AUDIO | BUILD
sending events and that would be the only thing they needed to worry about. “Email support from Audiokinetic was very good and the software stable and bug-free. I have never had the authoring tool crash on me, for instance. Once things are up and running, it works without a hitch and takes almost everything we throw at it. This has built up trust with the programmers, meaning they waste less time searching for a bug in the engine – experience has shown them that in 99 per cent of cases, it’s in their code. “We found Wwise was struggling at high load points to start with but that was before we read about stuff like virtual voices. After discovering and implementing some of those features, along with limiting sounds in a certain group or bus, things improved a lot. All-in-all, after discovering the tweaking knobs of Wwise, we have been very pleased with its performance.” MMO HEADACHE Clearly, audio is a vitally important part of the EVE experience but MMOs provide some specific audio development headaches as sound engineer and composer, Jon Hallur Haraldsson explains: “Being a somewhat young genre and, in the case of EVE, very open and non-linear, there are quite a few challenges for us. As we use over-the-internet delivery of the content, we have to be very selective of each kilobyte we ship. Also, with the sandbox nature of the game, a player might find himself spending a lot of time in the same place, repeating the same actions, seeing the same atmosphere. The human ear is very sensitive to repetition but the content has to be kept relatively small. This is also an issue with the music. The nature of the game DEVELOP-ONLINE.NET
makes it hard to determine danger levels and the length of conflicts, so creating a concrete system for music playback that underpins the experience can be quite difficult.” Baldursson continues: “For regular single player games you can design audio almost without worrying about repetition – most people play the game only once and for those who keep on playing for two or three months, it’s no big deal hearing the same sound a few times. In an MMO we have to be careful in designing sounds in such a way that people don’t get too tired hearing them over and over, month after month. We may have to sacrifice some cool sound effects created in the design phase simply because they don’t stand up to repetition. Wwise makes things a little easier by allowing us to randomly select a sound say, from a list of eight sounds, and then randomly alter the pitch and high-pass filter.” On this note, Haraldsson said: “The ability to randomise almost every parameter in Wwise is awesome – also the logic system used with the state engine, blend containers and so on. The internal logic part of Wwise enables content creators to do extremely complex state management without using any code. If used properly, the event and logic system can become a programming language of sorts, accessible by the content creators. Also, being able to test things without having to actually integrate them into the game itself is immensely helpful.” Faced with their perennial repetition issue, the team have been exploring SoundSeed, an interactive sound generator for Wwise which uses innovative DSP technology to greatly reduce memory usage while facilitating rich dynamic audio content. By creating an unlimited number of variations from a single
‘footprint’ sound, SoundSeed Impact enables audio developers to get tons more variation for resonant sound effects in a memoryefficient and cost-effective way. Baldursson: “So far it looks like SoundSeed can make a lot of difference for us. It may actually add a new layer of creativity, allowing for a new type of sound design – a design that happens within the tool itself. This will benefit everyone, especially the end user who will experience more variety. If we didn’t have to worry about memory usage we probably wouldn’t have noticed SoundSeed in the first place. Its main advantage for us is technical and concerns the use of RAM. For example, we can use only one gun sound waveform for a particular type of gun instead of five to ten. Multiply this with all the sounds where this is possible and we may be saving huge amounts of precious RAM. It looks like SoundSeed can save us some considerable time and money once we get it up and running in EVE, and our sound design methods are geared towards the use of it.” For Baldursson and his team, choosing Audiokinetic’s technology has clearly been a positive experience, with the promise of it yielding yet more production efficiencies and benefits in the months to come. The investment in Wwise has been well worth it as he concludes: “The first phase of implementing the tools and technology into both our own systems and way of thought has required some extra effort. What this means though is that from now on we won’t have to rely on a programmer for almost anything we do for audio in our games. This was one of the main reasons we decided to go this route in the first place and we are already using Wwise on another product in development right now.”
EVE’s epic space setting has attracted as many players as its developer’s home nation
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