Categories
Audio&Games

Boooom


So…

2010-2011, when the game industry exploded. Again.

The Wii went down, hard. Guitar Hero died, the 3DS? Who really cares about this 3D fad. I can’t track the numbers of AAA games with bad to abysmal sales, cancelled projects and people laid off. The Wii2 has been announced and nobody really cares either.

Apple’s market is more than tough (huge competition, prices too low) and for some reason success is always based on birds. Android doesn’t generate as much money and is a development pain in the ass.

In 2008 I couldn’t imagine that three years later game development would look this way.

Future exciting games? Spyparty, The Witness. I can’t wait for these two and I admire the amount of sharing Chris and Jonathan are doing, along with great game designers like Daniel Cook. I mean these guys are sharing so much information and knowledge and being open about their development, it’s so great. It’s inspiring. It makes me want to play their games. L.A. Noire? 3D actors and missions annoy me. Six years of development for that, now you see how it doesn’t really make sense financially. Portal 2? Well I could have played this one but I didn’t because I know it’s a good game (and I don’t have a machine to run it, that’s true) but it is still a sequel and I can’t just get excited over a sequel anymore.

Still reading Gamejournos to persuade myself to not care about big computer game news websites.

I’m really happy to see success stories online, onSteam (yes, it’s a word now). Platform agnosticism is gaining traction. Frozen Synapse is out. Terraria sold 200K in nine days (Terraria Vs Minecraft). Of course word of mouth is better on a network like Steam or Facebook –automatic status driving attention- but we can think about making games that connect to Twitter/FB/IM accounts out of walled garden too. It’s up to us.

I see a trend where indie games are finally, giving up the 8bit-nostalgia-hardcore-nerd aesthetic. As one would say, ‘bout time.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Dickland not in declined

You guys -women-, you work so much. You do so much. And yet you don’t get any damn respect.

Watched national French news all weekend. The woman who is fighting something terrible doesn’t exist at all. It was all about how DSK was doing and how France was relieved that he wasn’t in prison anymore. Not a single word for the presumed victim. I’m not even talking about these "intellectuals" known as stupid ass rich white men sharing their retarded opinion but holy fuck, I just want to hurt them so bad.

I just read about Mr. Schwarzenegger follow-up and it’s insane too. I don’t even get how you can live with all that shit in your head, everyday. How to sleep. It means you cranked up the “I don’t give a shit about respect” fader to the max, 11. The respect toward women is inexistent. That makes me think about Michelle, from bin Laden’s night on Twitter.

I can’t say I’m proud to be a man these days. I spent two days in the countryside with women doing everything, running life basically. I just picked up some strawberries, sat at the table. 2 hours from Paris and a woman is great if she cooks and can breed, like 200 years ago. For the rest if she’s too smart or ambitious, she’s just a bitch and nobody will want her and she will die alone and stuff.  It doesn’t change. It doesn’t change one bit. It’s terrible. You are so getting fucked guys I mean you need a fucking war. Starting with yourselves. This French woman who regretted to not sue DSK for sexual abuse isn’t going to testify in NYC.

Bitch grow a pair and do what you have to do: tell the fucking truth and help your sister from another mother. You opened your mouth saying what this man did. Now it is on and you can’t just say “no, thanks”. When it’s time to act, it’s time to act, goddamn. Way too much women can’t do what you refuse to do.

Woman with a black heart
I think this will happen

If countries with maximum freedom cannot apply justice correctly and show the respect women deserve, we’re screwed.

I put a track on the internet and guess what, only women bought it. W.R.E.A.M (Women Rule Everything Around Me).

Categories
Audio&Games

We need a MIDI engine II

The goal would be to provide a toolset a game audio designer could use to:

-Make him able to be free and creative by using his/her standard sequencer software and export midi/soundbanks/scripts in a convenient and efficient way to the game.

-Minimize the programmer’s work who would spend NO time on things he/she shouldn’t do like fixing sound fxs volume issues (remember, I am not talking about triple A business) and spend more time on better things like polishing.

What we have

The tools are a mess. Some tools do some extent of the job, some did it perfectly but are now dead, some survive but are dying… We’re almost there. And yet so far!

First there’s the MOD file (.s3m, .xm, .it). Yes, it’s MIDI data + samples/synths. It’s not crazily supported but Irrklang does as well as well as the ubiquitous Fmod.

Where it’s so weird is that it’s only for playback purpose: no way to interact at the lib level with channels and parameters of MIDI data! Why would you absolutely just play a mod file instead of any pcm stream, I don’t know.

To add to the mess there is the tracker, the most annoying and unnatural way to create music. I don’t want to argue about the fact that it can do great music, it does. But we shouldn’t have to deal with the tracker if we want something with MIDI + samples/synths. Like it or not, we don’t have to enter music on computer keyboard in hexadecimal anymore.

So because the MOD file while supported is definitely depreciated, because the tools are awful, it’s pretty much useless for game development.

OpenAL? No MIDI, bye. OpenSL? Just started for mobile, there’s MIDI, there’s a mapping of its data –I like to read SLMIDIMuteSoloIt– but there’s no designer tools (and what the fuck these profiles mean? 3D Audio for games? On mobile? Please). SDL? No MIDI.

There’s the BASS audio lib that is supporting the playback and manipulation of MIDI files and real-time events through soundfonts, it’s cross-platform but I’ve never been able to see a game using it. People use BASS to build their own little tracker or MIDI player. Soundfonts are pretty much dead too.

The Miles Sound System seems to do everything right according to this page… But it’s 4000$ so I never tried it.

That’s it. No widely available tool to help you create sound interactivity with MIDI. Microsoft had this amazing thing called DirectMusic Producer but they killed it when they shut down the MIDI part of Windows with Vista’s brand new audio stack. They did that to simplify APIs I guess and also because nobody wanted to use MIDI (I’ll get to that in part 3) but man, that was annoying to witness.

Since then, it’s all about 3D. I never really got this obsession with 3D audio. There’s way too much tools for it compared to the number of people or games actually using this feature (FPS and hardcore gamers, and? Who is playing with a nice 5.1 setup? People spent like crazy for their big ass TV and thought “fuck it” for the audio gear, for what I saw).

Main tools and audio engines like Fmod and Wwise are providing designer tools aiming for “volume” features, things helping to manage huge amount of streams and sound fxs, localization files etc. Which is fine but it’s now a very small part of the game development market! Teams, projects are shrinking heavily (for the best) these days.

What we need


My handwriting sucks, I know

I tried to get more specific about file formats.

The sequencer of your choice export data in .mid (ubiquitous format), the soundbank for the sampler is provided either with dls (industry standard and there are tools to edit them) or sfz (Cakewalk’s take on soundbanks), the advantage of sfz being that it’s highly flexible and completely free. Plus, you just need a text editor to change things, I know programmers would be really happy with that :-) I use this format all the time and it’s really nice.

Then, .mid/.dls/.sfz are mixed together and controlled by scripts. I’d go for Python in terms of readability but all of them would probably work perfectly. The output would be a Fmod-like pair of files separating data/content. It could almost be only done ala command line style!

I added a door in the synth/filter part of the engine so that if someone wants to throw in their own filters or synths they have already coded, they can (VST format).

Also overall, the GPU could be used to take care of heavy processing synthesis systems or shit like that.

I see many advantages with this MIDI game audio engine:

-A strong personality and interactivity: the game audio designer set up a “band” and makes it play –in every way- with the game.

-High scalability: the .mid can be reused with minimum efforts on any platform, only the “band” needs re-design. It’s the fun part, it’s like changing textures in an environment. You can have samples in 24bits 192KHz if you want or minimize to 8bits 16KHz for a small game on a phone, no problem.

-Efficiency: .mid are a few Kb, .dll are a few dozens of Kb and soundbanks are the size you want. Between the compression settings and what your “band” is, I’m sure an uncompressed 100 Mb soundbank –in RAM- would provide more than enough for a majority of games. Graphic cards have 1 Gb dedicated c

-Stability: editing scripts in a text editor or a free IDE is stable. Editing soundbanks in a text editor is stable. Exporting midi is trivial. Maintenance would be kept at the minimum, only the audio engine would need it. That’s huge!

Anyway, it’s just some thoughts.

Next time I’ll talk about the social-economics of the game audio engine.

Categories
Audio&Games

We need a MIDI engine I

There was something impalpable in the way game music and sounds were played through synthesizers and samples back in the 80s and 90s. Something that was telling you that the sound, melodies and beats were coming from the heart of the machine, something REAL was happening.

Now computer game music just feels detached or forced, especially with non AAA games. It doesn’t feel “natural”.

Let’s take the ubiquitous Mario on the NES. Los doggies (amazing music blog btw) deconstructed the sound of the game, music and sound effects. Here’s the example of the famous coin sound –2 notes-:

The B acts as an ornament to the E. Together, they form an interval of a Perfect Fourth. In relation to C Major, the tonal center of Mario, they are a Major 7th and a Major 3rd respectively. What kind of world has Major Thirds erupting out of reality? Oh yeah, our world has that. Major Thirds are found in car horns, bells, telephones, door bells, convenience stores, pop music, and every other kind of music. And now coins.

Not that Koji thought about it this way but he certainly made sure that sound fxs were matching the music tune, then iterated to hear in which interval it was sounding best. Yes, you can do that with non-MIDI game audio. It’s just so much more tricky, annoying and tedious in the work flow and production process to do so. Plus we need multi-platform support business wise so it’s even more complicated. I did it for SideFlip but it was painful and I could have done so much more with a MIDI engine.

It is frustrating because visual designers have such a wide array of rendering solutions and graphic output with great control over them. We don’t have shit. The analogy with graphics is that MIDI is vector-based, sampling is vector and bitmap-based and streams are full bitmaps. We only have access to the last one, which is not the best in every case, far from that actually.

When you think about sound, music and fxs as tones that you can control through an engine and manipulate with gameplay, MIDI is just the way to go. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time we need this functionality, it’s stable it has everything we need. We need an audio suite with an editor to create extremely interactive audio and awesome stuff.

MIDI engine
Basically

Game audio designers feed the engine with MIDI, feed the sampler with uh, sample banks and/or adjust synths and filters through a few scripts and the final audio stream happens in RAM, in the game. The important thing is this:

midi engine interactivity
This is where the fucking magic happens

We can control everything here. We can cut the bass line if the player is low in energy or add a clap on the snare when the player is doing great. We can accelerate music and sound fxs as the player moves faster, we can filter and sweep out a jump fx made with a synth to match the exact length of an analog action, we can send a note off if the combo is not perfect, we can make musical transitions, cuts and breaks to match the action… Things we can’t do or are so tedious with audio streams and one shot samples. Loop. Fade out/fade in. Cut the ambiance or music. Repeat. Streams are so limited.

This is how professional audio software like Reason are working, MIDI to computation to RAM. People associate synths and samples with bad quality because for some reason (ha ha) they think about it as the NES sound, the 8bit sound, the lame 90s Internet music (powered by 2 or 4Mb built-in soundbanks) and nothing else. They don’t know that a nice 64 Mb soundbank and a few synths can be used to make great music and soundscapes like Nintendo is doing since ages (people often can’t even tell the difference with streams since the Gamecube/Wii). They don’t know that computers are so powerful today that they can emulate with extreme accuracy a dozen if not dozens of complex synthesizers on the fly with real time input under 2ms without sweating. I mean, in ten years it is really ridiculous how much power we gain in audio rendering and computation (cheap ass netbooks ship with 1Gb of RAM and 24bits audio output).

This interactivity opportunity needs to be deployed into game development. Not in a back to the old school way, but more as a rebirth. After ten years making audio and music for computer games, I haven’t been convinced by the stream road we took, at all. In a lot of cases, especially for small and medium-sized games, a MIDI engine would stimulate the gameplay and make it more alive than a 2 channel soundtrack looping in the background with stock sound fxs. But yes it means you really need a musician/designer/scripter on that part of your game!

Next time I will talk about the tools we have now, the tools we need and the weird situation with programmers.