http://publications.dice.se/publication ... gory=Audio < pretty interesting shit. Bunch of cool microphones used too.

such an awesome job

Yarr, the guns sound doap in that. It is totally obvious that someone spent some thinking time on how they are put together.

I wish that presentation had working sound samples. I would be curious to see what elements got used and how they got mixed.

If i had gone to school for it, i would actually love to do video game sound design. That was always one of my favorite parts of the nerdprocess for putting things in videogames. The same sort of issues abound with what i was doing, in that it is difficult to get a car in a game to sound as awesome as a car does in real life. You have to fool the driver, and cheat the game's audio coding to do whatever it takes to make it work in the end result, regardless of how "wrong" it might sound or seem when you are working with the raw, real, audio.

Distortion especially, is huge. Pro microphones are way too clean for loud angry things like guns and cars. You have to filth them up before you try to bring them in game.

That shit was fun.

How exactly do car sounds in video games work?

I mean you can't just sit there with a car and hold the revs at 1273 rpms until it's time to record 1274 rpms...

Depends on the game. Usually, the program has to have some way of the soundood telling it what rpm a sample is at. Then, in combination with the physics telling it what rpm to aim for, it can pitch adjust that sample in real time.

Then what you usually would do, is have a few different samples at different rpms, and you would be able to tell the program "from 1k to 3k rpm use sample A, from 3k to 7k use sample B..." etc. And the audio engine of the game would be able to cross fade between them.

Then there are all kinds of additional things like: 1. an engine revving in neutral sounds totally different than one at the same rpm accelerating under load. 2. Exterior wind noise is a huge cue for making something sound like it is moving quickly. 3. The same is true of the engine's air intake. The sucking sound is a big part of why an engine revving under load sounds so different than one revving in idle. .... and on and on and on.

Well made games have very complex sound engines. Shitty ones might just have one sample at like 4k rpm, and they will just pitch shift it up and down. Sounds bad though. A better game can easily have ten different samples playing at once just for the car/engine/gearbox, and then another ten for the tires/suspension/roadnoise/collision sounds.

Oh hey, check it out, some doods did a miniarticle on Forza 3's sounds:

http://jalopnik.com/5478591/inside-forz ... nd-awesome

Man, a rolling dyno would be fucking sweet.

Also, they really like their kick mics over at Microsoft(or whoever MS farms out the Forza franchise to.. "Turn 10 Studios"?).

Wow. Some of those raw clips are REALLY what it sounds like in the game. A lot of them... not so much. There was even a clip that sounded like a different gun in the game there.

With BF3, they're re-recording all of the gun sounds, and at varying distances. SO in the game, when you hear a gun thats being shot 50m away from you, it will actually be a recording of a gun being shot 50m away from the microphone.

Mindblowing. Cannot wait at all. Oh god battlefield. I've only played for 30 minutes today, whcih is way under my usual 1-2hours/day hahaha.

That was interesting...