What, like this? Because if it's just screamo death metal, nobody's going to understand them when their character is trying to alert them to a grenade flying into their squad.
It has been over a month now since I gave you a state of the EC Audio update. Sorry. It has been a busy time. But I will try over the next few days to provide a few bits of information about what we have been up to (please excuse any minor tangents and breaks in the upcoming narrative). One bit of good news is that I have made a four minute soundwalk through the factory level (work in progress) that is slated to either be presented in a September Twitch or to be uploaded to the EC youtube channel, as soon as it gets the green light from the various gatekeepers. The reason it has taken me over a month to do this is due to a very funny bug (in hindsight it is funny but MAN! the pain this one has caused) where the level emitters would slowly turn off the more you wandered around, making the world go silent and making an environmental audio demo impossible. It took a long time to figure this out. What was happening had to do with a loop strategy we took a few months back where we transformed all of our static loops into dynamic ones. Unfortunately we did not know that there was a bug in the audio engine that would kill an object using this method the moment it's volume level dropped below the lower threshold. It was a big Doh! moment when our amazing programmer found the info about this bug buried in an old sdk readme file, but it made perfect sense. Knowing full well that it would take ages to get the bug in the audio engine fixed said awesome programmer figured out a work-around. The self-terminating sound emitters now come back to life the moment after they cease to be, and we have a level with a stable ambience. Also, regarding the environmental sound emitters, Katie is keen for me to do a live demo on a Twitch to further showcase the present tech. As long as our Twitch room is free of water and the gear works, I'll be there. But I don't know if I'll be able to keep people from talking over my audio feed (I had better remember to bring my duct tape). Another bit of good news is that I got the God Marks added to the Chaos Marine barks script. So if you have a GM, the normal spawn and cheer barks will be replaced by the appropriate GM ones. This wont be appearing anytime soon as the lines have not even been written, but they should be there for launch. Recently I have been working on a bunch of different things. One was the Sorcerer's Psychic Hand sounds. This was a very interesting area of discovery and exploration as some ideas simply fell flat while others provided really good results. I think Brent will be showcasing these at some point soon but if not, Katie has suggested (encouraged) that I do another standalone video about weapon audio. Which would be good as I plan to make good on my promise to showcase the Bolters to you, in a quiet environment, as well as demo my more recent work on the PlasmaCannon. Right now the Imperial Marine and Chaos Marine weapons sound the same (or very similar) as we have been trying to get them to function correctly regarding distances and spectrum, but, as stated way earlier in this thread, the Chaos weapons are going to have a Chaos element to them so you can tell them apart in the field of combat. I have been working on what this Chaos element is going to be but am slowly figuring it out. The Force Sword is the first Chaos weapon to have a really pleasing Chaos effect on it. Mathieu has been hard at work getting the music to play correctly and sorting out a really pesky bug regarding blueprints in UE4 and reverb zones. He will also be sitting in on an upcoming Twitch looking at EC music (yes, that means TWO twitches with some audio content... woo hooo!!!) so September is looking like a really good month for audio demos. Stay tuned!
So..... Get Alot of Duct tape. I mean alot, Hell show up early to work on friday and lockdown the room ahead of time, but make sure you take the tech team hostage to get everything running. Or atleast get Katie to get the community to go behind you 100% to have your time alone in the spotlight. Also Plasma Cannon sounds Already.... Is that a hint and a small spoiler of whats to come!!??! what we might see in EC if sound if trying to be added to it @Djemo-SRB God Marks Sound effects They are real!!!
I can't wait to hear it. It will be good if you can comment it on the twitch, like you are doing here. Also pretty excited from god marks, didn't know you are working on them right now. Are the GM barks only different lines or are you adding GM specific sound effect to them?
I have half a mind to buy a plane ticket to Canada and give you a bear hug! Made my day Ian. Similar to Serg's question, to what extent do the God Marks go audio wise? Is it just the proposed 1-2 barks or is there more planned? Just for clarity this is in no way one of those greedy moments of wanting MOREMOREMORE! Im happy even if its 2 barks per god for start (spawn and cheer) since to my knowledge it was zero before, just curious on the topic. Also a big plus on the Force Sword swing sound, the echoing whispers really do the trick. On the topic of psychic hand sound, to what exactly would you be referring to? The healing power sound or the sound the hand makes when the Sorcerer casts in general? Cause i was assuming the psychic powers themselves will emit different audio and that there wouldnt be a singular sound for all powers. Im probably reading something wrong though. Thanks again!
IF you go to Canada ill met yu there ill show you where they are hiding in that big building and where it is even located. Trust me if youi werent looking for it you might miss it.
Continuing... (I will get to your questions later)... I wanted to go into the tech a little on the difference between a static loop and a dynamic loop. A static loop is what has been used in the industry for a long time now: a soundfile that regardless of its duration has as it's tail part of the head of the file so that when played in loop mode a listener cannot tell where it starts and ends. It is called a loop because in the days of analog tape what you did was splice the head to the tail of the tape, so what you had was an actual loop of tape. When talking about environmental audio, the easiest form of this would be an electrical hum because in a wave editor it is a no brainer to make the wave loop smoothly. It should sound like a continuous drone (no clicks or bumps at the seam). This is good for room tones, which by and large are simple drones that need to be there but should not call attention to themselves. When a game has to consider it's memory footprint (both hard copy and working memory) loops tend to be really short, as in less than two seconds, and are really good for filling spaces with sound while being kind to the memory budget. But for more complex environmental sounds a static loop, unless really long, can get terribly repetitive. One of the biggest challenges to audio in games is to give the impression of repetition without being repetitive. Hence, the invention of the dynamic loop, or non-repeating repetition. How this works: lets say you have a simple loop of electrical hum and sparks that is 10 seconds long. Played on simple loop mode you hear it once and its fine. By the third repetition you already have figured out the pattern of zaps and clicks so it is now like a percussion piece. By the fifth time through it's too much and you turn it off. But if you take the 10 second file and cut it up into 4-10+ shorter files and then put them into a random playback generator so that each file will play in any order but one after another, what you will have is a series of soundfiles that appear to loop but do not make a discernible pattern. In Wwise for the enviro sounds we cut up all of our initial static loops, put the parts into random containers set to use the trigger rate transition with a duration that was just shorter than the particular soundfile set's length, limited the playback to 2 per game object and voila! Complex sounding objects that clearly made a looping sound but did not sound repetitive.
