sonofableep

i do so enjoy watching “behind the scenes with the audio team” podcasts…everybody casually chatting in front of their bridge-of-the-enterprise-sized consoles (you really need all that?), or doing field recording of gunfire and tanks (how much authenticity is left after you sweeten it with canned cannon blasts?).  it looks like so much fun!  maybe someday i’ll get my own SSL, or my own tank!

bah…i’m just jealous, that’s all.  i’m also jealous of the folks that get to work on big-budget sci-fi movies.  now *that’s* where you can go where no sound designer has gone before, creating the newest, shiniest, most off-the-wall sounds you can come up with.  i was watching a podcast on the transformers 2 audio team, and yes it had the requisite “sitting in front of the console” shots, and the obligatory “here we are shooting guns” shots.  but there was some neat-o stuff in there as well, particularly the brief section about coming up with unique robot sounds.  starting at the 4:15 mark, they discuss the germ of a particular sound idea – the high-frequency clacking together of two magnetic balls (think: ping pong ball accelerandos on crank).  it’s a cool sound, and they used that as a jump off for creating a whole vocabulary of very cool sounds.

it also reminded me of something similar i’ve done in the past…and so i went digging through foley source files until i found it: the sound of two heavy-bottomed scotch tumblers coming together side-by-side after being picked up at the same time.  i stumbled on the sound when emptying the dishwasher (nursing a mild hangover, i’d wager), and ran straight away to close-mic record the phenomenon.  i got something that almost sounds like an analog synth (see below)!  i never had much use for it, but now i know – if michael bay needs help updating those robots for transformers 3, me and my booze receptacles will be right there.

here, check it out…

my thoughts have recently turned to playtesting and QA’ing (QA-ing?  doing QA for?) audio.  the time has come for me to decide how to approach it this time around, and how to avoid the pitfalls of previous audio QA experiences.  but it’s 2:00 am now, so instead of composing anything lengthy & constructive, how ’bout i just be brief & negative by recounting one of those avoidable pitfalls?  besides, short & nasty is always more fun.  at this hour, the alternative feels like homework.

there’s a couple things that i’ve found to be true about QA.  the first is, most of the time they’re working, they’re looking at very specific issues.  not necessarily with blinders on, but they’re focused – they get in game, check what they’ve got to check, and get out.  in, out, in, out…the game is not usually up for hours and hours at a stretch, unless whatever it is they’re looking at *is* some kind of longplay issue (memory leak, etc.).

the second thing is, they’re usually not listening to the game unless listening to the game *is* the specific issue they’re working on.  otherwise, nope.  and i don’t blame them…in their place i wouldn’t either.  they’re in, out, in, and out of the game (intro music 50x/day?  no thanks.).  they’re probably situated in the middle of a cube farm, not wanting to annoy / be annoyed by others with the sound of the game.  really, why would you *not* just listen to your iPod all day?

which brings us to this particular pitfall.  combine thing #1 and thing #2, and the odds of a QA person still listening to audio into the 4th hour of gameplay are pretty low.  but as it turns out, once upon a time that’s exactly what we needed.  some kind of loopy audio memory leak that took hours to fully manifest itself (in the form of audio gradually disappearing in chunks – first the footsteps, then maybe the weapons, then maybe the voices…until it was all gone) went out the front door unnoticed.

well, unnoticed by *us*.  about, oh, four hours after that patch went out we started getting hundreds of bug reports about odd audio behavior, dropouts, total silence, the works.  so people come running to me, “what the hell did you DO?”.  we fire up the game, let it run for several hours with all the audio turned on, and golly gee shucks lookit that!  the sucker fell silent, just like all the players out there (and none of us in here) found it would.

so when i get around to composing the long & constructive diatribe about playtesting and QA’ing, there’s sure to be a bullet point distilled from that anecdote: play like a player – for a loooooong time, and occasionally listening to the game.  :)

apparently, sound designers’ health goes in the shitter during crunch time.  tell me about it.  no wait, i’ll tell *you* about it.  like any good story, this one comes in three acts: I) exposition, II) the fall, III) redemption.

I) exposition.

during the first half of the four-year dev cycle on my last game, i was taking pretty good care of myself.  the work week seldom exceeded 50 hours, and some of those hours included trips to the building’s gym.  in fact, it was during this period that 15 or so co-workers held a friendly weight loss competition – each ponying up $100 for the chance to win it all over the course of four months – and yours truly took home the gold, dropping 50 lbs. in the process.  things were looking good.  and by “things” i mean “me”.

II) the fall.

then came the 18-month-long super-slo-mo faceplant.  work started to pick up, and i got to the gym less and less…and eventually not at all.  healthy lunches from home turned into fast food lunches turned into vending machine lunches.  bottled water turned into sprite turned into endless rivers of mountain dew.  and not smoking turned into bumming the occasional smoke while chatting with a co-worker outside turned into buying packs for myself at the 7-eleven across from work at 3 am when no one was around to bum me one.

i worked later into the night.  i slept on the floor.  i worked straight through the night, forgoing sleep altogether.  i grew a beard.  i grew hair (i’m normally shaved to the skull).  and i ignored every warning sign – the wheezing when climbing stairs, the mildly terrifying fleeting pains in my chest, the sight of myself in the mirror…it was easy.  i *love* the crunch.  i love just fucking going for it.  you couldn’t drag me away from my office – not with so much left to do before launch, and so many readily available donuts / sodas / smokes.

turns out you also couldn’t drag me away because you’d put your back out trying.  when i finally snapped out of it – when the doctor said, “hm…your EKG shows irregularities usually seen in someone who’s had a heart attack” – i closed my eyes and hopped on a scale.  when i opened my eyes, i found i’d added 65 lbs. to my frame in that year-and-a-half.  hell, most of my muscle melted away during that time too, so those 65 lbs. probably represented 100 lbs. of additional lard and 35 lbs. of lost meat.  nice job, brad.

III) redemption.

so i quit inhaling soda.  i quit eating like a pig at a trough.  i quit smoking (i was never *really* a smoker, right?).  and i quit my job.  part III is yet to be completely written at this point – i’ve shed 20 or 30 lbs. of warhammer weight, and aim to lose the rest…but slowly and for good this time.  the only way that’s going to happen is if i take steps to prevent the last 18 months of *this* dev cycle from sending me into another super-slo-mo faceplant.  i’m working on it.  and keeping my slighty fat (but not as fat as before) fingers crossed.

spent the day sequestered in the office, turning my attention (finally) to the six-month backlog of unfinished sound system & sound design documentation.  read through page after page of notes, stripping away the bad ideas and dead ends, and finalizing the keepers.  funny how things that seemed like The Way Forward mere months ago are now obsoleted curiosities, made orphans by some left turn in the game’s development when they were counting on a right.

||: click-drag-delete :||

actually, a lot of that stuff will live on under the heading of no sir, i don’t like it.  that’s an ever-growing chunk of documentation containing all the half-brained & never-adopted ideas i’ve come up with.  that way, when i (re)discover of one of them again in six months and get all excited – and believe me i will – i can consult the factual record Leonard-from-Memento-style, and stop myself before i head down that path again.

reminds me a bit of yesterday’s tomorrows – past visions of how the future would turn out that are wonderfully woefully off the mark.  oh sure, all our sustenance will come from color-coded pills and our cars will fly over the highways they once rolled down…any day now.  and sure, real-time ADSR control of audio files via a sequence of script-based floating-point time/amplitude pairs will be a tremendously powerful addition to the sound system.  mm hm.  do tell.

i suppose it’s not for naught though.  ya gotta work through the bad shit to get to the good shit, methinks.  i don’t think i’d trust the first cut of any idea…not from my brain anyway.

’tis the season for studio hibernation, official or otherwise.

back when i was at EA, the studio officially shut down for the entire week between christmas and new years, and lots of folks stretched that into two weeks of vacation.  for the few that did not, the workplace was a ghost town, dotted with a few people here and there…gaming on the clock, or perhaps even being more productive than usual in the absence of all their distracting peers.  :)

things aren’t all that different at my new home.  despite the studio officially being open during the final week of the year, lots of people are gone for a week or even two, leaving a skeleton crew to…do some gaming and/or actually get lots of work done.  well i’m part of the skeleton crew this time, having squandered away all my vacation time before december rolled around.  i’ll be off a day or two for christmas, and then it’s back to the mill – probably locking the door to my office so people assume i’m gone, then bearing down and writing loads of music in peace & quiet.

maybe i’ll throw in some kind of twist to keep things interesting – like seeing how many days can i go without pants until someone notices or says something.  sheeyoot, man…that’d be just like the halcyon days of working at home, except this time with a full service cafeteria just down the hall.

so i was being a good little boy, composing my acoustic guitar parts on an actual guitar instead of on the 88 key thingy to ensure that what i was writing was actually “playable” and “realistic”…when my mind started to drift…

it was summer of 2009, and i was working with a live orchestra for only the second time in my so-called-career.  for the play! performance of the theme from warhammer online, i was to make an appearance onstage as Brad Derrick The Composer, and then sit in with the band on percussion.  an awesome experience from start to finish, if i do say so my damn self.

during the afternoon rehearsal, i hung out with the percussionists who were gracious enough to let me invade their space and beat on their fancy toys – a very nice bunch of fellers, indeed.  to keep up with those blokes, i had to resurrect a virtually deceased part of my musicial persona: the Percussionist (with a captial ‘P’).

now i’ve been a Drummer for 25 years, and a Composer for 20.  as a Drummer, “percussion” means beating the snot out of a couple of drums with a couple of sticks.  as a Composer, “percussion” doesn’t really mean *playing* anything at all, but rather generating & manipulating sequenced data in order to realize some musical vision.

but a Real Percussionist is a sensitive soul, with hands-on mastery of dozens of noise-making implements from disparate lands and ages.  and i used to be one of those guys for a short time, until my inner Drummer arose and beat my inner Percussionist into a coma (on principle, for being a wuss).  then later, my inner Composer looted the comatose victim for tips ‘n’ tricks on creating life-like percussion parts.  poor inner Percussionist.  :(

so i tried to resurrect The Percussionist for the day, but it wasn’t easy.  as the fellers around me gently tapped out rhythms on this and that without any sense of aggression or groove, the Drummer in me rolled his eyes and hollered “HIT that shit, dude!”  and when the timpanist helpfully informed me of the registral sweet spots of the various kettle drums – and that the part i’d written was clearly outside of those registers – the Composer in me smiled and said, “that’s all well and good, friend, but i know what i’m doing, now kindly just PLAY YOUR PART!”

okay, i wasn’t that much of a douchebag.  because i suspected they were looking at me thinking, “look at this drummer here, bashing away at everything with no finesse…and the guy can’t even compose a proper timpani part, for cryin’ out loud…”.

anyhoo, that’s what i got to thinking about as i played the guitar part on my keyboard that i had originally written on a proper guitar: something about wearing different artistic hats, or maybe not wearing some of those hats as well as others, or one hat being killed off by other hats…something about hats.

too bad the inclement weather policies at work aren’t as chicken-little-esque as those of the local school districts.  despite a couple feet of snow over the weekend, zenimax is open for business on monday.  the schools, on the other hand, had their few remaining days of 2009 cancelled.  so while the kids are free to fritter and frolic the day away, daddy has to be productive.

but daddy has to be productive from home – the aforementioned two feet of snow still cover the smaller roads in my neck of the woods, and a lovely cocktail of ice and slush cover the larger ones.  so get everybody bundled up and out of the house, put on my fuzzy slippers, and close the studio curtains to shut out the sight of all the sledding, snowballs fights, and assorted winter wonderland fun i’m missing.

pick up the acoustic guitar, strum some chords, try and construct something melancholy…over the shrieks of joy coming from just outside.  everything i play keeps coming out so damned…happy.  heh, guess i’ll have to run with it – time to write some “happy tavern music” or something.  or maybe postpone the whole endeavor until night falls.  yeah…i should do that…that way i’ll be in a more proper frame of mind…and that way i can squeeze in some tubing before we lose the sun.

yep.  another success story in self-management!

the shape-pooper is here!  the shape-pooper is here!

about a year and a half ago i had this idea for creating and manipulating in-game sound volumes – those 3D shapes in the world space that define the location and behavior of sounds.  typically those sound volumes were either associated with some in-game object (think: torch emitting its 3D fire loop), or placed by hand to create soundspaces without any associated object (think: localized differences in world ambience or terrain).  the latter was very tedious and time intensive – walking through the world generating & manipulating a sphere or cube, then another, then another…did i mention our complete and utter lack of audio tools on that project, other than, uh, Excel?  right.

anyway, back to the idea.  what if you could walk around the game dropping sound volume shapes every where you went, like hansel & gretel’s crumbs?  for example, you could drop spheres of radius X every Y units of distance you travel, save all that out, then say “fill that collective volume with sound Z”.  could be useful, yeah?  run down a road, run along a riverbank, encircle a terrain feature, whatever.  it’s fast, it’s fun, and it’s right there in the game – not in some standalone tool – so you get realtime results.  what’s not to love?  we dubbed it “the shape poooper”, because a) that’s what it was, and b) we’re juvenile idiots.

well, it never got off the drawing board, mostly because our audio toolset consisted of, uh, Excel.

fast forward 18 months (and 10 years, in terms of technology) to my current project.  the idea comes up again, but this time – PLAMP! – three weeks later we’ve got an initial implementation of it up and running, and we’re well on our way to having all sorts of in-game pooping functionality.  i’m giddy as a schoolgirl!  after years of creative constipation…(alright, the doo-doo analogy stops here.)

and this from the “keeping it all in perspective” department…

an oh-so-young member of the extended mythic family has been fighting breast cancer, and fighting it hard.  her artist boyfriend and an animator buddy came up with the idea of holding an art auction to raise money to help fund the fight.

and now their efforts have been picked up by the (geek) mainstream media – kotaku, joystiq, etc.  and now their story has been picked up by (geek) celebrities – as evidenced by this Felicia Day tweet.

here’s hoping this kind of exposure results in a fantastic auction, resulting in lots of proceeds, resulting in Cat kicking the Big C’s ass.  amen.

hold me.

the decision has been made to step boldly into the future and build a new rig, running windows 7.  the current rig went tits-up, providing me with an opportunity to step back and re-evaluate my OS options.  after i finished convulsing at the thought of sticking with vista, and finished pouting at the realization that rolling back to XP was out of the question (and finished my annual “should i go mac?” flights of fancy), there was only one thing left to do: bend over for Steve Ballmer.

anytime i have to put together a new DAW, it’s a chore.  anytime that coincides with a new version of windows, it’s a chore wrapped in a crapshoot.  it’s anybody’s guess how (un)stable the house of cards will be this time around.  when a particular version of windows gets a little long in the tooth, the kinks usually get worked out between all the OS/hardware/software/plugins/drivers/authorization schemes/etc.  but when that version of windows is so young that there’s still leftovers from the launch party (i’m sorry…i’m *never* going to get tired of that video), those kinks are bound to be rather kinky.

so, while i limp along with my busted vista machine, there’s going to be another machine…over there…off to the side.  everyday i’ll approach it with great care, maybe install one app, tweak this ‘n’ config that, then back away slowly.  if that goes well, the next day i’ll repeat the ritual, maybe dropping in an audio card or two, perhaps allowing myself to exhibit a bit more confidence…but not so much as to provoke confrontation.  yes, i’m coming at this thing Jane Goodall style.  let’s just hope it doesn’t end Dian Fossey style.  :-/