use it or lose it
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.
