sonofableep

another day, another water cooler (okay, smoking area) conversation about voiceover that invariably winds its way back to the mother of all VO touchstones these days – the voiceover plans for the forthcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic.  it’s going to be “fully-voiced”, and we keep hearing things like “40 novels’ worth of dialog” and “200 people dedicated to voice” and “the biggest voiceover project ever” and “good christ this must be costing twenty million dollars”.  astounding.  i feel like i’ve got a front row seat for Evel Knievel jumping the fountains at Caeser’s Palace, and i’m holding my breath in anticipation of the outcome.

while we sit here and figure out how to strategically and effeciently use voiceover to help deliver a compelling experience to the player, going back and forth as to what should be voiced and what should not, Bioware’s “fuck it, let’s do it all” approach is a contstant source of wonder.  it’s brilliant!  it’s arr-tard’d!  they can pull it off!  there’s no way it can work!  it’ll take gaming as a form of entertainment to the next level!  it’s millions of dollars flushed down the toilet on a feature nobody asked for!  and each of those arguments could be made convincingly.

vroom vroom, Bioware.  may the wind be at your back, and a couple of scantily-clad showgirls by your side.

having *years* to work on a game sure sounds like a long time, don’t it?  but somehow, it’s never enough, is it.  :)

i’m sure somebody somewhere has a pie chart showing what percentage of games have shipped on time, late, very late, or never.  i don’t happen to have one lying about, but it’s a fair bet that most MMOs fall into the “late” or “very late” category.  oh sure, some ship “on time”, but those probably had their launch dates slipped before they were ever announced in the first place.

and when you’re looking at a five-year development time, it’s hard to be uber-focused in Year One.  shit, you’ve got four more years to sort this business out, right?  that’s why milestones were invented – to keep the nose in the general vicinity of the grindstone.  but even those are meaningless sometimes, as features casually slip from one milestone to the next, and Year One blurs into Year Three…then everyone crunches all the way through Year Five and that turns into Year Six (oops, i guess we shouldn’t have announced after all)…and things go from bad to worse…

anyway.  the point is – though i’ve got time, my nose is already a bit worn down as i’m trying my darndest to make sure audio is ahead of the game (pun?) and can cruise comfortably across the finish line when the time comes.  the other (related) point is – my head has been hurting for days from all the planning, designing, meetings, doc writing, and straight up THINKING.  i’m a drummer ferchrissakes.  i wasn’t cut out for all this cereberal nonsense.  i’ve never gotten so wiped out just sitting on my ass all day, chewing on a pen and staring at the ceiling tiles.  i’m spent.

maybe this will bring me ’round.  yep, just gonna stare at that ’til i have the strength to play me some Bad Company 2.

others may have their favorites, but the most hotly anticipated MMO in my house is without a doubt Lego Universe.  and that’s not just because i have a dedicated “lego room” in my house and all the lego xbox titles.  it’s because i have kids (who i can conveniently blame my oversized lego collection on) who also can’t wait for the game to come out.  kids who are now old enough to enter the MMO gamespace, and what better title to do it with?

they’ve been saving up their dollar bills now for several months.  a tooth fairy payout here, a household chore payout there (you never saw kids so eager to vacuum a floor or windex a window), and soon they had enough to buy the box.  but then i dropped some new street knowledge on ‘em: “subscription model”.  so they kept on saving, with the same dilligence & determination i had when i saved up for my first snare drum.

the only remaining question is, when that sucker launches am i going to get multiple accounts so we can actually play against each other?  i don’t think i’ll be able to resist the promise of grouping up with my kids and adventuring through that shiny plastic world.  wheeee fun!

i have to admit though, i do feel just the tiniest bit like this about it.  :)

early on in this little career of mine, i have to admit there were times when i was reluctant to share some Closely-Guarded Trade Secret or another.  i’d stumble upon some neat audio trick – something i thought maybe nobody else was doing – and i’d rub my hands with glee and stroke my evil mustache, basking in my perceived cleverness and imagined superiority.  but with time i’ve come to realize that a) somebody else probably *was* already doing it before i thought of it (which doesn’t make me any less smart, dammit!***), and b) that’s not cool, broh.

plenty of what i eventually came to know was learned / leeched from my peers, so what’s the point of being a pro audio ball hog?  the sound design & game audio communities at large are generally very open and forthcoming when it comes to discussing craft.  after all, what’s more fun than talking about your passion with those who share it?  and as it turns out, that shared passion tends to transcend “position” and “reputation”.  it’s awesome to see the likes of Ben Burtt or Randy Thom mix it up with Joe & Jane Nobody on the sound design forums.  that’s just cool, broh.

we had our own example of that brotherly love here this week.  my oft-refered to coworker – we’ll call him “Matt” – has been stuck for awhile trying to get good sounds for some visual effects.  he’s tried this and that and the other thing, but hasn’t come up with anything he’s really happy with.  turns out that he and i worked with a sound designer of some repute at a sister studio back in 2008, and that guy and his team did a bunch of similar work for us – churning out oodles of high quality sfx for vfx.  Matt kept saying, “man, i wish i could just pick that guy’s brain for a minute…see if he can shed some light and get me over the hump here”.  but the fact that he still works at that other (no-longer-our-sister) studio, coupled with his stature, left us a little hesitant to hit him up.

silly us.  we finally figured what the hell, he was cool before and the worst he can do is say, “go away”.  so Matt sent him a tentative email.  what we got in return was a bunch of Reaktor setups and a phone call to walk through them.  phenomenally cool.

so ying-yang, karma, etc.  if i ever think of anything clever ever again, i’ll be sure to post it here.

*** back in school during some compositional exercise centering on 12-tone music systems, i devised some BRILLIANT METHOD for organizing the tone row – something about distributing tetrachords across some unresolving chord progression or god-knows-what.  when i handed in the exercise, i explained it to my professor very excitedly, only to have her say, “yes, that *is* very clever!  in fact, that’s exactly how Webern solved that particular problem back in nineteen…”.  i didn’t hear anything after that.  i was pouting too loud.

it’s been almost a year since i’ve even looked at Warhammer Online.  and considering i spent the three previous years looking at it nearly every waking moment, that’s kind of remarkable.  as anybody who follows MMOs knows, WAR has, ah, had it’s share of troubles in the year since i stopped looking at it.  and it’s undergone a lot of fairly radical changes to try and address those troubles – a luxury / curse common to online subscription-based games: the old “fix it in the mix” syndrome that audio engineers know well.  i read about WARs troubles & solutions from time to time on massively, etc. but i’ve not witnessed them firsthand.  until now.

last night i downloaded and hopped in the unlimited free trial.  yes, as a (former) Mythic / EA employee i get a slew of free accounts for life.  except that i never activated them – interpret that how you will (“he was probably just tired of it by the time it launched”; “he worked on the game and even *he* didn’t even like it”).  the unlimited trial has a level cap of 10, and i think you’re stuck in just one zone, but whatever.  i know the start areas have seen massive changes in the last year, and i was curious to see how the work i had done was affected.

the first thing i noticed was…the mist in my misty-eyes.  oh the nostalgia.  every snippet of dialog, every animation, every visual effect, every fixture, every little bit of sound that i had my hands on all came rushing back to me.  the sensation was quite pleasant…for a moment.  then the cracks started to appear – the same maddening cracks that i left behind a year ago.

hey, those sounds are still missing.  hey, the timing is off for those animation sounds.  hey, those sounds are spamming the whole region in 2D when they should be local and 3D.  hey, the mix is jacked because we couldn’t duck audio elements or do any realtime mixing.  hey, hey, hey!

and then there were some new surprises.  like, whomever is doing my job these days is making some “interesting” choices when it comes to recently added sounds.  and the music is gone.  i mean…it’s gone.  i can’t find it anywhere.  i’m running around the zone and my music is gone.  my lovely LOVELY MUSIC.

but that’s the way it works.  it’s not mine anymore.  it belongs to someone else now, and if they want to throw out every sound i ever put in the game, that’s their prerogative.  or if something is horriby horribly broken, it’s not my sleep to lose.  just walk away.  stoic on the outside, crying a little on the inside, just walk away.

my last day at Mythic, cleaning out the office.  i think i was saving that bottle to celebrate the “WoW-killing” bonus that never came.  :)

i just started playing Battlefied: Bad Company 2 last night.  good lord.  gawd damn.  holy hell.  yeah.

i could prattle on about the visceral realism of the weapon sounds, or the “you are there” immersion of the environmental DSP, or the quality of the VO, or a lot of things.  or what a great game it is top-to-bottom, no ifs, ands, or buts.  but plenty of reviewers and bloggers are wearing out their keyboards doing that already.  i’ll just say that as someone who knows what it takes to pull all that off, hats off to those cats.  hats way off.

my coworker and i jumped right into multiplayer and got ourselves ganked again and again and again.  and we weren’t even jumping around, listening to torches this time.  we were *playing*.  and *losing*.  and LOVING IT.

i’ve always had this dream that someday MMO combat could approach – never equal – but maybe at least inch closer to the kind of combat you get in a game like that.  obviously the nature of the MMO beast virtually prohibits it (server lag, gameplay mechanics, class balancing, etc.), but still.  there’s things that can be done with animation & audio to make combat feel more…combative.  more “I’M KICKING YOUR ASS WITH BOTH HANDS!”, and less “(nom nom nom) auto-attack (nom nom sandwich) ability #3 (nom nom check facebook) ability #3 (burp)”.

it is a dream i have, friends.  and the gameplay last night simultaneously made me want to try ever harder, while making me think, “no, fucking, way”.  :)

so it’s 1997 and i’m working on MMOs at Kesmai and thinking i’ve pretty much got the whole “this is what MMO audio is all about” thing figured out.  after five years of that i start working on DAoC, and i look back at my Kesmai time and see just how much i still had to learn.  how quaint, all those simple little games with their simple little audio designs!  but *now*, i’ve got it all sussed out, yeah?

another five years and as many DAoC expansions go by, and i start working on Warhammer Online.  i now realize that my DAoC experience was just the tip of the iceberg – there’s so much to this game audio-wise that Camelot never had (much less the Kesmai games)!  but this…*this* time i am surely master of all things MMO audio, right?

a few more years pass and i’m working on my next project, and it i see once again that i *still* have not been to the highest mountain.  there are new aspects of audio in the MMO gamespace with which i’ve not dealt.  and there is still room for aspects with which i am familiar to expand in scope dramatically or be improved upon.  so…uh…when this one is done, will i at last be all knowing, all powerful?  or at some point in the midst of the *next* next project will i look back at 2010, shake my head and smile and think, “if i had only known”?

i think i may never get there.  that “highest mountain” just keeps getting higher and higher every year.  and if it didn’t – if i did manage to summit someday – i wonder if this job might become just the tiniest bit…ulp…boring?

(yeah right)

there come times in sound design where you just gotta throw realism out the window and go with what’s sounds bitchin’.  that’s an easy axiom to live by if you’re working on a Mario Brothers game, or a sci-fi title, or anything that’s not grounded in reality to begin with.  but that’s something i find i have to actively remind myself when working on titles with at least one foot in the real world – medieval fantasy, WWII air combat, modern day shooter…that sort of thing.

those kinds of games can’t stray too far outside their sonic comfort zone.  the last couple games i worked on were straight-up fantasy MMOs, and though the word “fantasy” is in there, the sound was by-and-large “of this earth”.  we were constantly wary of spells that sounded too sci-fi, or UI sounds that sounded…too much like UI sounds.  the cogency of the audio as a whole starts to fall apart if you have a big synthetic WIZZOOSHDING in the middle of Middle Earth.  i’m looking at you, Aion monster aggro sound.

and before that i worked on the Air Warrior series, where taking creative license was virtually verboten.  we had players who would know if their P-40 was not making the sound of a Supercharged Liquid-Cooled Inline Allison V-12 1250 Horsepower engine, but instead sounded like a Pratt & Whitney R-2800-x Double Wasp 18-Cylinder 2400 Horsepower Radial job, because the sound designer had figured a P-47 is only seven away from a P-40, right?  (by the way, i never did that.  that would be courting homicide from the Air Warrior players.)

that’s staying a little *too* true to the spirit of things, methinks.  you gotta sacrifice accuracy just enough so that things can sound bitchin’ for bitchin’s sake, but not sacrifice so much that things start to sound out of this (game-defined) world.  that’s the lesson i had to remind myself as i was finalizing the lunacy that was the logic matrix for choosing weapon impact sounds on my current project.  yes, in order to get the most realistic sound you need to take into account what the weapon is, what it’s made of, what the target is made of, the size of the target, the intensity of the hit, the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, and so on.  but in the end, that gives me a very narrow range of sounds i can create that will actually fit the bill.  every time i club a guy, i’m going to hear a number of variants on “Club_Wood_HitsMetal_Large_Crippling_01.wav”.  at some point i looked up and thought, “wouldn’t it be cooler just to have a bunch of bitchin’ hit sounds, that are vaguely accurate, but more importanly ARE BITCHIN’?

hey look at that.  this enlightenment is in direct contrast to my stated position of four months ago.  i’m a flip-flopper!  it only took four months for my fevered head to become cooler so it could prevail.  gee, where will i stand come july?

well, i got a little more sunshine blown up my keister today.  as a nice addendum to the positive feedback the audio department received after our last company-wide playtest, i was stopped in the halls twice today by coworkers who gave me an “attaboy!” on the (very much in-progress) musical score.  one of whom is an avowed “sound off” gamer, but when he finally was exposed to the audio…HE SAW THE LIGHT.  er…HE HEARD THE SOUND.  and wanted to let me know That It Was Good.

i love starting the weekend off with a sunshine-filled keister.

i was pointed at Chuck Russom’s blog the other day – very cool stuff – to have a look at some samples of metal on dry ice (ah that olde chesnut), and later to peep some samples of bowed cymbals (ah, that other olde chesnut).  so i checked ‘em out, nodded, and i says to myself i says, “hey, i’ve done a lot of that too!  i love that shit!”  that shit is great for everything from abstract suspenseful tones to literal metal stress.  and once you see it done, it’s a total “oh *that’s* how they do that!” kind of sound.

this is a particularly fun trick for me because as a drummer, i’ve got dozens of cymbals – from the tiniest icebells & splashes up to a half a dozen chinese cymbals of different styles (and good lord are those ever the best for dry ice / bowing).  over time i’ve built a library up of me bowing ‘em, dry icing ‘em, crashing ‘em together, doing rolls on ‘em, dropping ‘em, scraping ‘em, you name it.  if it was worth the effort, i could put out a sample library…”B. DIZZLE’S SYMBAL SIZZLES!”

so in the spirit of “me too!”, here’s some samples of what i’ve got lying around.  nothing’s been done to these – they’re straight off the mic.  which just goes to show *why* they’re the olde chesnuts they are.  a little pitching, a little shaping, a little verb, a little whatever…and they can become some truly amazing METAL TERROR FLAVOUR.  might wanna watch yer levels on the dry ice one.  that shit hurts.

cymbals vs. dry ice

cymbals vs. bow

and what the hell…i threw together a bunch of the above, did a little pitching, a little shaping, and a little verb.  presenting: METAL TERROR FLAVOUR (the “pass the Tylenol” club mix).

and finally, here’s me doing a killer dry ice bong hit.  killer.