sonofableep

more studio-building navel-gazing today.

the floor where we’re doing the buildout is directly above us, and largely empty save for a bunch of office furniture coated in gypsum dust and general construction detritus.  the place is roughed-in, but that’s it.  so we’ve been up there laying out imaginary workspaces on the floor with masking tape, trying different configurations & office sizes.  generally acting like kids planning their biggest and best tree fort yet.

well today, in light of what we learned at Bethesda yesterday, we’re engaging in a little bit of practical experimentation, a la mythbusters.

holy shit.  i just typed that as “mythic busters” before backing that out.  take that for what you will.

test #1.  the latest floor plan has us near the johns.  mmmmmmmm okay…how bad can that be?  insert a “ventilation issues” joke if you will, but that shit happened to me (get it?).  back in the day i had a room that, despite not being adjacent to the men’s room, was certainly adjacent to the HVAC route outta there.  and by 2pm, i knew exactly who had gone to guadalajara for lunch that day and who had not, nowhaddumsayin’?  anyway, we’re more concerned with air as a medium for sound than odor, so the first thing we did was flush all the commodes and do some serious throat-clearing to see how much of that filtered thorugh our shared wall.  we could hear it, but were just about to declare it no match for our double-wall soundproofing plan when the big momma pipe kicked in – the one that carries water from the subbasement to the top floor and back again.  wow.  okay.  no.

test #2.  we’d been telling ourselves all along that the three feet of dead air between the drop ceiling and the structural ceiling made for a good start on isolation.  sure, it’d need some insulating foam and all that…but let’s see what we’re working with here.  so matt runs up to the 3rd floor, stands directly over my office on the 2nd, picks up a hunk o’ scrap metal, and lets ‘er drop.  PLONK.  if i didn’t know the structural floor was concrete, i’d've thought the thing was going to come straight through and land in my lap.  given the bashing and smashing we plan on doing, it looks like we’re going to need a bigger boatload of isolation.

fact is, people are going to hear us.  i mean, i could be drumming in there at some point, and that shit is going to be HEARD, nowhaddumsayin’?  so we’ll just have to keep the really gnarly stuff to nights & weekends.  which is probably for the best anyway – saves having to explain to people why i’m walking around the building with a passel o’ weapons under one arm, and a load of motor oil and condoms under the other.

road trip!

today we headed down to big sister studio Bethesda Softworks to meet the audio team, ogle their studio setup, and maybe engage in just a wee bit of fanboy sightseeing.  since we’re in the midst of drawing up the plans for our audio facility here, and since their team is very much like our team – a couple of guys in a couple of rooms doing lots and lots of work – it made sense to have a look-see at how they do things down there.  besides, if they’ve already done the R&D for putting together such a space, why not just pick their brains instead of doing the legwork myself?  /smart?  /lazy?  /yep!

the guys there are super cool and indulged us for hours, fielding all manner of questions and filling in the gaps of our own studio design.  turns out, the similarities don’t end with us both being small teams.  they’re located in the midst of a bunch of people they have to shield from racket, and we’re going to have people on all sides & above & below us.  guess we can’t all be david gilmour.

so, we’ll spend some money to make the rooms sound great on the inside.  and we’ll spend some more money to keep as much sound as possible from getting to the outside.  and maybe we’ll spend what’s left on flowers and chocolates for the law firm upstairs.  cuz after “metal impact foley” week, we’re gonna need it to stave off litigation.

p.s. and in the durndest twist ending to my tale of the “asleep at the switch” sfx vendor, the very morning i arrived on the doorstep of Bethesda Softworks, so did the 60 sfx CDs hollywood edge has owed me for about three months.  they finally made things right…by sending my merchandise to a completely different studio.  just dumb luck that i was there to pick them up.  it literally went like:

[BGS admin gal] “oh hey mark…did you order a bunch of CDs?  these things showed up this morning, but i don’t know who they’re for.”

[mark the BGS audio guy] “nope, sure didn’t.  that’s odd.”

[brad, the visiting ZOS audio guy] “uh…i did?  (looks inside box) yeah…these are mine (sighs heavily).”

so all-in-all, a very fruitful trip indeed.  complete with door prizes!

i was in a conversation with a couple of programmers today, one of whom is on the XBOX/PS3 development team.  the subject of the memory limitations he’s at war with every day came up – the 512 MB total he’s got to work with, compared to the 2/4/8 GB or whatever happens to be in the typical MMO player’s rig.  the comment was made, “brad, you should thank your lucky stars you’re on the PC dev side of things”, and it’s true.  as i rack up hundreds of MB of game audio and don’t sweat micro-memory-management, i do thank my lucky stars.

cuz i’ve been there…albeit in a different form.  back the dark ages (no pun intended, this was *before* that) of online gaming, when the graphically & aurally resplendent game experience was communicated over 28.8 (or worse), and players had 32 MB of RAM (or worse), it wouldn’t be unusual for a game to be allotted a total audio footprint of 2 MB, so we had to use every trick in the book to stretch that 2 MB (sometimes literally…read on).

there was the obvious: downsample, downsample, downsample.  and go 8-bit.  and compress (oooh did that ADPCM sound oh-so-smooth…no it didn’t).  and go all-MIDI music, relying on the user’s Sound Blaster to bring out the subtlety and nuance of the score.  then there was other goofy stuff, like take an engine loop, and pitch it way up in realtime for a 100 ms UI beep, and pitch it way down for a 20 second ambient drone.  or build a whole library of explosion sounds from BloodyHugeExplosion.wav, by starting playback at the 500 ms mark for a large explosion, and at the 1 second mark for a medium explosion, and at the 1.5 second mark…and so on.  or mixing a pitched-down sound A and a time-delayed sound B to get a virtual sound C (i think the indians called it “scripting”).  and lots more forgotten cleverness that has atrophied with disuse.

though the echoes of some of that stuff are with me to this day – most notably “99 ways to maximize variety!” – it’s funny, almost bittersweet to see that particular subset of my skillset lying dormant, now virtually obsolete.  i s’pose i could go work on games for the iPhone and relive those glory days.  or instead, you know, wallow in the glory that is The Future.  let’s just do that.

<paraphrase>
“you know i play with all sound off – always have, you know that.  and i pretty much hate MMO audio from way down in my cold dead black heart, as a rule.  in fact i don’t understand how or why anybody would play with it turned on.  i mean…well…anyway.  i was playing the latest version and i heard the thing you did with the thing, and i have to say…that was pretty sweet.  the way the thing comes down and goes GGGUUHHSSHH and all that.  pretty sweet.”
</paraphrase>

- lead programmer and devout MMO gamer type guy, at this morning’s meeting

i think i’ll count this as a win.

oh look.  i found two more unfinished unreleased djM tracks today.  so instead of summarizing my day as a game audio dev (which was fairly unremarkable), i’ll just post the one that sucked less and relate it to gaming by saying “the soundtrack i’m currently working on will bear no resemblance to this”.

there.  i’m staying topical.  here’s “Nice Turtleneck, Jackass”.

p.s. this prompted me to set up the audio page as a repository for stuff like this as well as all the Warhammer Online music. enjoy (via the crude embedded player that i haven’t bothered to figure out how to customize / manipulate)!

the stuff we worked on last night isn’t going to be part of today’s dog & pony show.

but hey, that’s cool.  it’s not about the dog & pony show…it’s about keeping on track, making progress, meeting internal milestones, right?  right.

still.  i do like dogs, and i do like ponies.

10:00 am – okay, tomorrow’s the triweekly dog & pony show.  gotta get all my ducks in row for that.  it’s cool, i’ve got all day.

6:00 pm – okay, things aren’t quite coming together like i’d hoped.  i’ve still got animation sounds that aren’t coming together, and matt still has a lot of effects sounds to do.  so, let’s grab a bite and get back to it.

10:00 pm – still not there yet.  dammit.  looks like the nightly game session ain’t gonna happen.  well, if we can get out of here by midnight, that’s cool.  i think we can get out of here by midnight.

12:01 am – we didn’t get out of here by midnight.  man, this is taking longer than i thought (really?  ya think?).  this new animation audio tool i got here is slick, but still a bit of a diamond in the rough and i’m still working through the kinks.  and matt’s having a hard time getting things to work in-game cuz…well, we don’t know why and there’s certainly no one here to ask…

2:00 am – alright alright alright already.  what we’ve got is good enough to show for tomorrow.  it doesn’t have to be perfect, right?  this is just a progress check kind of thing, right?  so if our progress snapshot has a few imperfections, that’s just reality, right?  right.  fuggit.  into perforce with the lot!

2:05 am – whaddoyoo mean perforce is shitting all over us?

2:10 am – whaddoyoo mean perforce is forcing us to stomp fresh valid data with the stale invalid stuff?

2:15 am – WHADDOYOO MEAN MY PROJECT IS CORRUPT?

3:00 am – i can’t figure this out.  shit.  oh hell with it.  we’ll call in reinforcements in the morning.  hey i know!  let’s unwind with some old school internet funnies!

3:30 am – my face and tear ducts are sore from the juvenile punchdrunk giggle fest.  matt split.  i rrrrrrrreally should call it a night.  oh hell, let’s try to resolve this perforce mess one last time.

3:31 am – I’M IN!  MY PROJECT IS LAUNCHING!  THE FILES ARE FILING!  THE MERGE IS MERGING!  WOO-HOO!

4:00 am – done.  peace.  relief.  ready to go for tomorrow.  at 9am the higher-ups start making their dog & pony show rounds, so i’d better hit the hay.  good thing staying up gaming & music-making ’til 4am every other night has conditioned me for this sort of thing.  :)

i just read justin webb’s latest column over at mmorpg.com (full disclosure: i know and like the guy), which ballyhoos the player music system in LOTRO.  it’s pretty intriguing (full disclosure: i’ve never played it myself), but i have to say – i’m not convinced.

(oh, if you didn’t read it / haven’t played LOTRO, it boils down to this: another player can walk up to you and bleat out some lady gaga on the bagpipes, or perhaps some attack attack on the lute.  mmmm…”community”.)

i understand that meta-game and social activities are critical to the “RP” in “MMORPG”.  i understand that new games need to expand the definition of MMO – not by leaps and bounds, but by palatable increments – in order to demonstrate to players that *this* MMO is different / ever-so-slightly-better than all those others that came before.  and i understand that the player music system has a bloody huge OFF button (though if you read through all the comments on the article, it’s still not clear if that truly works as advertised).  but still.  i mean…really?

i don’t mean to come off as a pedigreed music snob, but i am one, so that complicates things.  thing is, how could this be anything other than awful / a griefer’s paradise 90% of the time?  and it’s not like there’s a suck filter in the UI next to the bloody huge OFF button that could be adjusted to only let the good stuff through.  if that was the case, more people might actually leave the feature enabled.  but as-is, the first unsolicited shiite serenade likely sends most players scrambling for that OFF button (if they haven’t pushed it already on principle – the “i always turn off game music” principle).

and man, the last thing i need to do is to give players another reason to adhere to that principle.

p.s. the post title is a reference to my old bandmate jamal millner’s friendly retort to rednecks who’d shout “freebird!” during a show.  takes a lot of charm / stones for a dreadlock’d brutha to say that to a room full of drunk crackas and have them laugh at the joke instead of storm the stage.  but it worked every time.  :)

at 6pm, the heat in the building cuts out.  by 4am, it is officially un-warm in here.

i think somebody is trying to tell me (“get…out…”) something.

once upon a time, i wanted to be richard devine in the worst possible way.  this was back when i was selling myself as “dj_methodikal”, and trying to keep pace with kids half my age with their reaktor cracks and DAMN BIG BAGGY PANTS.  ahem.  so, that turned out to be kind of a losing battle, and i re-focused my energies more completely on game music & sfx.

nowadays, seems ol’ richard is almost more sound designer than musician / composer (though given the nature of his music, they’re really one and the same).  though i haven’t kept up with his records like i used to, it’s cool to see him still being so prolific, and branching out so heavily into the world of “pure” sound design.  after seeing that piece (and this one, holy smokes), i went back a dusted a few LPs of his off.  yep, a “desiging sound” tour de force, to be sure.

speaking of which – not of “tour de forces”, but “lost battles” – here’s an unfinished djM track from 2005.  prolly the last thing that bugger ever did…