sonofableep

it occurred to me not long ago that i might be able to do something for my kids better than just putting them through college.  i could pass on the family business, just like fathers used to do in the good old days!

now, i’m not a cobbler or railroad tycoon or anything.  i’m a video game maker guy.  but if any of my spawn should show an interest in dear old dad’s profession – and judging by the hours they log on the xbox & pc, i’d say they have a(n almost un)healthy interest – well then by golly, why wouldn’t i try and help them get a leg up on following in daddy’s footsteps?

they’ve toured my workplaces wide-eyed.  they’ve beta tested games i’ve worked on (logged in as me, doing things only a kid would think to do).  their voices have been used in games (voice acting!), they’ve helped me record stuff around the house (foley artist!), they’ve submitted their monster pictures to my coworkers (concept art!).  i guess now i’ve got to show them the basics of audio editing, sign ‘em up for computer art classes, or start buying them some new books.

and a few years down the road i’ll have a stable of minions (interns!) to do all the grunt work around here.  and if i hear any grief about it, there’s no way you’re using the car friday night, mister!

don’t it feel good when intense preparation pays off?  like a fighter who’s been training all those long hours, conditioning the muscles and reflexes just so, building the perfect punching machine…and then he finally gets to HIT somebody.  BAM!  oooh, that feels good!

that’s putting way too manly a veneer on my own little thrilla in manilla today, but still.  i’ve been working on VO design stuff for weeks – abstract abstractions of how some hypothetical tech might work with some future assets in a myriad of conditional scenarios.  i do enjoy the mental exercise, really – i just need an eight ball to get through it all without losing focus.  it’s like writing a rubik’s cube solution guide without actually getting to play with the rubik’s cube.

but as i inch towards a complete VO design and a list of the tech needed to support it, bits and pieces are finding their way into the game.  a prototype here, a prototype there…and the design and tech start to resemble systems you might find in a completed game (and then some…we *are* trying to push the envelope at least a little, after all).  but nobody’s really heard the results outside of my office – the badly acted temp VO, the text-to-speech test VO – we’ve just been churning along, getting ourselves ready for The Real Thing.

well we got a taste of The Real Thing today, in the form of a content team wanting to get some dialog exchanges into the game with dialog good enough to demo internally (ie not badly acted, and most certainly not text-to-speech).  and of course, the demo is on monday, so it’s got to get into the test build by friday, so the data has to get pushed up by…(looks at watch)…the next few hours?  how does that sound?  that sounds (looks at rubik’s cube solution guide in progress)…by god, i think that sounds doable!

dive in like a bat out of heck, record six people reading through dozens of lines, chop ‘em up, edit ‘em quick-n-dirty (having edited tens of thousands of lines of dialog in my lifetime comes in handy from time to time), drop ‘em in the build, check all my knobs and dials one last time, and ding!  pencils down!  time’s up!  how’d i do?

awesome.  well, as awesome as six non-actors reading dialog can be, but that’s not the point here.  :)  the point is, everything WORKED.  triggers triggered, volumes attenuated, audio spatialized, polyphony was managed, parameters updated, rulesets were obeyed, and so on.  a minor triumph.  i’ll have to remember that sensation the next time i’m slogging through design & tech docs (which would be, ah, tomorrow).  BAM!  the payoff.  feels good.

1st ME2 play session.

total uptime: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

time spent shooting stuff: 11 minutes.

time spent watching cut scenes laced with spin-the-bottle conversation choices: 82 minutes.

i must be playing this wrong.  am i not supposed to watch all the pretty movies that BioWare spent millions of dollars on?  am i supposed the hammer ESC to keep things moving along?  it *is* an awesome looking / sounding game…so why did i bail after 93 minutes?  to play WoW??  oh the humanity.

instead of spending the night with Mass Effect 2 like i’d planned (which i *still* haven’t managed to start yet), i ended up recording temp VO for a bunch of temp monsters.  that would be temp ^ 2.  which should mean “just get *something* down, it doesn’t have to be perfect…hell it doesn’t even have to be good, just knock that shit out”.  39 lines.  just read ‘em into the mic derrick, and move on.

but nooooo.  you just *had* to agonize over finding the right voice for each different monster, didn’t you?  and you just *had* to get the most convincing performance possible, right?  and you just *had* to edit & process them as if they were headed for gold master tomorrow, hm?  and now it’s 1 am, you sound like you smoked a carton of marlboros with the filters ripped off, and you’re too drained to do anything other than slide out of yer chair into a little puddle on the floor, Salvador Dali style.

and what have we learned here?  probably nothing.  i’m sure to repeat the night’s events dozens more times before it’s finally time to call in the professionals.  meantime, maybe i should pony up for The Art Of Screaming.

when i volunteered to speak at my kids’ school for career day, i thought it’d be a simple affair.  ya know…show up to class, hang out with a bunch of firemen and livestock inseminators, wait my turn, then speak for a few minutes about how flippin’ sweet it is to make video games for a living.  i filled out the innocent looking form the kids brought home (name, job title, that’s about it) and sent it back to school without much thought.

a week later i get a very-nearly giddy phone call from a young fella at the school…

“mister derrick?”

mm hm.

“says here you do music and sound effects for video games, is that right?”

mm hm.

“are you still willing to participate in our career day?  cuz when we saw this on the list, we were like, ‘we have *got* to get this guy…the kids will love it!’  so…can you do it?”

sure.

“great!  that’s great!  okay…here’s the deal.  we’ll have you come in around 11:30 and get set up.  we’ve got a laptop, a tv & dvd player, any kind of multimedia stuff you might need.  you’ve got 25 minutes with each class…”

say what…?

“…and we’ll rotate all the third grade classes through your room through the afternoon, as they move from one parent to another.  so let’s see…that’d be six presenations, at about 25 minutes each, with 5 minutes for changeover…we should have you out of there by about 3pm.”

say WHAT…?

“again, thanks very much for doing this.  i think the kids are going to eat it up!”

ulp.  will the kids eat up the sight and smell of a middle-aged geek with a fear of public speaking sweating through his hipper-than-thou threadless tee?  will the kids start throwing rubber erasers and safety scissors when they realize i didn’t have anything to do with their favorite xbox / wii / ps3 title?  will they glaze over when i delve into the complexities of scaling PvE audio feedback for endgame PvP?

i’ve previously touched on my prowess as a public speaker in these pages.  the fact that the audience this time around is a bunch of nine-year-olds might make it even worse…when i slip up and start muttering “oh, horsecock” under my breath.  and whomever said “just picture your audience naked” was never in a situation like this.  or has since been neutered and is currently serving time.

stay tuned for part three.  hoo boy.

another (yes another) ex-Mythic dev is here for an interview today.  which means catching up on old times as he’s shown around the studio.  which also means meeting up at the local irish watering hole after he’s had a minute to decompress and shed the Business Casual look.  which is where i’m supposed to be in 21 minutes.  which is why i’m done typing already.

(glug)

in the early stages of game development, it’s tempting to just cram stuff in to see if it works, under the banner of “proof of concept”, without regard for laying a solid foundation and all that.  hell, it’s tempting to do that in the late stages of development, under the banner of “holy shit this has to go in, i don’t care how it gets done”.  a certain amount of that is fine early on, even necessary.  but if you’re still doing that late enough in the game that you can no longer say with a straight face, “sure, we’ll back this out and do it right, just as soon as we’re over the hump”, well then god have mercy on your soul.

having seen more than my share of this firsthand, i’ve been taking great pains to think things all the way through – overthink them, really – before not so much leaping into action, but gingerly taking the first baby step.  hence all the brain-wracking and soul-searching about something so simple as one little facet of voiceover integration.  because i’ve been there when, months before launch, you suddenly find out that the content team has been triggering some unknown percentage of your 3D dialog as 2D zone-wide sounds, or the 2D dialog that was crafted for a very specific use in one area is now being spammed mercilessly in another area, because somebody thought it made a “cool sound effect”.

so my apologies to the guy here who innocently asked me a few weeks ago to put a few lines of VO in the game.  that inquiry set off the avalanche of design decisions – that had to be made at some point – which has kept me from fulfilling what seemed like such a simple request.  it was like, “well, i could just shoehorn this in, but if i was to do this right i’d have to make sure Thingy Z was in place…which means Thingy Y must also be set up…and hey, without Thingy X it won’t function correctly…but for that to work i have to have thingy W ready to go…”.  you see where that’s going.  i’m almost back to Thingy A now, which means i can finally get around to dropping in a couple lines of test dialog, fer cryin’ out loud.  it also means i’m ready to drop in 50,000 lines of permanent dialog, if need be.  and that kind of up-front investment will help me sleep at night during the pre-launch crunch.

after reminding matt to never again work on one sound for 3 hours straight (buh-bye objectivity!), i cleverly repurposed that dictum to apply to design benders like the one i’m on right now.  “never brainstorm / problem-solve on a single topic for 3 hours straight”.  right.  then i proceeded to do just that.

i’ve been trying to work out the nuances of our server-triggered dialog integration.  a simple enough nut to crack, eh?  but 8 hours later i’m still at it.  and my eyes feel like they have ground glass in them (what’s the max LCD exposure time in a darkened room before one goes legally blind, anyway?).  i’m trying to avoid all the pitfalls i hear in other games, including those i’ve worked on.  dialog cutoffs, mix-wrecking volume levels & fades, unnatural sounding positioning & attenuations, you name it.  and i can’t…quite…seem…to get there.  argh.  my notes here go a little something like this…

define settings based on balancing the following (seemingly at odds) things:

• gotta feel right for “in-person” and “disembodied” speakers.

• intelligibility throughout broadcast area, regardless of distance from speaker.  twiddle max distance and volume/ low-pass / spread curves…probably a lot.

• maintain the sense that the dialog did come from the onscreen source.  this rules out simply making “in-person” dialog 2D.

• can’t be drastically different in attenuation from “standard” settings, or else juxstaposing dialog and combat/emote/misc audio will sound jarring.  this rules out the heavy twiddling required above, making the jarring pretty much unavoidable.

• the player might leave the speaker, crossing the max distance before the dialog has finished playing.  can’t pick a solution for this until the other stuff is solved.

• the player might leave quickly (transportation) or Very Quickly (teleportation).  if your radius is big enough, transporation might be okay.  if there is teleportation, prolly do a big teleport sound to mask the cutoff.  there’s really no way around it.  w00t.

• use these settings as a jump off for 3D-xfading-into-2D-disembodied speakers…then use *those* settings as a jump off for full-time 2D-disembodied speakers.

• can we even arrive at one solution that works for the trivial VO (“Thanks!”) as well as the epic (Uber-Villian monologue)?

• the player might be in a different room than the speaker – yet very close distance-wise – when the dialog is triggered.  will the player get the message?  if not, cool.  if so, do we rely on occlusion / obstruction to do it’s thing, or is more required?

and the non-stop metalcore isn’t helping my focus at this point.  time to heed my own advice, throw in the towel, and go buy Mass Effect 2.

and the cleaning guy just wandered into my office.  what’s he doing here after midnite?  probably wondering what *i’m* doing here after midnite.

so, we weren’t dividing by zero after all.  but pretty close.

turns out it was one of those “0-100% will hereafter be represented in the code as 0.0-1.0″ kind of things.  the programmer missed the fine print in the documentation for the setReverbWetLevelToGetBradOffYourBack(); function.  turns out, full blast = 1.0.  he thought full blast = 100.  so he set it to 100.  and the function didn’t object.

it didn’t object to the fact that his “100″ produced the equation “100 * 100%”, yielding a wet level of 10,000%.  so much for bounds checking.  and hence, our bare-feet-on-dirt footsteps sounding like godzilla in an oil tanker in space.

once upon a time, chris mentioned that he enjoyed seeing himself referenced in these little anecdotes.  well there ya go, buddy!  HI CHRIS!  :P

given the development cycle of the average MMO, and the life cycle of the average north american male, back-of-the-napkin math tells me i’ve got about 8-10 more MMOs in front of me, then i retire / die.  hm.

whelp, guess we’ve got that all sorted out then.