Determinance screenshot

Develop 2008 – The Aftermath

So, unfortunately I couldn’t make the Gamesindustry.biz party tonight for two reasons. The first was that my phone finally strained out its last ounce of functionality from the…let’s not extend that metaphor…from its battery. The second was that it takes a really quite unbelievably long time to travel from Brighton to Oxford on trains in the evening; just to give you some idea, it involves visiting Gatwick even though you’re not getting a plane.

This did give me a chance to walk aimlessly around the airport shops while waiting for my connection: this is something in which I take a perverse pleasure.

I drop the usual thanks to people I met who were nice lest they ever stumble across my postings: bigups to Hugh from audio bods High Score, the ubiquitous and award-winning(ly smug) Richard Jacques, the Mustard Corporation guys, the Strawdog guys (don’t click on that one – the music which emerges is loud and terrifying) and everyone else I bumped into. I didn’t meet anyone who annoyed me even slightly – at a development convention. But I did hear someone say “well, this is certainly sub-optimal” after a fire alarm went off and everyone had to stand around outside.

I think the highlight for me was Paul Moore and Tom Johnson’s session on movie sound: it really opened my ears to some possibilities by making me think differently about cinematic-style sound design. One of my key problems as an audio engineer is that I tend to make overly-dense and complex mixes – it’s a beginner error stemming from insecurity which it takes a lot of people a long time to get over. Listening to movie sound from classics like Raging Bull and Once Upon a Time in the West, you can really hear the benefits of sparsity.

On a similar theme, David Moellerstedt from DICE showed their brilliant attenuation system in Battlefield – the game selects key sounds based on perceived loudness and relevance, then ducks the rest of the mix when they’re triggered; it’s effectively a side-chaining style effect, and it works so well in a game with such a complex mix.

I got a lot of inspiration for Synapse’s audio from these talks: it’s probably the most productive conference I’ve ever been to in a lot of ways.

Ste Curran should have been awarded something for Best Slide (narrowly beating out a guy from Dolby who had an image of a woman with a toilet-paper-dispensing hat and the headline “Is It Practical?”). The reason is simply this:

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 1:11 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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