The State of Game Audio

The extent to which a game's sounds and music can affect a player's enjoyment is often overshadowed by other characteristics, such as graphics or gameplay. That said, I'm sure most players have had an experience where the audio really contributed to making the game great, whether it was an epic soundtrack, excellent narration, or just intuitive sound effects. Rock, Paper, Shotgun is running a feature discussing the state of game audio in today's market, discussing how far it has come, and where it's going. "Games present some unusual problems, like the mix having to adjust itself to suit a situation created by the player, rather than the static vision of a single director. Game designers have to have a flexible attitude towards factors such as the amount of time spent listening to the same piece of music and the potential for sonic overload if too many game sounds are played simultaneously. ... CryTek's Florian Füsslin explained that Crysis' lavish soundscape was defined primarily by what information the player needs to hear. 'We often went for the concept "less is more" or let's better say "important things first." We used a pretty solid priority system which cuts quiet or unimportant sounds in an audio busy situation like combat. Together with the right mix we were able to provide a dense soundscape in all situations players might run into.'"

Comments

Portal

[KasperMeerts]

Portal still holds my vote for best videogame audio. It really helped build the game's atmosphere.

Some games on the the other hand, just slap a stupid rock-techo-pop beat on it, just for having something. (I'm looking at you C&C3)

Re:Portal

[snowraver1]

I remember popping Amped 3 in my 360 and booting it up. I start the game at the top of the mountain looking down. ELO's Blinded by the Light starts playing and I start ripping down the mountain and pulling MAD tricks left right and center (it was HARD to fall). The music totally made the first several minutes seem almost surreal.

Then I got to the first cut scene and the music sucked from then on... I was really dissapointed, but it shows the influence that sound can have on a game.

I particularly enjoyed Oblivion...

[Anpheus]

Where the battle music would follow you into towns and other safe areas for sometimes several minutes before abating. Or if you were still being chased after using fast travel, it would continue until you had saved and exited or cued a cinematic with its own music or entered a dungeon that would cause certain music to play.

That was probably one of the big turn-offs, I enjoyed the world, but even if it was just a crab that attacked me I felt like I should be participating in an epic battle. It was like the game was mocking itself.

Re:I particularly enjoyed Oblivion...

[geekoid]

I also like how the caves have more light in them during the daylight hours.

Re:I particularly enjoyed Oblivion...

[solraith]

I had to turn off the music in Age of Conan for similar reasons; it just kicked in at the most random times. I'd be walking around fighting stuff, listening to the sounds of nature and bloodshed, when all of a sudden WHOA SURPRISE EPIC SYMPHONIC BUTTSECKS.

Re:I particularly enjoyed Oblivion...

[Kell Bengal]

It should play a special fanfare when you flip them onto their backs and attack their weakspots for MASSIVE DAMAGE.

Re:I particularly enjoyed Oblivion...

[Dutch Gun]

I actually wrote the battle music system for a major PC title (not Oblivion). It seems like a fairly simple thing to do, but because of the fast-paced and dynamic nature of combat in that game, it actually ended up being a real challenge to tune. For example:

* It sound bad if you start some epic battle music as your high-level party goes and kills a few low-level critters. I measured the collective party strength versus nearby enemy creatures to determine if the battle would likely be difficult enough to warrant battle music.

* It sound bad if ambient music just starts up, only to be immediately interrupted by more combat. Therefore, I set the threshold for ending music much lower than for starting it up. Nearby enemies will cause the battle music to continue, because it's likely the players will run there next and start the next battle.

* It sounds bad if a second piece of battle music start (our music didn't loop - I just started another piece of battle music) only to be cut off after a few seconds. Therefore, before another piece of music starts, it tries to determine if combat is soon to be over anyhow. If so, the ambient music continues.

You can see, it ends up being a lot more complicated than you'd think. And, it's difficult to tune it so that it works properly at all player levels and in all areas of the game.

Grim Fandango

[geekoid]

Has an excellent sounds track, plus that put it online so you can download it for free. I highly recommend it.
Must music gets turned off after a while. It tends to get repetitive.

ff6.

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

Hey, great sound makes a great game - like almost anything nobuo uematsu has added music to..

Sound really matters

[RogueyWon]

As the article points out, Crysis had some really great sound. However, badly deployed sound can be an absolute killer.

Embarrassing confession time: I just replayed Doom 3, the other week. Don't ask me why, I just had these strange urges to.

On replaying it, it struck me that while the graphics are still excellent and the atmosphere is good in many ways, the sound actually acts as a negative. Why? Because sound is too definitive a cue that there are enemies nearby. If you hear a demonic snuffling, it means you are about to be ambushed. By listening to the kind of snuffling, you can tell what's about to jump out. This defuses a lot of the tension. I remember that the excellent Aliens-TC WAD for the original Doom had a fantastic alternative for this. The designers locked enemies inside small, self-contained boxes "within" the walls of the levels. The player could never encounter these, without the use of IDSPISPOPD, but he could sure as hell hear them. Removing the absolute link between monster sounds and monsters actually appearing added a huge amount of tension to the game.

Re:There are no great games without great sound

[AuMatar]

Sure it can. On PC games I always turn music off- I'd rather hear Vent (in online games) or have an mp3 player on. I can't remember the last game I actually kept the music on for, other than guitar hero.

audio only games

[Anonymous Coward]

there are a few of these out there for the visually impared, including FPS type games (for surround systems).

got really interested and started working on an audio game engine - I wanted to create a game system so compelling that even sighted people (like me) would want to play it with the lights off.

Gave up in the end, due to a lack of decent 5.1/7.1 reverb enabled mixing engines (havent coded c/c++ for years). thing is what you need is multiple room reverb for that level of immersion. think of yourself being in a small room with a doorway to a hangar. the long reverb from the hangar needs to pan to a 3d point where the door is, then have some local room reflection added.

the only thing i found that could support that was EAX 3 or 4 or something, only supported by creative labs cards. thats too high a barrier,so I gave up.

I'm convinced a good audio only game would be a win for everybody, it could be so creepy.

UT3?

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

While I don't play w/ Game Music, I am partial to the in game sounds, and the way that full EAX brings about a feeling of how the rocket just hit a wall behind you and to the right, while footsteps are coming from the left telling me that someone is baiting, and hoping to catch me from behind.

I got accustomed to it (I wrap myself in 5.1)

W/o sound, I felt like my performance wasn't there. In TF2, it's just not the same 8'(

Unfortunately no one plays UT3 anymore

An oldie but goodie.

[Lord Kano]

I remember being blown away by Marathon's audio. It's crazy to think that it's been well over 10 years, but that game was groundbreaking.

LK

The only thing missing

[DragonTHC]

As I see it, the only thing missing is a decent 5.1 channel headset to hear it all on. Sure we can all afford 5.1 or 7.1 channel speakers, but most of us can't blast them while playing.

I've listened to more than a few 5.1 channel headphones. None of them meet my expectations. Game audio was meant to take advantage of multi-channel digital sound. Since 90% of the gamers I know use headphones or headsets, isn't this the next logical step? Most of the 5.1 headphones are only 5.1 virtual channels. Those few that are real 5.1, are so disappointing. The Razer barracuda HP1 set was just a complete waste of money. I'm waiting for the first company to come alone and make a true 5.1 channel digital headset with a removable boom mic. Then my games will come alive finally.

necessary features include these:

dolby digital certification.
very low impedance drivers.
comfortable closed circumaural design.
digital coax plug for phones.
discrete voice drivers and standard phone jack for them and mic.
robust and discrete woofer driver. Sony's 50mm HD driver used in its upper end MDR 7xx/9xx series should do the trick.
discrete synchronized positioned drivers for center channel.
positioned drivers for FL/FR.
discrete positioned drivers for RL/RR.
onboard DD decoding and DTS decoding.
high quality amplification components.

one of the real problems that most of the 5.1 phones face is their common ground conductor. This leads to joint stereo and muddies up the positioning.

If I had the time and the cash, I'd build a pair for myself, but they'd most likely be analog.

Re:The only thing missing

[TeknoHog]

There are good reasons why 5.1 headphones are hard to get right. One is that 5.1 sounds are meant to be played from speakers well away from your ears. Both of your ears are receiving sounds from all speakers, and it's the differences in phase and timing (not so much volume) that tells your brain where the sound appears to come from.

Playing the same signals next to your ear, with right and left sides isolated, leads to very different results. In any case, you only have two input channels for sound, and you should be able to get good results with in-ear monitors and a decent transfer function.

one of the real problems that most of the 5.1 phones face is their common ground conductor. This leads to joint stereo and muddies up the positioning.

Seriously? Every audio system I know of uses a common ground. If you're interested in a lecture in electronics, I can probably explain more ;)

And what the heck does "joint stereo" mean in this context?

Re:The only thing missing

[TeknoHog]

99% of systems that use speakers have 2-conductor speaker wires per speaker. 99% of headphones have 3-conductor wires for the whole system.

joint stereo is such that when you turn the balance all the way to one side, you can still hear it in the other.

speaker systems usually don't do this.

Speaker systems also use a common ground. Only the cables between the amplifier and the speakers have separate ground wires, for obvious practical reasons. You might need to learn a bit more about electronics to understand what the ground actually does, and why a shared ground doesn't share the actual signals.

The problem with most headphones is that the signal wires are usually not shielded from each other. Instead, they are paired inside a common shield. There is inductive transfer between the two, which is why you can't silence one channel completely. It may also be that balance pots aren't perfect, as they are not usually designed for complete channel muting.

This is not a problem in practice, though. As I mentioned in the grandparent post, when you listen to speakers, both of your ears will pick up sounds from all speakers. Only relatively small differences are required to convey the stereo image. It's been estimated that a channel separation of about 20 dB is enough for headphones.

Re:If the same amount of DSP was devoted to audio

[Dutch Gun]

Actually, sound processing is moving *away* from specialized DSPs and moving toward software mixing and processing. The difference is that multi-core CPUs are standard, both on PCs and consoles. So, developers are simply allocating a core (or part of a core) to audio processing. I wouldn't look to DSPs. Just wait for general-purpose CPUs to advance in speed enough to be able to do all sorts of interesting things.

I wrote the new sound engine and tools for an upcoming title - we're completely ditching hardware acceleration in favor of the flexibility that software mixing gives us. The Creative X-Fi, while a great card, holds around 1% market penetration, according to our customer hardware survey. For most other cards, and for ALL onboard audio, there's no real advantage to dedicated hardware.

We're still nowhere near doing real-time synthesis for most types of sounds. Physical modeling sounds nice, but it would likely require a complicated and time-consuming process of programming and tuning these models. Even though true physical modeling isn't practical at this time, we're looking at ways of synthesizing combinations of sounds (such as impacts - footsteps is a prime example) as a way of reducing the combinatorial explosion of (terrain_type x avatar_type x movement_type x number_of_variations).

I see a future more of blended synthesis than pure physical modeling - that is, advanced filters applied to pre-recorded samples in order to create more dynamic and believable variations, and more advanced ways of mixing and blending raw samples to create new sound sets. This seems to be a much more straight-forward problem to solve, and would be far easier for sound designers to tune.

Incidentally, why do you say water and gas are out of the question? Oddly enough, while these are horribly complex to model using true fluid dynamics, these are typically the easiest sounds to recreate using fairly simple algorithms. A waterfall is pretty close to being pure noise (just requires a bit of frequency filtering to color it), for example. And things such as water drops, steam hissing - I've heard good modeling of all these things in instruments such as NI's Reaktor, in addition to their excellent SteamPipe physical modeling instrument.