In a continued attempt to shed light on some of the best examples of Technical Sound Design in the current generation, I’d like to call attention to several titles that have pushed the envelope when it comes to the art of ambience. The all encompassing experience of “being there” in a game, where the sense of place is encapsulated in the sound of the environment. Stepping beyond the background din of a given location, we’re moving forward towards the players ability to affect the sound of a space by their interaction with it. This can be as simple as turning off a machine that had been emitting a constant loop of activity, or as complex as scaling the dynamics of a crowd dependent on the current artificial intelligence activity in an area.

THE SHACKLES

Despite leaving behind the memory restrictions of previous generation consoles, hearing a single looping ambience throughout a level or area within a game continues to be common – making any recurring distinct elements of the background clearly identifiable when repeated. While these backgrounds, well designed and teaming with character, still contain the potential to keep the player immersed in the game world, anyone who chooses this approach runs the risk of exposing the limitation this technique to the player. Several best practices have evolved and taken root to combat repetition and further lend a sense of randomness to the sound aspect of the game world.

In an article by Nick Peck back in 2004 entitled “Tips for Game Sound Designers”, a case for highlighting ambient elements which vary in time, duration, and position in order to “Generate 5.1 content without full bandwidth sources” was made. This included the idea of a subtly shifting background ambience with randomly placed elements as a solution to static looping soundscape, and presented a way out of the confinements of the locked loop. While likely that this presentation was not the first time a solution was defined, the practice of ambient creation using these methodologies perpetuates today in step with the advancements in available resources and the increased creativity of audio toolsets.

THE LAND OF THE LIVING

The world of Oblivion can be bustling with movement and life or devoid of presence, depending on the circumstances. The feeling of “aliveness” is in no small part shaped by the rich dynamic ambient textures that have been carefully orchestrated by the Bethesda Softworks sound team. Audio Designer Marc Lambert provided some background on their ambient system in a developer diary shortly before launch:

“The team has put together a truly stunning landscape, complete with day/night cycles and dynamic weather. Covering so much ground — literally, in this case — with full audio detail would require a systematic approach, and this is where I really got a lot of help from our programmers and the Elder Scrolls Construction Set [in order to] specify a set of sounds for a defined geographic region of the game, give them time restrictions as well as weather parameters.” – Marc Lambert

In a game where you can spend countless hours collecting herbs and mixing potions in the forest or dungeon crawling while leveling up your character, one of the keys to extending the experience is the idea of non-repetitive activity. If we can help to offset that from a sound perspective by introducing dynamic ambiance it can help offset some of the grind the player experiences when tackling some of the more repetitive and unavoidable tasks.

“[The ambient sound] emphasizes what I think is another strong point in the audio of the game — contrast. The creepy quiet, distant moans and rumbles are a claustrophobic experience compared to the feeling of space and fresh air upon emerging from the dungeon’s entrance into a clear, sunny day. The game’s innumerable subterranean spaces got their sound treatment by hand as opposed to a system-wide method.” – Marc Lambert

Also on the topic of injecting randomness into the soundscape, from a Game Informer interview with Don Veca regarding the ambient sound design of Dead Space:

“Veca told his audio team to make their ambient tracks a little shorter, more vanilla, in order to create audio with fewer effects that would catch a player’s attention when looped. The team then wrote some software Veca calls “the creepy ambi-patch.” This little piece of code would play separate small sounds, gradually changing their pitch and volume as they panned around Dead Space’s 3D environments. The effect worked beautifully, ensuring that every moment of Dead Space’s ambient backgounds were different no matter how long a person explored, or how many times they replayed a section.” – Game Informer

It should come as no surprise that ambience can be used to great effect in communicating the idea of place, either with ties to reality or to the abstract extreme. When you combine the use of soundscapes and level-based tools to apply these types of systems appropriately, the strengths of dynamics and interactivity can be leveraged to create a constantly changing tapestry that maintains a sense of immersion, and creates a personal experience for every player.

THE TOOLS OF THE TRADE

When it came time to design the creative tools used to implement ambiences in Fable II, the sound designers were able to “paint ambient layers” directly onto their maps. In a video development diary, Lionhead audio director Russel Shaw explains:

“I designed a system whereby we could paint ambient layers onto the actual Fable II maps. So that as you’re running through a forest for instance, we painted down a forest theme, and the blending from one ambiance to another is quite important, so the technology was lain down first of all.” – Russel Shaw

In what could be seen as another trend in the current console cycle, enabling the sound designers to handle every aspect of sound and the way it is used by the game is just now becoming common. The ability to implement with little to no programmer involvement outside of the initial system design, setup, and toolset creation is directly in contrast to what had gone before.

In the past, it was not uncommon to create sound assets and deliver them with a set of instructions – how they should be played back – to a programmer. A step removed from the original content creator, the sounds would then need to be programmed into the level – including any parametric or transition information – where the ability to adjust values would be out of reach for the sound designer. It is clearly a benefit to the scope of any discipline to be able to create, implement, and execute a clear vision without a handoff between departments to accomplish the task.

Many of the audio middleware toolsets currently available enable the Sound Designer a high level of control over the way sounds are reproduced. Some include the ability to randomize a sounds 3D position, even going as far to enable the ability to map positional “paths” using a custom interface. This opens up a further level of variation beyond sound files or pitch and volume randomization, and distributes the action across the soundscape in a way that better resembles our experience’s in real life.

As familiarity with these techniques and functionality of available toolsets increases, we can hope for a level of randomness that keeps the player firmly rooted in diversity and appropriateness of the game world. In this way I feel like we are gaining in the art of audio implementation and sound integration – by putting creative tools in the hands of the interactive-minded sound designers and implementation specialists we are paving the way for the ability to simulate living breathing worlds of sound.

THE NAKED CITY

“There are a thousand tales in the naked city” and if you listen closely enough you might be able to hear most of them during the gameplay of Prototype. That is, if you can keep yourself from wreaking havoc among the citizens of New York…which, let’s face it is nearly impossible. While you probably won’t hear all of the stories that the city has to tell, you will be able to hear the changing voice of that city during your progression from introspective lost soul to amped up superman thanks to the attention to detail by Radical’s Sound Department. In a detailed article, Sound Director Scott Morgan details the implementation that gave Protoype’s cityscape it’s voice.

“So we decided to develop a dynamic system for ambient sound so that New York could speak, through its inhabitants, of its current “emotional” state. If the city was in a relatively “normal” state, we would hear the traffic, the pedestrians and the busy sounds of New York that we all know. As panic ensues, so does the voice of the city, with screaming pedestrians and honking horns. If the player guides his character up to a quiet rooftop or the middle of Central Park, the sounds of New York adapt accordingly. As the infected hordes take over, the sounds voice the pain and suffering of the city and its inhabitants. As the story progresses and the city heads towards its darkest hour, its voice dynamically follows – expressing its state as a character in the story, revealing its suffering.” – Scott Morgan

This touches on a diverging point in the creation of ambience: that the sound of the ambient should react to the gameplay and change dynamically based on what’s happening in the environment as a result of player interaction. As we continue to move closer towards realistically representing a model of reality in games, so should our worlds react and be influenced by sound and its effect on these worlds. This was foreshadowed by Crytek’s Christian Shilling during the production of the original Crysis:

“Ambient sound effects were created by marking areas across the map for ambient sounds, with certain areas overlapping or being inside each other, with levels of priority based on the player’s location. ‘Nature should react to the player,’ said Schilling, and so the ambiance also required dynamic behavior, with bird sounds ending when gunshots are fired.” – Christian Schilling

Schilling went on to explain the basic concept and provide additional background when contacted via email:

“Sneaking through nature means you hear birds, insects, animals, wind, water, materials. So everything — the close and the distant sounds of the ambiance. Firing your gun means you hear birds flapping away, and silence. Silence of course means, here, wind, water, materials, but also – and this was the key I believe – distant sounds (distant animals and other noises)…So, after firing your gun, you do hear close noises like soft wind through the leaves or some random crumbling bark of some tree next to you (the close environment), all rather close and crispy, but also the distant layer of the ambiance, warm in the middle frequencies, which may be distant wind, the ocean, distant animals”
In addition to the triggering of various one-shot sounds, various mix decisions are being made behind the scenes in order to further focus on the appropriate sounds – Insuring that the important aspects of sound are communicated to the player.

THE WAY FORWARD

Thankfully, the continuation of work started years ago to diversify the ambient landscape in games and bring variation and randomness to environmental sound is starting to make headway. With standout examples leading the way, and dedicated individuals sharing their processes and reasoning, we can hope to expand on the creative possibilities enabled by toolsets and best practices to create rich sound worlds for players to inhabit. Focusing on these ambient techniques during game development means the player won’t feel inclined to focus the negative aspect of hearing loop point’s while playing – instead, they can marvel at the interaction between their character and the game world, and let it set the tone for their experience.

Concept Art © Aaron Armstrong: http://aaron-armstrong.blogspot.com/

Developer created proprietary toolsets continue to provide a vital form of audio integration in the industry, especially in cases where the gameplay specific features need to be exposed and interacted with at a deeper level than what comes “out of the box” with most middleware. In the days before robust audio middleware toolsets this may have been the only way to get past the basic “Play Sound” functionality of an audio engine and pull off amazing feats of groundbreaking interactive audio.

Because of the nature of game development and custom technology, there is not a lot of information made publicly available regarding these tools, and what has been exposed is usually little more than a screen shot or casual mention in a larger article regarding a specific titles sound. In most cases additional links and information have been provided in an attempt to gain a clearer picture of their uses, and what is available may be of value to those who might be involved with tool creation and especially those who are attempting to understand some of the additional esoteric aspects of audio implementation that have developed over time. While this is not a comprehensive look at proprietary toolsets through the years, it is an attempt to survey the landscape of what is known.

Sony SCREAM

Veiled in secrecy, the SONY SCREAM tool provides direct access to the Sony hardware specific audio library MulitStream. Public information has been scarce, unless you are a developer for the PS2/PS3 and the only screens around are found embedded in Presentations or articles. One interesting thing to note is Sony’s adoption of the iXMF interactive standard established by the IASIG in 2009 for their future toolset iterations including AWESOME (audio scripting solution) , SULPHA (a Multi-Stream analyzer/ debugger), and FUSION (modular based synth engine) as noted in an article with SCEE’s Jason Page and subsequent Delop article with Oliver Hume.

Sony’s Page: ‘Next Gen Audio – Is That It?’
Develop Article: SULPHA, so good
SCEE to implement iXMF
Next-Gen Audio Square-Off: PlayStation 3 vs. Xbox 360
IASIG – iXMF
Better Tools for Sound Designers on PlayStation_3

Bungie: Guerilla Toolset

The Guerrilla Toolset used by Bungie for the Halo games has been discussed in several articles, but aside from some general information and a tiny picture in the wild, there aren’t many supporting details. I was able to cobble together some details from notes I recovered from an Audio Boot Camp presentation Jay Weinland gave back at GDC 2006. Among the features over viewed in the session were the ability to subscribe and mix sounds based on their sound_class, visually represent distance rolloff in-game, update values in the tool and update in-game with keystroke, and Reverb interpolation between zones. I’m sure much has changed since 2006 as Bungie continue to ratchet up the quality of audio across their titles. One thing that stands out in Halo 3 is their newly implemented use of Waves EQ and Surround Limiter at runtime to modify the output of the game’s audio. This move toward the use of high end DSP taken from the pro audio realm and converted to work in the engine is a trend that we should be seeing more of in the future.

Halo 3 Audio: Locked and Loaded
Halo 3: Bugie.netAudio Presentation
GDC 2005 Report: Audio Production for Halo 2
Halo 3: Waves DSP at Runtime

Bethesda Software: Oblivion

Some of the audio functionality of the Elder Scrolls Construction Set is over viewed in this insightful development journal, along with what are becoming some of the best practices for Ambient sound integration. It’s great to see a visual representation of the ambient being used across an area, along with the parameters for playback. This kindof specific use tool is a great example of bridging the gap between game engines and audio functionality.

Article: Elder Scrolls Construction Set – Audio

Day 1 Studios: Ducking

In a technical article the overviews the theory of Ducking, Zach Quarles exposes the tool he used at Day 1 Studio’s to accomplish the interactive effect of reducing the volume of non-priority sounds in order to better differentiate mission critical sound or dialog..

Article: Game Audio Theory Ducking
Internal Ruminations of an Audio Monkey 

Day 1 Ducking Tool

Radical Games: Prototype

Thanks to the fine folks over at Radical Entertainment, much has been revealed regarding the various tools and techniques utilized by the sound team to push audio quality in games further towards a Hollywood model of sound. While the idea of interactive mixing is a broader topic for another day, some of the recent work that was done with scalable crowd ambience has gone along way towards pushing the dynamics background sound. In a series of articles Scott Morton details of their use of Max/MSP style procedural, runtime Reverb, and the proprietary toolset “Audio Builder” to accomplish the feat of implementing a 18 channel sound file in order to orchestrate the ambient and limit the impact to the disk at runtime. Some of the tools used for this process have been outlined including a peek behind the curtain on some of the creative tools used at Radical.

Article: Dynamic Game Audio Ambience
Article: The Sounds of Prototype

Battlefield Bad Company

In a presentation given at the Game Developers Conference in 2009, DICE Audio Programmer Anders Clerwall gave an overview of their “High Dynamic Range” audio solution spearheaded by David Mollerstedt (Head of Audio, DICE). Simply put, High Dynamic Range Audio allows for the realtime interactive mixing of sound based on prioritization, culling, and loudness measurement during gameplay. The result is an overall sound mix which adapts to the action going on in the game. Furthermore, menu options are made available to adjust the playback device type as explained by Ben Minto (Audio Director, DICE):

“TV/HiFi/Cinema – these (Options) change the way the game is mixed at runtime through Frostbite’s HDR system. The settings are self explanatory – HiFi is default, TV is if you need to hear everything at a quiet volume through a small speaker, and Cinema is if you have a nice posh setup with full range speakers.“

While the technique of providing different playback profiles is not unheard of in other titles, the HDR system easily allows for the dynamic balancing of the listener experience in order to provide the best possible soundscape.

Download: Automatic_Audio_in_Frostbite
Article: Heard About Battlefield Bad Company
How HDR Audio Makes Battlefield: Bad Company Go BOOM


In addition, here are some screens from the Audio Panel within the Frostbite Editor where you can see the “Loudness” attribute for a sound source exposed.

EA: The Simpsons

From a presentation given by the audio team at EA Redwood shores for The Simpsons Game several screens for proprietary tools are exposed including a view of the EA proprietary procedural toolset AEMS or Audio Event Management System, and several custom tools used for modifying parameters related to their physics implementation. AEMS is a general tool at EA made by EA Tech, and it’s been in use since before 2002. Its been used by almost every game during those earlier days, and even today is used in many.

Presentation Slides: Sound Design for The Simpsons Game

EA Tool used on "The Simpsons"

EA Tool used on "The Simpsons"

EA Tool used on "The Simpsons"

Impact Tuning

Roll Tuning

Slide Tuning

Despite the rise of audio middleware in today’s market, it is clear that is not a one size fits all mentality when it comes to creating a toolset and workflow to support the strengths of a particular games design. Hopefully by seeing, and understanding the choices studio’s and game audio professionals are employing to help them creatively add sound to games, we can continue to drive the innovation of game audio through the current console generation and beyond.

Tune in next time when we pontificate further on some of the creative techniques used to bring interactivity to audio in games.

Here is the final interview with Rob Bridgett, about Prototype, talking about the sound of the cinematics, the mixing process, and more!

Designing Sound: First of all tell us something about what was your contribution on Prototype and what do you did for the sound of the game?

Rob Bridgett: In late 2007, the audio director for the project, Scott Morgan, asked if I could get involved and help out with the game mid-production. Cory Hawthorne was working as Technical Sound Designer and Implementer on the project which meant I had the opportunity to cover two areas on the game, one was as cinematics sound designer and implementer and the other was as game mixer. In terms of the first role, I was responsible for the sound effects, Foley, dialogue editing and mix of all the cut scenes in the game. The music was edited and supervised by the sound director for the project, Scott Morgan, and once all the components were assembled I would provide a mix automation pass before the finished file went into the game.

The second role, that of mixer, was one that came into play only during the post-production sound beta phase of the project’s development, in which Scott and I spend four weeks mixing the entire game in Radical’s 7.1 mix room. I always welcome the opportunity to help out on projects like this as it offers a break from being an audio director and allows a lot more time to concentrate more fully on one or two areas in particular.

DS : Can you tell us something about the process for the cinematics sound production?

RB: Sure. I’ll talk you through a typical set-up and process that I use on cinematics. The actual work on the cut-scenes starts fairly early in production. Once a script has been approved for production, placeholder dialogue is recorded here, for this we typically just use members of the team to read out the dialogue. We record this, edit it and give those files to the animation team so that they can begin their storyboarding process. They use these placeholder files to come up with very rough timings and shot lists which really gets the whole process kick started. Usually during this time, the actors are cast for the cinematics and they are recorded which eventually means that after a couple of months you have the real dialogue takes to work with and the animation team can start being more accurate with their timings.

Up until that stage, Scott Morgan, the game’s audio director had pretty much run the process, I was myself at this time finishing up the 50 cent game. I rolled onto the project in January 2008, at this point Scott had all the dialogue recorded and the cinematics team had some very rough avi files of the various cinematic scenes, so this was a good time to actually start building up the sound elements and structural foundations of the cinematics.

The first thing that I do is create a seperate Nuendo session for each scene. I typically do this from a cinematics template that I have created in Nuendo, which basically is an empty project with pre-assigned tracks and folder tracks.

• Dialogue Folder Track containing six mono tracks all assigned to CENTRE only
• SFX Folder Track containing five mono tracks all assigned to CENTRE only plus five stereo LR tracks
• Foley Folder track containing ten mono tracks all assigned to CENTRE only
• Ambience Folder Track containing four stereo tracks all panned LR and slightly LS RS
• Music Folder Track containing four LR stereo tracks and two 5.1 music tracks
• LFE folder track containing 4 mono tracks all assigned to LFE only.

These templates provide very quick structure to the whole project which is easy to navigate and expand upon. I recommend this for anyone getting into a new cinematics audio project as getting organized at the earliest stages like this saves tons of time later on.

As we had the dialogue ready and recorded, one of the first tasks for me to do was to go through all the scenes and ‘worldize’ the voices – rather than re-recording, I used Altiverb VST for each different room or physical space depicted in the scenes. The roomverb was panned mainly to the fronts (LCR) but also to the rears in order to give the sense of the listener being inside the room and surrounded by the reflections off the walls. This is quite a subtle effect, yet it adds a great deal of realism to dialogue that is recorded close-mic in an ADR room. Further to this some low-end was also rolled off the dialogue in order to simulate more of a distant mic / location sound feel. Having done this treatment on each of the cinematic scenes, it was time to move onto the second phase of building up the sound, adding roomtone and BG ambience.

For each scene and for each cut, I added roomtone that I had recorded here in the various spaces at Radical. There is a lot of AC in Radical and it makes for some useful roomtone source recordings, this meant that I had a ready to use library of roomtone beds which I could quickly edit into the scenes. For each camera cut in perspective the volumes of the roomtones were changed to ensure they corresponded to the listener position and point of view of the characters.

Scott Morgan had also been on location to New York to gather exterior ambience for the game, and it is these recordings that I was able to quickly use and edit together for any of the exterior scenes in the game. In fact, in the end I mainly relied on the actual background ambience file from the game for these ambience beds, as this would mean there was continuity between cut-scenes and game. In some of the scenes we also let the ambience present in the game continue throughout the cut-scene in order to maintain complete continuity from game to cut-scene and back to game again, for these instances, it just meant muting the ambience folder track on export.

With all the reverb and backgrounds built up, some effort could be put into sound effects design. An initial pass was done just concentrating on big fx moments like explosions or body impacts, also because the movies were low in detail at this point it could not be seen what materials or detail would be present in the final movies. All of the cut-scenes in the game used the in-game engine, so the full detail could only be seen at run-time in the game.

For the Foley in the cinematics we contracted Sharpe Sound here in Vancouver to cover the movements for all our cinematics scenes. The Foley was returned to us un-edited so the next phase of my work was to edit all the Foley and premix this so it sat well with the other effects and backgrounds. During all this work, the movies were constantly being iterated upon, receiving a lot of editing work and often large sequences would be re-cut and even deleted entirely. This meant lots of rounds of re-syncing dialogue and effects to the latest cuts of the movies.

By the time we reached Alpha and the work on the cut-scenes was locked down, I had two weeks in which to complete the final effects pass and mix on all the movies, matching the vo, music and effects levels for all of the movies. There were around 30 movies in total, around 45 minutes of in game rendered cut-scenes. Scott and I then reviewed all the cut scenes with the rest of the cinematics team and made notes of a few final tweaks before sign off.

DS: Did you record all the sound effects of the cinematics… what are the sources?

RB: We do have our own sound library here at Radical, in which we have archived many of our sources for other games such as Crash and Scarface. This library is invaluable in quickly getting sounds that I know will work. I think the key to good, fast work is actually knowing your library really well and being able to access exactly what you want quickly. The Foley, as I said, was all recorded fresh for this project, but the majority of the effects, the bodyfalls, punches and transformation sounds were all recorded here specifically for the project.

Perhaps the best example of some of the cinematic sound design we’ve been talking about is the ‘intro cinematic’ for the game which can be viewed online here…

DS: How about the mix for the game? Can you tell us something about the process involved for that?

RB: We have a proprietary run-time mixing system that enables us to do this attached to Mackie hardware control surfaces, the same one used on Scarface that I have talked about in depth elsewhere. For the mix we spent a total of four weeks, this time was broken down into a few different phases.

The first week of the mix was probably the most critical because it was where we set the overall output levels of the game. The first thing we did was to bring the whole output of all the channels down by around -6dB. This is because that when we started listening and mixing at reference listening level of 79dB, the game was incredibly loud. What tends to happen during development is that sounds are turned up and up so that you can hear them while you are populating the game with them, this approach is fine while in development, but at some point you have to reset the whole board and start from scratch again. This is what we did in the first few days of the mix. Getting the dialogue to a decent level and then ‘mixing around’ it is the approach we have been taking. So, once we’ve set our dialogue level, the music will be determined in relation to that, as with the effects and so on. Intelligibility of dialogue is really at the centre of most mixes to be honest, I still hear so many games today where you actually cannot audibly hear what is being said by certain characters because guns are being fired etc. This is perhaps one of the many areas where the styles of mixing in cinema is an influence.

Anyway, once the overall listening level is set, it is a matter of playing through the entire game, identifying key mix moments, mainly dialogue or mission related, but often tied to some in-game feature or effect like the thermal vision in prototype, for which we pitch down the ambience and add a low pass filter to many of the sounds in the game. Similarly for Infected Vision, where all sounds are given a muted treatment except for infected who remain clear and unprocessed during this mode. We also tweak every individual sound to make sure it is not too quiet or too loud. This is what takes the majority of time on a game mix, up to two weeks in this case, and all the time being aware of keeping the overall listening level tolerable for the player at home. Another major thing is to maintain the levels of sound, particularly dialogue and music, throughout cinematics and gameplay so that there isn’t a jarring disconnect between the two modes of exposition.

The final week of mixing we used to test how the game sounded on various mixdown configurations, such as stereo TV and all the various output configurations on the various consoles. The mix is tweaked at this point to ensure that users who listen on a tv set only are able to hear what they should be hearing, usually in the form of a few minor tweaks to music levels and dialogue levels but nothing too significant that it will adversely affect the surround mix.

DS: It’s a video game for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360… to work with sound… what platform you prefer?

RB: A tricky question, as a developer of multi-platform games I do have some opinions from a mixer’s point of view. The 360 is certainly the least complicated in terms of outputs, it supports Dolby Digital 5.1 and stereo (via optical and HDMI) as well as an analogue stereo output so it is kind of the easier to work with in terms of options and checking the mix. However the PS3 has discreet 7.1 support as well as a whole host of audio output options including DTS and PCM as well as Dolby Digital, which does make it more complex for checking and testing, but also provides more options for the user, particularly the higher-end HD audiophile user. As for the PC, this is potentially the most complicated of the platforms to mix and test for, because you can have any soundcard on the market connected to your PC which means we have to test on a wide variety of cards but can’t always be sure of what end users will be hearing. Having mixed the Xbox version of Prototype first, we then cloned all our mix settings and did a mix pass on the PS3 – fortunately the mix translated very well and I think we only made one or two very minor adjustments. The biggest difference being the difference between our two different compression codecs used: XMA on the 360 and MP3 on the PS3.

DS: I saw an interview with Mark Tuffy of DTS who said that Prototype was the first Xbox 360 game with 7.1 sound.. It’s about neural surround… what do you know about the implementation of that process in Prototype?

RB: I actually know very little about the implementation of this in the game from a technical point of view. What I do know is that it is running the DTS Neural surround code on the Xbox360 (there is an option in the sound menu in the game to turn this on or off) and that it is outputting a 7.1 mix of the game when listening through a receiver with neural enabled. The receiver then basically decodes the extra two back surround channels from the Left and Right surround channels of the regular 5.1 outputs. We mixed the game while monitoring in 7.1 on the Xbox, while always checking how the sound folded down to both 5.1 Dolby Digital and Stereo. The game also runs in 7.1 PCM on the PS3.

DS: In terms of interactive mixing, what aspects would you highlight as most important in the mixing and implementation of interactive audio on Prototype?

RB: Some of the action gets pretty intense pretty quickly in this game. Strike teams are sent into heavily infected zones, the amount of sound playing back is huge and there is essentially a sound for every event and collision occurring, so the game needs to be able to deal with this. It isn’t really part of the mixing system but it plays into it, there are limits specified in our engine on the amount of certain types of sounds that can be played back at any one time, such as dialogue or gun shots, and there is a priority system which gives precedence to some sounds over others. To add to this, the mixer system allows us to finesse certain events such as the shot from the thermobaric tank, whereby we duck down most other sounds to foreground this one huge tank weapon ejection to make it seem like it is much louder than it really is!

DS: I think one of the best features of Prototype sound are the ambiences, there are a lot of those and too much recording of many places… Why does the sound team gave much importance to the ambiences? What is the importance of these in Prototype?

RB: You know, the audio director Scott, has written a superb and detailed article on the ambiences in prototype here that can best answer your question… I really recommend it as there is quite a unique approach to ambience in this game, which I agree, works really well in conveying the feeling of New York.

Prototype Official Website

Rob Bridgett, one of the first to complete the Master’s degree in Sound Design for the Moving Image at Bournemouth University in 1999, has a series of articles at Gamasutra called “The future of Game Audio”. On May 14 Bob presented the first part of the series: Is Interactive Mixing The Key? And heres is the second part: The Game Audio Mixing Revolution.

Bridgett gathers mixing case studies on titles such as Prototype, LittleBigPlanet, Fable II, Heavenly Sword, and concludes by looking at the next 5-10 years in the field, you can’t miss this.. I could include some highlights, but whole article is fascinating, so you can read the full version at Gamasutra.