sonofableep

suspended between worlds here, with one win7 machine on the way in, and one vista machine on the way out…but using both side-by-side as all software, hardware, and data makes the leap from the old to the new.  so far the new rig is all about audio & music, while the old one is home for the game, the tools, and the docs.  one machine is my right brain, one is my left.

since i didn’t plan on having the two coexist for so long, they’ve each got their own keyboard, mouse, and monitor sitting in front of me.  now a funny thing has evolved: i’ve been sitting here with my left hand on a mouse that drives the computer/monitor on the right, and my right hand on a mouse that drives the computer/monitor on the left.  and like some weird chameleon-eyed boy, i’ve adapted to this configuration, merrily mousing away with two hands on two screens simultaneously and tracking it all with eyes that feel like they’re rolling around independently in their sockets.

i’ve been switching up my mouse hands for years (ever since the great carpal tunnel scare of ’99).  and i’ve been able to pat my head and rub my tummy for even longer.  so this just kind of…works.  if i keep this much longer, my fleeting thoughts of keeping my setup like this might just take hold.  i mean come on…has there ever really been a proven case of somebody’s eyes getting stuck after crossing ‘em one too many times?

can i get a w00p w00p?  no?  well anyhoo…looks like team sound is going to get to graduate from “offices” to a “studio” at some point here.  not that i don’t enjoy my current office setting – a lovely panoramic view of hilly wooded maryland greets me every day as i settle into work, complete with deer grazing within arm’s reach.  but that view comes to me through about 200 square feet of glass, comprising two of the four walls i call home.  visually stunning.  acoustically atrocious.  there’s an about a 750 ms plate verb in here every time i stop whatever i’m listening to abruptly – especially if that happens to be something like pig destroyer.

so it’s time to get serious, give the corner offices back to the important people, and build ourselves a deep, dark hole with raised floors, dropped ceilings, padded walls, and not a trace of daylight.  i can’t wait.  truly.

we’ve got a blank slate to work with more or less, so i’m working up a layout that makes the most sense for our little team (emphasis on “little”…meaning “two”) and the best use of the space we’ve got.  nothing over-the-top, just a good room for each soundguy, and a sizeable foley / VO booth separating us.  and a door configuration that allows us to “seal the outer hatch”, leave the inner doors open, and holler to one another all day long…or seal the inner hatches as well and be left to our own devices.  and a booth window layout such that we can’t see each other directly – giving us the freedom to pick or scratch whatever needs picking and scratching, as soundguys are wont to do towards the end of 12 hour stretches.

we had the ghetto version of this layout back at mythic, and it worked out great.  there was virtually no need for “audio department” IMs, emails, meetings, etc.  with the outer door closed and the inner door open, we were in constant communication all day long.  with a group that small, why do it any other way?

only problem there was, both DAWs and the “booth” were carved out of one office that was 6×16 or something.  it was a little tight.  and there really wasn’t any sound treatment.  and there wasn’t really a booth.  and i had to walk through the other guy’s space to get in & out of mine.  okay…the whole the thing had a lot of shortcomings.  but the definite keeper was the outer/inner hatch philosophy, so i think we’re gonna try that out here, writ large.

and if this all goes through, we’re going to push for a green room and a deli tray.

let me see if i’ve got this straight.  as i move through the world, i’m treated to a location-based ambient mp3.  but suddenly…i’m in combat!  so…quick!  fade out the ambient mp3!  choose a combat mp3 (from a pool of maybe two or three) and start playback!  maybe even before i see the baddie (thereby giving away its presence)!  play it from the beginning for the brief time i’m in combat (thereby ensuring i’ll never hear the end, and will get bloody sick of the beginning)!  then, as soon as it’s begun…combat has ended!  so…hurry!  fade out the combat mp3 (nevermind providing any kind of win/lose/draw resolution)!  return to that ambient mp3, and play it from the beginning (thereby ensuring…mm hm).

really?  really.  hey guys…1999 called.  they want their music implementation back.  OH SNAP!

(i couldn’t figure out a way to wrap it up with a “that’s what she said” joke, so i went with “<year> called” instead.  i think it works.)

p.s. man…how many great scores have been wrecked by this, the De Facto Standard Of Game Music Implementation?  i can recall one from a few years back that won all kinds of “score of the year” awards – and it *was* great music – but was implemented using the D.F.S.O.G.M.I. method.  hearing the music outside of the game was soul-stirring.  hearing it inside the game was…less so.  i always wondered…what did the composer think when he heard his work shoehorned into the game in such a manner?  maybe he just sobbed all the way to the bank.

after much soul-searching, i’ve come to a momentous decision: i’m going to donate by body to not to science, but to foley.

we were yakin’ tonight about plans for an upcoming foley session – the timeless “buy a truckfull of meat & produce, haul it in, mic it up, murder it to death, and tell the CFO with a straight face that it’s all work-related”.  yes, that chesnut.  :)  anyway, the talk soon turned to procuring animal bits not to be found at the local market.  a trip to the abattoir perhaps?  being mentally unhinged enough to drag warm deer from the side of the highway?  posing as med students to get access to fresh…uh…

this *was* all “hypothetically speaking”.  hypothetically.

it was then that the ultimate act of sound desginer collaboration occurred to me.  to hell with being an organ donor…let my audio peers at ID take a run at my mortal coil with a couple of sledgehammers and a sawzall.  now that’s a production podcast!  and then when my loved ones want to pay their respects, they can just hop in-game, wack a mutant in the head with a blunt instrument, and voilà!  we love you daddy!

after all, i always nodded in agreement when bill hicks said, “put ‘em in the movies!”

fired up VPN today for the first time.  well, yesterday technically…now that it’s 1 am.  in an effort to play our game from home (and, you know, work on it and stuff), i installed VPN, logged in, and next thing you know i’m browsing the work network like MAGIC, i tell you.  hey, i’m old enough to remember FTPing a single short .wav file from a home machine to the college computer music lab overnight – the *whole* night – so this sort of voodoo still impresses me.

but just as soon as i was getting comfortable with The Future, the act of installing the game had me reliving the 9600 baud dark ages.  the client is several GB at this point, and installing it via VPN ain’t exactly like using steam.

wow, i *just* got that.  “valve“.  “steam”.  see?  holy crap.  /shame.

short story long, eight hours later the installation finished.  it’s now tomorrow technically, but here i am playing from home (and working on it and stuff).  now if i can just get some hologram meeting action going, i’ll finally be able to hole up in my underground lair and never report to work again.

my brain hurts.

last night a bunch of us ne’er-do-wells went out for a few drinks after work.  at a “sports bar” (really?).  to watch “the game” (game…what game?).  those alien concepts aside, count me in.  i’m always down for a little team building exercise, and this would be my first chance to break bread with a couple of my new coworkers.

well 10 hours, 15 beers, and 20 cigarettes later, the exercise was over.  once again i managed to test the boundaries of appropriateness, held back only by the thought, “oh hey now, don’t forget…tomorrow these people will still be my subordinates / peers / bosses.”  at the end of the night a did a quick mental tally: i stayed away from religion & politics, didn’t hit anybody (that one time was more of a slap), didn’t ruin anybody’s clothing / hand-held / evening…all i was really guilty of was occasionally shouting out stuff that would make Doug Stanhope blush.  so, i’m cool…right?

this morning i found draped over my office chair a fantastic red cape…and a memory from last night came rushing back – a new coworker’s war story about some other party at some other company that involved costumes and a “groping wall”.  the whole thing had sounded a bit like a scene from Eyes Wide Shut except with better music.

i laughed so hard my brain stem still hasn’t forgiven me.  i donned said cape and slumped into my chair, rejoicing as always that being a game dev means not fabricating a work personae to mask the weekend one.  every day is hawaiian shirt day, folks.

i love it when non-gaming media reports on gaming.  /sarcasm.  but, /genuine too.

/genuine, because there’s no such thing as bad press.  so even when bad press equates to bad reporting (as opposed to reporting on something bad), it’s a hoot to see one’s profession/pastime in the spotlight for a moment.  of course, bad press in the traditional sense is a hoot too.  :)

/sarcasm, because…come on.  Fallout 3 is “a popular coming-of-age video game”??  because the game uses a time-accelerated coming-of-age sequence as a tutorial device?  ah, right.  reminds me of that Better Homes and Gardens piece* on Half Life back in the day, that described it as a “wonderfully interactive look at the modern day subway”.

*okay, that never happened.  but wouldn’t it have been awesome?

p.s. to hell with “sentence case”.  i tried it yesterday.  it was 22 additional keystrokes, and made my own words unrecognizable to me.  nevermind if it made them more readable to some of you.  who am i doing this for, anyway?  :)

Fail to plan, and you plan to fail!  (What is it with me and tired-ass motivational jargon this week?)  I’ve spent the last couple days mapping out how 2010 is going to play out around here.  There’s a healthy list of tech issues that require solutions before the audio department can unleash hell and start creating and implementing enormous volumes of content.  It’s all the usual suspects – effects, animations, footsteps, fixtures, interactables, interface, ambience, water, weather, obstruction / occlusion, DSP, voice voice voice, music music music…

Now throw in multipliers like “static” vs. “dynamic”, or “automated” vs. “manual”.  And hey, what dependencies are there as far as other teams go?  And oh, what additional non-audio tech will touch / will be touched these things?  And how does audio fit into the various dev pipelines?  Lots of food for thought.  A bloody huge banquet for thought.

But now we’ve got a pretty good idea how to knock each one out, and when we’re going to knock them out.  That’s when the real fun starts – when we get to look up at the calendar and say, “Hey!  This is the week we finally get turned loose on <thingy>!  It’s time to tear shit up!”  And suddenly the game is full of feature-rich <thingy>.  I can’t wait.  I love <thingy>.

so i’m reading this 2009 wrap-up on the “year of shitty MMOs” and surprise surprise, WAR gets a tongue-lashing in the first paragraph.  okay, it’s not a surprise.  i think the guy even called me a moron – okay, not by name, but via the transitive property of moron-by-association – but that’s okay too.  i don’t get the sense that he’s placing the blame for Warhammer’s problems at the feet of Mythic’s audio department.  at least i hope not…

and no lambasting of WAR would be complete without a jab or two at Paul Barnett who, as the most visible face of Warhammer Online, is subject to a ridiculous amount of information superhighway road rage.  in this particular WAR-lambasting, there’s reference to an interview with Paul given in the heady days leading up to launch, wherein Paul makes some rather memorable statements.  one in particular about Mythic devs saying “they hate playing other MMOs because it gives them ideas” is called out as being especially ludicrous.  and it is…because of course Mythic devs play other MMOs – lots of them.  Paul’s point, albeit made in his baiting-controversy-with-a-gleeful-wink style (which sometimes reads wrong when taken out of context, i.e. “literally”), is merely the importance of not being conditioned into a fixed way of thinking by one’s experiences.

but folks, i didn’t come here today to defend WAR, Paul, or jargon like “thinking outside the box”.  it got me thinking *about* the box.  to know only the box is to be doomed to never deviate from it.  to know nothing of the box is to…end up with a pyramid or something, which might result in success but will probably result in failure.  wait…say what?  confucius is confused.  let’s cut away from the failed floral bullshit, shall we?

play only WoW/etc. —> end up making WoW/etc.  play no WoW/etc. —> end up making something totally “new”, and probably totally “rejected outright by the gaming marketplace”.  so the question is, how much Box is too much?  where is the line between standing on the shoulders of giants and standing in their shadows?

guess what.  i don’t have an answer for that.  quelle surprise.

hey man, i’m just thinkin’ about a box, okay?  and how my ignorance or knowledge of it has impacted me specifically as a developer.  see, i started working on MMOs before i really played MMOs.  consequently, for a few years i made decisions about The Way MMO Audio Should Be in a near-vaccuum.  once my gaming hobby started to catch up to my gaming job, i became more aware of how lots of different games used sound.  i started to see (hear) that things like music & ambience were handled in a more-or-less consistent fashion from one title to the next.  i started to see The Box.  at that point i could compare my version of The Way MMO Audio Should Be to The Box.  and the results were pretty interesting.

for one thing, i found that i kinda went way overboard with ambient sound.  i’m all about that shit, and i figured if you’re playing a game for hours and years at a time, ambience has got to be as dynamic and engaging as possible.  deep, deep, deep.  then i come to find that most games weren’t going to nearly the lengths i was to create that level of complexity for what some would argue amounts to aural wallpaper.  some loops here, some random one-shots there…it gets the job done.  well har-RUMPH, i said.  but hey, that’s The Box.  players have certain expectations, and if you meet them, cool.  if you exceed them, well that’s even more lovely.

on the flip side, i found that i wasn’t really getting how music was typically used in-game.  while fond of the music i’d created, i could see that it wasn’t being used in ways that made sense to the average player.  some music was heard too often, and some not enough.  some music was abstract enough to not even be identifiable as such (“hey, there’s no music here…oh you mean those weird tones are the music?  oh, i see.”).  in this, i was off building pyramids when i should’ve been a lot closer to The Box.  ah well.  live and learn.

so i gotta play MMOs just enough to “give me ideas”, but not so much that i start internalizing those ideas as hard-and-fast rules.  and also, i gotta remember to spend 75% less time on ambience, and 300% more time on music.  :)

i think i was supposed to do some kind of year-end wrap-up, was i not?  everybody else does, and that’s cool…nice to have a little perspective on things.

how’s this for perspective: about 2/3rds of the facebook updates on new years eve / day from game dev friends of mine were some variation of “good riddance 2009, the worst year of my (professional) life”.  all the more reason to be grateful that i ended up in the other 1/3rd.  for me, 2009 was only half-shitty, with the other half turning out pretty durned swell.

the shitty: i made myself walk away from a job and group of people that i enjoyed immensely for many years, because it was the right thing to do.  i watched a game that i absolutely killed myself for suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous (mis)fortune, and become the MMO whipping boy of aught-niner.  i saw dozens of talented friends & acquaintances become unemployment statistics, and those who held on to their jobs left working under a black cloud of uncertainty.

the swell: i got a new job, and rejoined a group of people that i’ve enjoyed working with off-and-on for over a decade.  i started fresh on a new game (no hyperlink there folks…NDA, you see) with new tools, new toys, and a new lease on my professional life.  and at the end of the day (well, “year”) came the satisfaction of knowing that somehow i’d cheated The System for one more year – another 12 months of farting into microphones for a living and getting away with it.

so yeah, here’s to 2010.  less of the shitty, more of the swell please.