Learning your first DAW is a challenging and memorable experience, and for those of us in game audio, learning audio middleware brings similarly insightful rewards. Not only can you experience the uncanny magic of syncing sounds to animations, you can also witness the characters and environments come alive with even the simplest of audio assets. Before you know it, you've … [Read more...]
Valve Launches Steam Audio
After acquiring Impulsonic earlier this year, Valve just released Steam Audio, a new spatial audio solution with physics based sound propagation on top of HRTF binaural audio for games & VR. The Beta of the SDK is available free of charge & currently supports Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android. For more details please visit the official announcement. … [Read more...]
Beep Book Released
The Beep Documentary Project just announced that the Beep Book is now available. The book contains transcripts of interviews with over 100 game audio professionals from a range of areas of game sound's history. Interviews include artists such as Marty O'Donnell (Halo), George "The Fat Man" Sanger (7th Guest), Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy), Yoko Shimomura (Kingdom Hearts), … [Read more...]
4th International FilmSoundHamburg Summer Academy
The fourth annual FilmSoundHamburg got under way in Hamburg on Sunday evening - an event that will bring together enthusiasts from the worlds of sound design, film composition and game music for five days of workshops and seminars and masterclasses. Among the highlights will be four separate masterclasses given by Tim Nielsen of Skywalker Sound (Maleficient, Lord of the the … [Read more...]
Audio And VR
There’s been more VR content made in the past year than the last twenty combined, thanks to the emergence of the Oculus Rift, Sony’s Project Morpheus and other such virtual reality (VR) devices. There’s lots of innovation happening on the visual front, including new methods of gameplay, narrative structure and visual design. The obvious question: what’s happening on the audio … [Read more...]
A Modular Creature Design System
I’ve been working on a game project on and off over the past year and a part of the design is of relevance to this month’s theme — animals. The gameplay revolves around creatures of various kinds — some good, some evil, some tiny, some large. I had to conjure a vocalisation system that achieved the following technical and design criteria: Actions by the user would directly … [Read more...]
Rewind…Audio Implementation Greats #3: Crackdown – Realtime Worlds
In the run-up to this month's reverb theme, former contributor Damian Kastbauer suggested we re-run this article he put together discussing the game Crackdown for XBOX. The article may be two years old, but the content remains undeniably relevant. Never one to ignore good suggestions, here we are... One area that has been gaining ground since the early days of EAX on the PC … [Read more...]