Electronic entertainment 2
September 30, 2008
Last post I talked about the video game Rez and how the gameplay was highly dependent on audio and tactile feedback.
Physics engines in games have been getting increasingly realistic. There are millions of calculations per second in a modern PS3 or XBox360 game devoted to how things fall, bounce and scatter. Furthermore, most computers and game consoles now have a second whole processor devoted to calculating how light from specific sources in the game bounces off things and scatters.
Has anyone devoted this much attention to in-game sound physics?
With 5.1 surround audio, the possibility of a game having realistic doppler and echo effects would be highly immersive and make the sound-based gameplay I was talking about before possible. I know some games use doppler, but I don’t think it is calculated realistically on the fly and I don’t think anyone is simulating realistic echo.
Could such a game be used in therapy as a VR training method for teaching that clicking technique thatBen Underwood uses?
October 8, 2008 at 9:01 pm
The PC gaming community has been at the forefront of sound design in gaming for years – check out Creative Labs and Sensaura as examples.
I cannot specifically speak to the *physics* element, such as wood splitting actually being procedurally generated (although, almost all of the sounds and music in Spore is procedurally made… that’s where I learned the word procedural), but here is a great presentation / article from the 2003 GDC:
http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/sound-technology/index.html