sonofableep

i seem to have a lot of posts that follow the format “ah, i remember when… / so, nowadays…”  or sometimes the other way ’round.  so in that fine tradition…

ah, i remember when.  working at Kesmai with a relatively small team of a few dozen folks, there were two ways of getting your pet feature (or desperately needed functionality) into the game.  The Right Way – having an approved design, getting your tech docs in order, getting implementation on the schedule, and let engineering take its course.  and The Ninja Way – ascertaining the programmer’s favorite scotch, procuring a bottle, and presenting said bottle in exchange for getting the work done after hours (and not while consuming the scotch…that part is key).

so, nowadays.  we’ve got a pet feature that we want to get in, and we’re really psyched on it.  thing is, Zenimax is a much bigger studio, working on much bigger projects, with much bigger development processes.  almost everything has to be done The Right Way.  it’s much harder (and more frowned upon) to do stuff The Ninja Way.  loose cannons are bad for well-oiled machines, to mix my metaphors.  but our pet feature is of such a nature that one almost has to see the finished version in the game to be convinced it even belongs on the feature list.  that is, we have to get it done before we can get it started – the best way to build momentum for design approval is to actually show the damn thing to people.  holy catch-22, batman.

hm.  what’s even more stealthy than a Ninja?

once upon a time, perusing my sound effects libraries went something like this: search for the sound i needed via some crude FileMaker Pro thing, pull the physical audio CD off a shelf, stick it in my CD-ROM drive, spin it up and RECORD IT INTO MY AUDIO EDITOR.  record.  the audio.  in realtime.  granted, this was 1995 and it was also the first year of my doing things like “perusing sound effects libraries”, but still.  kee-ripes.

eventually i wisened up and ripped all the SFX CDs to my hard drive (boy did i ever think i was clever) and suddenly had all those sound effects right there at my finger tips.  needless to say, that sped things up a bit.  that also afforded me the option of doing clever things with file renaming, so i could use Windows search capabilities to find files my own way.

also i found myself doing a lot of database prep work, using Audition batch processes to strip out the silences between cues, hi-pass stuff @ 15 Hz, even do a little compression & limiting across the board.  so while i was using a combination of FileMaker Pro & Windows to navigate the sound libraries, i was simply using the Audition “file open” dialog to, yes, audition them.  with auto-play enabled in the dialog, i’d click around all the files until i heard what i wanted.  i got to know the first few seconds of every file very, very well.  :)  and thanks to the prep work, a file that originally might’ve been 20 seconds long with five explosions at different volumes all seperated by a few seconds of silence became a 10 second file with all the explosions kinda sorta “mastered”.  BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM went the auto-play.  that was me perusing my libraries in the early 2000′s.

now of course software like Soundminer and (my fave) Basehead combine uber-thooper-dooper database search & retrieval and keyword management (buh-bye FileMaker Pro) with on-the-spot auditioning (buh-bye “file open” dialog) in one sexy package.  type in “horse fart” and get hundreds of…hm?  what?  oh, just the one?  okay, “horse fart” gives us just one hit – a real gem, mind you.  but type in “metal rattle” and get hundreds or even thousands of hits, depending on how many libraries you’ve got lying about.  you can listen through them all as fast as you can arrow up & down, or jump into each file a bit, and even pitch it up & down to see what the effects of transposition would be.  then you just drag whatever selections tickle your fancy right into your waiting audio software.  lovely.

every time i do this it puts a smile on my face.  because i’m old enough to remember how much time and effort used to be involved every time you thought to yourself, “you know what this SFX session needs?  a little bit of metal rattle, about two seconds worth, right here on track 2…”  i bet that used to take me about 15 minutes.  now i can do it in about 15 seconds.  freeing up lots of time to pen this dreck and refresh facebook.

and thar she blows…our favorite SFX DB search return: “horse fart.wav”

the plan for today was: map out the forthcoming milestone, do a little postmortem assessment of how the last one turned out, shoot a lot of shit about the state of audio tech in the game, get through a meeting or two, then work through the night on music or something fun while the rest of the world sleeps.

the reality of today was: the power went out in the building early in the afternoon.  we stepped outside to play some ball in the gorgeous, humidity-free, summer-in-april weather.  we got word that the power wasn’t coming back on anytime soon and the buliding would be locked until the next morning.  with heads hung low (ha), we reluctantly (ha!) convened at a favorite watering hole well *before* happy hour.  the next six hours were spent in an adirondack chair at “the beach” – the secluded, sand-covered, outdoor section of said watering hole – with the sun pressing me further and further into that chair until nightfall, at which point i had to be forcibly peeled from it.

adopt, adapt, improve…right?

during my morning commute i was thinking about thinking during my morning commute.  since i live 100 miles from the office, i’ve got that kind of time.

used to be, i lived 10 minutes from the office.  but that was a different office, at a different studio, in a different town.  i regularly rode my bike and rejoiced in doing so (except when it started raining halfway through the day).  but the time came when i took a new job, and came to live 60 miles from the new office in a new town.  bike riding was out of the question, and i figured it was just cosmic yin & yang, evening things up for all those years of easy-commutin’.  at least my new job afforded me the luxury of driving off-rush-hour, and the trip was through beautiful farming countryside nearly the whole way.  it was 60 miles in as many minutes.  plenty of my co-workers drove longer to cover less ground, so i didn’t complain.

it was during this time that i began to master the art of death-wish-multi-tasking.  well, let me back up a sec.  in my past life as an amateur musician, i logged literally a couple hundred thousand miles of highway driving by the end of my 20′s.  so i’ve long since mastered the art of driving with one knee while eating / writing / phoning / typing / drumming with my free hands.  cast the first stone if you must, but i’ve now surpassed 400,000 miles of highway driving without incident.

anyway, during the years of my jaunty little 60 mile commute, it got to the point where i was doing a couple hours of solid work in the car every day.  driving with my left hand while using my right to plunk out spreadsheet & doc work on a laptop, or work through melodies & chord progressions on a keyboard, i usually got a leg up on the day’s work before i punched in.  and if i still had it in me, on the way home i’d wrap up any business left unfinished when i punched out.

and now it’s up to 100 miles.  but i still drive off-rush-hour, and my drive is even more serene than before – comprised nearly entirely of the rolling hills and farms of virginia, then west virginia, then virginia again, then maryland.  (also, i don’t have to make the trip every day, which contributes greatly to the bearableness of things.)  if the trip weren’t one big 5th gear open road free-for-all, i wouldn’t be able to use it as my Time Of Reflection.  it serves as the “chewing on the end of a pencil and staring at the ceiling tiles, deep in thought” part of my day.  so once in office, i can spend most of my time *doing*, executing whatever my brain has worked out while flying obliviously over all those state lines.

if all this sounds like absurdist rationalization for coping with a ludicrous situation, well hush.  it’s *working*, so don’t ruin it for me.

being a bit reflective in the wake of my recent birthday, i’ve been looking back and taking stock.  not about the choices i’ve made in this life or anything heady like that.  but at stuff like this.

what the hell is that, you ask?  that, my friends, is audio implementation in the era before FMOD or Wwise.  that…is Windows “notepad” as middleware.  this is the file that controlled all the audio in Kesmai’s BattleTech 3025, our only “tool” for talking to the Miles Sound System underneath it.

go ahead, read through it and try and make some sense of it.  it took me a minute too, and i came up with the damn thing (though it *was* a decade ago).  let’s see what high-powered functionality we managed to drive with our text editor…

• various sound object definitions: single sounds, random sound groups, and start-loop-stops.
• sound object parameters that could have discrete values or value ranges set, including: sample rate, volume, pan, and offset time.
• attenuation distances.
• priority groups, and their sound cutoff behaviors (new overrides old vs. old trumps new).
• meta-sounds that could reference one or more of the above and override their parameters (ie crude scripting).
• a change log!  haha.

of course all this stuff is in any decent audio middleware package these days.  but i thought it was pretty spiffy at the time.  DIY, BITCHES!