next »

[MadWatch]

As a programmer who knows nothing about sound (and have poor musical tastes) I have no idea how sound designers work and what you guys expect from the programmer of the project you're working on.

What kind of feature do you like to see in a game engine ?

What about those professionally expensive sound middleware (such as FMOD), how useful are they ? What does they bring to you ?

Just curious

[Calum Bowen]

Hey it's Nicholas right?

FMOD is in fact free. I've used it a little and it seems to offer a lot! I'd love to have an opportunity to put FMOD to work but have yet been working on a project where it was suitable/compatible. I have a feeling most other people work in a "make the track/sfx send it to the programmer to do their thing" model as I have also done.

FMOD allows you to do adaptive audio and sophisticated things with SFX like randomly altering the pitch of a SFX at random intervals making a much more real and less repetitive sound. You can also sync up track tempo/pitch/various other effects to different in game parameters. E.g. the faster you go in the game the higher/faster the music goes. It's a very powerful tool!

As far as looking to what sound guys want from programmers - most basic thing is they want you to loop their music properly haha. You spend ages finding and securing the perfect loop point only for it to be messed up in game! Be flexible and interested in how the sound guy wants the sound to be implemented. Have good ideas yourself and be interested in different interesting ways to implement the sound.

I don't know if I am capable of specifically answering your question but hopefully that gives you an idea of what i'd ideally look for.

Calum

[trurkowski]

More often than not I've noticed programmers telling me "do whatever you want" without direction or feeling. Audio is one of the major parts of the design process and a well thought out game will have some ideas for basic audio and music.

Usually we can get along by going with whatever art style is in the game (pixel art for example could mean a more 8-bit feel to sfx/music) but it's a team project, we like your input.

Feedback is essential for us to change our audio to suit the game better, if you don't like a specific sound effect, tell us and let us know what about it you don't like. If you do that we can at least attempt to accomodate you and change it to fit better. Keep in mind we may be resistant to certain changes, but we should be able to give a reason for that too.

As Calum noted, make sure our stuff loops with no gaps, and generally... don't modify our samples without, at the very least, telling us.


Also, middleware is awesome. It basically allows us to do real time changes without the programmer needing to worry about more than hooking our audio events into your game where we ask you to... That is, once its set up to run with your engine.

Currently my favorite is wwise, but it isn't cheap for a license. F-mod is excellent too because it works on the same premise that UDK does (i'm pretty sure...) If you make money, give a percentage to the company.

[MoritzPGKatz]

Hello,

FMOD is in fact free.

While the software is free to download, it is definitely not free to use in your game - whether or not you actually sell your game or make it a free download. Check the licensing options on FMOD's website. Have you checked the new FMOD Studio, by the way?

Audio middleware like FMOD and WWise definitely make sense for bigger-scale projects, but for most purposes like small-scale indie and/or mobile games a conventional approach (linear audio) will suffice, especially in 2D games.
I've worked on a few Unity3D games that use Unity's own trimmed FMOD engine - pretty cool what you can do with that alone. (reverberation, filtering, 3D panning...)

More often than not I've noticed programmers telling me "do whatever you want" without direction or feeling.

I've made quite the different experience: my clients usually knew pretty well what kind of mood and instrumentation their game needs, even though they may not be able to put it in "technical" terms - but here's where exchanging references and providing layouts can help a lot. The conceptual phase is probably the most crucial one!

Of course, I always welcome if devs show an interest in adding small sonic details that improve overall fun and immersion.
But I consider spotting (like it's called in the film industry) part of my job as a composer as well as a sound designer. Get an audio guy who shows an interest in more than just throwing assets over the fence, and be open for ideas!

I have no idea how sound designers work.

If you want a good overview of a game audio person's work and thought process, I recommend giving Aaron Marks' Complete Guide to Game Audio a read.

Cheers,
Moritz

[trurkowski]

More often than not I've noticed programmers telling me "do whatever you want" without direction or feeling.

I've made quite the different experience: my clients usually knew pretty well what kind of mood and instrumentation their game needs, even though they may not be able to put it in "technical" terms - but here's where exchanging references and providing layouts can help a lot. The conceptual phase is probably the most crucial one!

Of course, I always welcome if devs show an interest in adding small sonic details that improve overall fun and immersion.
But I consider spotting (like it's called in the film industry) part of my job as a composer as well as a sound designer. Get an audio guy who shows an interest in more than just throwing assets over the fence, and be open for ideas!

I'm talking more about the response that I got from my last little game. Pretty much just not enough communication between me and the developer was the biggest issue, and trust me, I tried...

He was pretty hands off about anything to do with audio, got no feedback whatsoever, positive or negative, made me feel like I wasn't really part of the team.

[MoritzPGKatz]

^ That sucks.
I've had jobs like that before, though not in games... I try to steer clear of those and I'm not afraid to turn 'em down if the bidding process already hints at a relationship like that. It's just not fun that way.

[MadWatch]

FMOD allows you to do adaptive audio and sophisticated things with SFX like randomly altering the pitch of a SFX at random intervals making a much more real and less repetitive sound. You can also sync up track tempo/pitch/various other effects to different in game parameters. E.g. the faster you go in the game the higher/faster the music goes. It's a very powerful tool!

Sounds great (no pun intended).

How does it work ? From what I've found it seems FMOD provides some kind of graphic programming language. It it something similar to Pure Data / Max MSP ?

[Calum Bowen]

FMOD is much more intuitive - i'm pretty sure there's not really coding at all involved. Although I haven't delved too deep into it. The only stuff i've done with it, so far, is just importing sounds, selecting the parameter you will alter and then working with drawing lines and assigning that line to a button or ingame paramater - e.g. closer you are to object x the louder this song gets. Also with SFX you can set up an object and decide how often it repeats, what the range of the different pitches are, etc. with drop down boxes. There probably is some way to control all of this through code now that I think about it but I haven't used that.

It is not really like PD or Max/MSP as everything is a lot less "from scratch". It's easier to use but still has loads and loads of control.