chainsaw vs. ice block
UI sound is hard. UI sound has to punch through the din and communicate information in a split second. UI sound is taken for granted. UI sound seldom gets prasie from players & critics. UI sound is wicked subjective. UI sound can be the most experience-wrecking and immersion-breaking audio aspect of a game if done poorly. hey now…let’s work on some UI sound!
in any game, there’s plenty of UI elements to hang audio messaging on. but in an MMO, the list is hee-yooge. the systems for combat, questing, commerce & itemization, travel & transportation, crafting & trades, socialization, communication, yada yada yada…they all have UI components. the question is: which of those actually benefit from having audio feedback? which would help the player play the game better if sound were added? and of equal importance: what *doesn’t* the player need to hear? what will just confuse the messaging and contribute to the cacophony meaninglessly?
i suppose there’s two ways to come at this: start with nothing and add sounds as needed, or start with everything and whittle away that which is not. we’re giving the latter a go – putting sound hooks on every conceivable UI action, throwing sounds at ‘em all, then chiseling away as we play the game / inhabit the UI over time. a lot of stuff quickly proves to be unnecessary and is eliminated, but we might be pleasantly surprised at some things we *do* find useful…things we might’ve never gotten around to hooking up had we gone with the “add sounds as needed” approach.
so for now, the interface goes “ClickDingClickFwapZoopClickFwupZipClickDingShunkThonk!” all over the damn place. at least on my build it does – i don’t dare push that stuff out to the rest of the building for fear of co-workers seriously questioning my judgement / sanity. plus, Nathan hates when everything goes “Click”.
So you have different builds of the same game? How is that produc
Productive.
well, in my example it’s productive so everyone else doesn’t have to hear “ClickDingClickFwapZoopClickFwupZipClickDingShunkThonk!” :)
that’s just a matter of me running the game with local data – audio that i have but no one else does. and artists do it with art. and programmers do it with code. that way everybody can work on their own little bit, changing all kinds of stuff locally without breaking stuff for everyone else in the meantime. then when the local changes are good to go, they’re submitted and merged into the game as a whole.
this sort of thing is managed via “version control” software, like perforce (http://www.perforce.com/). though that site is mind-numbingly boring and cookie-cutter-corporate, perforce is pretty amazing. i’ve worked on projects w/o it (or any other version control software), and it’s fairly nightmarish.
Okay I thought you meant that everyone was working their own version of the game and that would creating conflict between the departments. Like if a Guy changed a hill here and another Guy put a house their.
well, that kind of stuff *can* happen, but that’s where version control is yer buddy. if a guy puts a hill somewhere, and i’m about to go put a house in the same spot, perforce will warn me that somebody’s already busy putting a hill there…and then there’s all sorts of rules about how those conflicts are resolved. trust me…it’s more bitchin’ than it sounds. :)
So no new post’s for a long time crunch time before e3? Just a guess though.
Hello,
This is a long shot but i’m just wondering if you may still have some game audio’s from ‘ Starship Troopers Battlespace ‘, or maybe you know of a website where we can find both the audio and graphics|screenshots from the game.
Thank You. ~ ed