volumetric defecation
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.)
