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Workflow Evolution

Dec 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Dan Daley

As the tools for video-game audio get more sophisticated, the sound gets more complex and the workflow has to adapt.

Beyond the asset list

The asset list that most game-audio developers use as the jumping off point in the quest for matching sounds is a great foundational workflow tool. However, LaMartina says, don't assume it's all you need. “Sound goes well beyond the assets that appear on the screen, and that's where audio really makes its contribution to a game's immersiveness: The ambient sounds and off-screen localization sounds reinforce the world of the game and have a narrative element in that they can foreshadow events to some,” he says.

LaMartina's methodology is to play a section of the game at the level he's designing it. “As if I was walking around the game environment as though it were real, what am I missing that makes it more real?” he says. “You're looking for clues that aren't on the asset list.”

As an example, LaMartina, an avid snowboarder, says he was traversing a virtual winter-world landscape once, and he noticed that the sound that tiny particles of hard snow make when they hit objects was missing. “I added a kind of rustling sound to get that effect, but more importantly, to get that emotional response connection that that sound provides,” he says.

The intensity with which that kind of audio is experienced is now more variable than ever. “Various new middleware applications allow us to let it play back differently according to the circumstances of the game,” LaMartina says. “How hard the snow hits is determined by play, and the resulting sound is affected by filters and level changes. The changes in the audio are behavioral, which greatly enhances the experience. It's much better than just tossing the raw WAV data in there like used to be done.”

Another piece of software that game-audio developers have come to rely on is Firelight Technologies FMOD, a highly compatible cross-platform audio engine, available for the Microsoft Windows, Windows CE, Linux, Apple Macintosh, Nintendo GameCube, Sony PlayStation 2, and Microsoft Xbox platforms. (Part of its allure for the gamer culture is the fact that it's license-free for non-commercial users. And even licenses for commercial applications are quite inexpensive.)

“FMOD gives game developers a much higher level of control over the audio,” LaMartina says, citing its ability to address hundreds of voices simultaneously, creating the kind of matrix of hundreds of variable submixes (which can react to various circumstances in the game) versus the final mix of linear entertainment media.

Once every asset has its sound envelope, and ambient and localization audio has been created, the process moves to authoring, which has lately been dominated by Unreal Technology's Unreal Engine 3, a game-development framework developed for next-generation game consoles — specifically for Microsoft DirectX 9/10 PCs, the Xbox 360, and the PlayStation 3. The engine is multiplatform and comprehensive, covering everything from rendering to animation. Unreal Engine's Visual Sound Tool supports all major audio formats; is 7.1-capable; and can control sound levels, sequencing, looping, filtering, modulation, pitch shift, and randomization.

“Unreal is a scripting environment, and when you combine it with FMOD, the level of control we can achieve over the audio is incredible,” Schaefgen says. “For instance, when a grenade explodes near you, we can automate the ‘flash-bang effect’ [the best example of which is found in the opening moments of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, simulating temporary hearing loss and general disorientation]. The sound is low-pass-filtered and a high-pitched whine is introduced. After about 30 seconds, the whine decreases in level and intensity, and the filter ramps off. The combination of FMOD and Unreal Engine 3 lets us do special audio effects like that, and that's really driving how audio is used in games.”

This greater degree of control has brought to the fore some amazing audio nuances. “As a character walks through the world, we attach an audio event to every aspect of its movement — there is a sound for every time its foot hits the ground,” Schaefgen says. “That may have been done before, but now, because the audio is hard-coded into the game instead of being scripted, the audio can change according to what type of surface the foot lands on. The same for bullet impacts — are they hitting hard or soft surfaces, and at what angle are they hitting? The level of nuance is incredible.”

But all this newly attainable realism has an impact on workflow. As Bush had alluded to earlier, audio still has to fight for its share of bandwidth in a game culture that, like film, puts the emphasis on visuals. It also takes more time, and in the process, it can isolate the audio team into its own little bubble. To counter that, LaMartina says Cheyenne uses off-the-shelf tools such as Microsoft SharePoint, a portal-based collaboration and file management platform that can access shared workspaces and files from within a browser. “Every step of the process goes through an approval process between various departments,” he says. “Once each one agrees to a change, they check in through SharePoint, through which every other department can monitor the process, and then it's put into Perforce as a permanent approved document.”

Given how long the game development process is, there are employees at Cheyenne who came on board after a particular title had been started. “This gets them up to speed quickly because they can see the history of the workflow, and the documentation is moving in the same direction as the workflow,” LaMartina says. Another technique to keep everyone on the same page is periodic “milestone tours,” in which producers and department leaders look at each other's work at key points in the continuum.

So game audio is like film sound and then some, and its workflow has to adapt accordingly. Given the plethora of new tools to manipulate audio for games, it has become more complex than a lot of film postproduction, as well. Fortunately, the industry still elicits enormous amounts of passion from its participants, which is probably why Lara Croft moved from the little screen to the big one and not the other way around.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.