Sound in games

I had never really considered music in games to be all the important and for a long time designers seemed to think so too, the music track simply being plunked into a level giving nothing to the beat or flow of the game.

That was'nt until i played the original Call of Duty theres a specific level that tasks you with manning an artillery cannon and destroying a series of incoming tanks as the flow of tanks ever increases and the game becomes more and more frantic a steady orchesteral score is introduced increasing not only in granduer but also in volume so by the time the tanks are piling up you can barely hear the weapoons fire.

What striked me about it was not the sudden introduction of the music but the way i did'nt notice it until it was over, the sudden silence making more of an impact upon me than the actual score,

Rather than games simply following linear forms of narrative such as films where the changing events trigger a score change i think games have to try something a bit more dynamic, games are by there very nature non-linear so trying to force an approach to music that is suited to the linear, pre-defined world of film is a bit foolish. However go back far enough and this simply did'nt matter the old 16 bit platformers of yore presented the player with a level the player working there way from left to right until they reached the end where the next stage was loaded, the choice of music was reflected in the type of stage if it was an egyptian looking level Egyptian inspired music would start to play and so on this music would play much like the level in a linear fashion from beginning to end, you could backtrack but what would be the point? There were enemies up ahead.

Also due to there technical limitations the music and sound effects of the time could only playback primitve midi tunes, this gave them a distinctive sound signature so thats part of why if you were to play the Super Mario Bros it would instantly register as a piece of videogame music.

Jump foward to the 90's and the advent of the cd-rom and faster processor speeds meants sound could be reproduced in much higher fidelity and was more akin to movies - but instead of epic sweeping orchestral music or even a soundtrack in suiting with the style and charecter of the game they swamped them with trashy dance mixes i don't care if sony made gaming 'cool' with the playstation by dumping it in nightclubs and slapping *shudder* 'clubland hits' into the games it just made them shallow, two dimensional - gamings equivalent of MTV. The music did'nt reflect the game or the mood the games were trying to set. It was like rolling past idlyic awe inspiring hills with some boy racers mix tape blaring over the top - grr rant over

Anywho jump foward to the nowish and sound and additionally the music in games is taken alot more seriously, designers now realising that using a linear form of audo presentation simply dosen't work for all games mixing in dynamic music that shifts between action and dynamic reflecting the events in the game and also relying on prescipted events such as a boss fight to further emotionalise the action

Would you like fries with that?

This is mighty interesting its an article i've discovered on gamasutra about the marketing and creation of all these Blitz / Burger King games - pretty interesting as it covers the original reasoning behind approaching Mr King in the first place and the effect its had on the company.

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20061113/sheffield_01.shtml

Trinigy engine is a serious games engine *frown*

Lookie here!

Been looking more into game engines more spefically the more exotic ones, found this its a game engine developed not only for normal games but actually mentions its application for Serious games so i guess that guess lecturer chap was'nt completely mad.

Some of the things the developers can promise it can do is 'Automotive testing simulation, Virtual ship training simulator' among many other simulations but my personal favourite has to be 'Conference visualisation'...i get the feeling they were scratching there heads when they put that one in

Game engine task

Game engines are the invisible glue that seems to tie together all the assets that create a game -a decent engine can literally make or break a game long before the user gets to sample any modicum of gameplay. At its most basic level a game engine ties together among other things a 3d renderer, collision detection, sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking among many other things. Creating a link from the base level of a computer to the inputs of the user, often via a graphical api like DirectX or OpenGL As far back as Wolfenstein, engines by way of my nerdy legend John Carmack have written ever more and more complex engines adding in feature after feature as the power of pc's have increased the feature set of these engines has in turn increased - in fact game engines and 3d accelerators have an almost symbiotic relationship with the increasing speed of pc's linked to the ever increasing feature set of the engines.
A engines key engine technologies are constantly being updated and up hauled for a new faster technique in fact its rare for an engine to have a feature in one iteration but lack it in the next - game engines seeming to take a kitchen sink approach to features trying to pack in as much as possible.

Nowadays game engines are some of the most complex pieces of software written tieing together countless features to ultimately display and run a game. Because of there overarching complexity and the time it takes to program engines are often licensed out to third parties, the most significant of these are the Unreal and Quake engine games of which the licence for a single game can cost upwards of one million dollars for the latest Unreal 3 engine. These engines now include an entire suite of features and tools to better implement and create there game – merely having the engine is nowadays not enough, developers expecting an entire suite of tools to better implement and create there game.

Subtractive and additive could mean one of two things I’m not too sure which so I'm gonna detail then both – woo! Subtractive and additive editing is relation to how game levels are created, subtractive takes away a predefined block from the ‘void’ while additive editing means adding features to a featureless 'void', such as walls, floors etc much like space. I could write entire essays on why subtractive editing completely sucks simply because of my Quake engine knowledge but they fall on the unreal engine devil side so i'll ignore them. Simply having subtractive editing seems to rely more on blocking out a level then falling back on predefined models to populate the level while additive mapping rely's more on adding further details still in the level editor and allows quick and easy eidit and manipulation
(Think im gonna write a blog about all this actually)

Now the other Subtractive and additive doodad could have meant adding and taking away features of an engine depending upong its end use.
The most obvious examples i can think of are the Doom3 and source engine lighting implementations, the Doom3 engine uses a per pixel lighting engine meaning all lights in the game can cast shadows depending upon the objects surrounding it and is automatically updated if the objects move around, the shadows lenghtening and shifting - this is very demanding on most pc's so the Doom3 engine is limited to a few lights each time and refined to traditional corridor based enviroments while the Source engine relies upon precomputed lightmaps, the map creator places lights around key points in the level editor before compiling it which works out how each light would react and illuminate the surroundings. This is much faster and more suitable for larger expanses of surroundings the only problems is the lighting is entirely static - shooting a light would certainly not have the same outcome as if you shot it in Doom3 and moving or editing a light in the level editor would mean you would have to recompile the entire thing. A game like far cry which features both indoor and outside expanses relies upon both precomputed lightmaps and per pixel lighting to achieve the desired effect, i think developers will be dropping lightmaps almost entirely in future titles as the hardware becomes more powerful and fall back on stuff like soft shadows and the like

Blogger you curr

Goddamnit i hate blogger that or im an idiot it seems not to have posted aload of blogs i wrote mostly over the winter break - ah well there up now all posted on the same day(!) - guh, thats gonna look weird

Machinima hate

So judging by the views of many in the lecture today nobody likes machinima, i can kinda see why in some parts but i disagree with many others. Using stock animations and models for something outside of the scope of the original game is foolish yes - seeing master chief in an embarrasing yet apparently humourful (not sure if thats even a word) social situation as he goes through a looping reload animation is so metally jarring it hurts, but when there used to further extend a games story or ethos it can only be a good thing, right? Much the same way fans write fan fiction for there favourite film or book machinima could be used for games.
Alot of the machinama out there at the moment is based around comedy and lets be honest all of its crap, its about as funny as you'd expect from a 14yr old living in Texas i can see parelles people draw with comics many people expect comics to be funny have some kind of punchline at the end of the three frames, raised on the sheltered antics of the Beano and the Dandy its hardly surprising - i struggle to think of any newspaper cartoon that isnt marely shallow humour and im including those shameful daily mail strips about footballers and girls with there tops off. But dig deeper and comics are a serious genre as grave and adult as there big brother, literature. Anyone who's read through Holocaust inspired Maus will testify to that - all monochrome and tiny frames crammed onto the page the thing oozes depression and dispair.
So why can't machinima try this approach? Get rid of all the damn linkin park music video covers and making something truly dark almost artistic? It was also mentioned in the lecture how using compuer models will never be as good as the real thing, well no they won't, thats uncanny valley territory there humans are very good at identifying a real human from a fake be it a real model or onscreen , even the very finest pixar models which take days to properly render look stiff and wooden which is why they often go for a more stylised cartoony look, think Incredibles. Look at the latest iteration of team fortress its clearly take a leaf out of the incredibles design book somehow the models look MORE realistic when they follow the design rules commonly used for more traditional cartoons.
If someone would take the time to create custom models for a given role, never seen before only used for the role in which you first see them with the props and enviroment matching the same design and visual look with an intelligent story and direction would it still be crap? I can see machinima becoming gamings equivalent of claymation - some of the more arty one's you never see in the mainstream are positively evil, brief visions that takes months sometimes years to create rather than constalty trying to twist gaming and the tool set that comes with it into something its not, in this case mainsteam films why can't they be something on there own?

Dance Dance Immolation!

Just seen this in the newest PC Gamer, called Dance Dance Immolation its what I think should be outfitted to all dance rhythm games frankly - rhythm based games and pyromanicacy go so well together I find.
Take a normal Stepmania powered machine and attach several propane flamethrowers to it, if you shuffle you booties correctly it fires jets of flame harmlessly into the air if you don't it fires them into your face. Of course what would be a pretty short one-time type of game is made replayable by the inclusion of a fire suit normally used in chemical spills and raging infernos.

I can't help but think of the Saw series of films, with the main adversaries making ever disgusting machines of disfiguration if you succeed in the task of self perversion you can free yourself if not, bam! That’s what the audience came to see etc

I can't help but think there could be a series of gaming related machines - fail to come top in a multiplayer last man standing game and you really won't be respawning again.

More here: interpretivearson.com/ddi

Gears of tried and tested

So thanks to my 360 owning friend I’ve played and completed Gears of war, good grief is it short but overall very good the context sensitive control system overall works pretty well with you slapping your back against walls with aplomb but I found as with most things that are over simplified to a single action the game often caused me to jump out into fire when I just wanted to move into cover - a word on cover, every object in the game be it a chest of drawers a wall or a pillar is recognized as cover with the areas in the game being broken down into competitive puzzles more than anything else, simply rushing head first into the enemy will get you killed with the game taking a more tactical edge, something that surprised me coming from Epic a developer who previously worked on Unreal Tournament a fps as gristle headed as you get.

The environments in the game are presented in a linear fashion, clear one section of baddies and the game will proceed to the next often in the form of a cut scene or NPC interaction, the game constantly loads the next segment in the background so your never presented with a loading screen something I want to see more developers doing as it was very effective in immersing me in the story and mood.

Control wise it did remind me allot of Resident Evil 4, it has the same over shoulder view and maps the same context sensitive actions to a single button, tilting and panning the camera around your onscreen avatar.

All in all, gears of war is a more traditional game a huge blockbuster of a game - a world in a peril, boss battles, huge weapons and even bigger characters in a climate that’s constantly trying to be new and fresh its nice to see a game still it touch with its action film roots.

Gah! Intergrated chipset evil!

So I was over a friends house today to play with his spangly new computer, several games underarm I checked the pc's specs everything checked out multicore this gigabytes that but wait! GAH! What was this an Integrated Intel chipset? Something which in some of the more nerdier circles is whispered in hushed tones of revulsion. He would be unable to play most of the games I had brought and the ones he could run would be reduced to 'orrible juddery slide shows of PC gaming's current finest.

Why the hell do Intel do this? They dress up these things to read like the second coming of the electronic messiah in advertisements but when you get down to it there about as powerful as a calculator, like every other sector of the hardware league Intel and AMD are in a constant battle to produce the fastest zippiest processor, even at the budget end of the spectrum there processors are still more than adequate to run a modern game respectably so why are there graphic chipsets so crap?

Of course you could argue that these onboard graphic chipsets aren't really graphics sets but merely something to display windows, perhaps display video and the ever cheeky office game of solitaire, while it falls to dedicated video card makers ATI and NVIDIA to produce something that caters to anybody wanting to do anything more demanding than run Windows but with the recent purchase of ATI by Intel rival AMD this has been put into question.

Microsoft's next iteration of Windows Vista, has a new graphical interface named Aero glass that pretty much demands a card capable of displaying these complex graphical titbits, a bog standard Intel integrated job by simply won't cut it. This coupled with the ever increasing popularity of high definition video endures that the casual e-mail sending, web surfing pc user is going to require something much more powerful.

Of course its the corporations that ultimately control this, PC makers such as Dell concentrate on the more recognisable indicators of a systems power in advertisements when targeting there casual pc using audience the choice of graphic chipsets often seems like second fiddle to the more recognisable representations of a pc's power namely a headline dominating processor speed and ram size these are the numbers the general public understands, so long as it sounds big and flashy its ok.

Additionally its companies like Dell's biggest customers that also effects this the most not the casual pc user but the IT sectors of gigantic corporations if it costs a IT manager an additional $5 to increase the graphics chipset to something approaching respectable speed what’s the harm but increase that over 50,000 pc's and suddenly you see why graphic cards are sill are luxury.

Games for windows

I wandered into a GAME shop the other day, that place is fast becoming the sole reason for my ever increasingly jaded view of the traditional public image of games but more on that later. A quick look around any games shop confirms one thing, the PC section is shrinking skulking and further back into the shadows a sad collection of budget titles and console ports while the shelf space given to console titles seems to be ever increasing - hell the PS2 section in most GAME shops seems to almost dominate half the shop, the things almost dead yet its still given quadruple the space to the PC arguably the birthplace of all games.

While the revenue in things like MMORPG and casual online games are increasing ten fold a 10% drop in traditional titles from last years shows something’s up, with the ever shrinking public image of PC games it’s hardly surprising.

Well its fallen to Microsoft to address this issue, with there unveiling of games for Windows initiative, all console games have a standardised box layout, console name on the top perhaps on the back details of the numbers of players supported that kind of thing; with pc games its different there’s no fully standardised look with each publisher taking a different approach in presenting specifications, genre etc all the things customers look at when deciding a purchase. It maybe purely psychological but having a instantly recognisable banner and look on each pc game would make the pc look more like a viable gaming platform a brand if you will and less like a scary mix of specifications and publisher branded games to the casual gamer.

Addiotnally Microsoft are also tackling the traditional trap of the requirements box to Mr Casual gamer, working with Vista's new PC rating system the pool of numbers and stats are now broken down into a numerical score on your PC, if your PC scores a 3 and the game requires a 3 or lower than congratulations you can run it! Of course there’s bound to be mistakes in this approach but it massively increases the potential of people trying games on there PC's rather than simply being put off at the first hurdle.

Of course you could just argue that Microsoft is doing this simply to control the PC games sector much the same way it does with the 360 make the PC a closed system, they hold all the cards in the same way there trying to do with DRM for multimedia. Only time will tell