Developers Conference with a focus on super sessions, off the hook parties, and the impression of a procedural audio groundswell.

Listen – GAP Episode #9

More cool tips on working with audio development for the iPhone, this time from Nathan Madsen at iDevGames.

Introduction

Because creating audio content specially for the iPhone isn’t too drastically different than creating audio for any other game, this article is a relatively brief collection of tips about how to best adjust audio for the iPhone.

Where’s the bass?!

The iPhone has one external speaker at the bottom end of the device, and a headphone jack at the top left location. The speaker is very small but has decent quality, however you will get very little low end bass from the speaker. The headphones will give you a much better stereo mix. As long as you are aware that your audio can be heard in either of these ways, and plan for it, you can create audio that sounds appropriate and solid in both situations.

File size and type

File types are important on the iPhone, especially MP3s. The iPhone cannot stream multiple MP3 files at once. The most common way to approach the sounds in a game is to have music be a streaming MP3 file (at stereo 128k if the file size is small enough, mono if it needs to be smaller) and use WAV or CAF for the one hit SFX (Sound Effects). SFX are usually down sampled to 22k but that can depend on the game’s graphics and other processing needs. The more simple the game, the more CPU power you have to work with audio and vice versa. When contracting out for a game, always ask the client what the maximum file size is for the streaming music. One of my clients required about 1.5 MB which is equivalent to about a minute and a half or so of music. Another client wanted two and a half minutes of streaming music, so it can vary from project to project.

If possible, attempt to make alternative versions of the same song, and give them to the client. It can be as simple as muting several of the tracks, changing the instrumentation, or performing a different solo. For a client that is open to a larger audio footprint this can really help keep the music within a certain size (per each individual file) but give more variety and make the music less repetitive.

Continue reading…

Via The Sonic Spread