The Mother of All Updates: A Soliloquy in Five Parts (5 of 5)
So if you haven't been by here in a while, you may notice that not only have I updated five times in the last day, I've also cheated about when I supposedly posted them. I'm trying to keep them sort of chronologically relevant, so get over it. You may want to scoot down to part one and start from there.
If your name is Marsha and you happen to live in San Francisco, you may wish to skip this next part.
Saturday marked my return from San Francisco, where I was gleefully attending the 2007 Game Developers' Conference. I managed to talk Simutronics into sending me to the Audio Boot Camp, so I spent the entire week attending lectures and panels on things like innovative mixing techniques using 5.1 surround and budgeting/planning for a live orchestra session. A few of the seminars I went to were pretty rubbish, basically commercials for the presenters' products/company, but I got a hell of a lot of useful info from the others. Some of the show's highlights for me:
The stuff they're doing with Wwise this spring is going to be awesome by all appearances. People have done a lot of brilliant game soundtracks over the years (my personal favorites being Diablo II, Total Annihilation, and Heroes of Might and Magic III), but there's rarely more interactivity than switching between music based on your current area of the game, or perhaps if you're in combat. Over the next few years, we're going to be seeing more and more games where the soundtrack tailors itself to how to you play. Take the Hitman series as a random example - a player who stalks quietly through the levels, avoiding unnecessary confrontations, might have a more ambient soundtrack, while a player who goes the spray'n'pray route (like I always ended up doing) and just machine guns the hell out of anything that moves is going to have a fast, exciting action soundtrack.
Hero's Journey is going to be a perfect application of this sort of dynamic scoring, mark my words.
Marsha, you can start reading again, and if you slipped up and read all that other stuff, uh, sorry I didn't call while I was in town. I didn't want to set up a time and not be able to make it, and I ended up not having any time at all.
In an attempt to keep on top of all the other projects I have going on while in San Fran, I am the owner of a shiny new Asus laptop. It came with Vista, and my personal jury on that is still out. So far, I like it except for the networking issues, of which there are several.
In other news, I hear Gameheads has made it through the major portion of the editing process. We'll be meeting back up this Saturday for some ADR work, and with any luck, I can get hold of a copy for spotting. I think someone else will be doing the majority of the music, which is no crushing blow to me and my thousand projects, but I'd still like to get an unscored version to do it myself at some point for fun and practice. I guess I should probably also write them a bio for the cast page, since the one they made up for me says I was raised by wolves, and I tried so hard to bury that part of my life.
Currently listening to: "Wish", Nine Inch Nails
If your name is Marsha and you happen to live in San Francisco, you may wish to skip this next part.
Saturday marked my return from San Francisco, where I was gleefully attending the 2007 Game Developers' Conference. I managed to talk Simutronics into sending me to the Audio Boot Camp, so I spent the entire week attending lectures and panels on things like innovative mixing techniques using 5.1 surround and budgeting/planning for a live orchestra session. A few of the seminars I went to were pretty rubbish, basically commercials for the presenters' products/company, but I got a hell of a lot of useful info from the others. Some of the show's highlights for me:
Talking to Dolby's Chief Research Engineer at the CCP/White Wolf party about new outboard gear they're developing Garry Taylor's (Audio Manager, SCE Cambridge) lecture on foley and recording techniques Scott Selfon's (Senior Audio Specialist, Microsoft Game Technology Group) lectures on non-linear game scoring Getting dragged out of the crowd at a SingStar demo by one of the demonstrators, and beating his ass at "Rocket Man" Seeing all those nice Bioware people again. Thanks for the shot glass. Getting a hands-on look at the 2007.1 release of Wwise, the plugin audio engine developed by Montreal-based AudioKinetic, which focuses on Interactive Music.
The stuff they're doing with Wwise this spring is going to be awesome by all appearances. People have done a lot of brilliant game soundtracks over the years (my personal favorites being Diablo II, Total Annihilation, and Heroes of Might and Magic III), but there's rarely more interactivity than switching between music based on your current area of the game, or perhaps if you're in combat. Over the next few years, we're going to be seeing more and more games where the soundtrack tailors itself to how to you play. Take the Hitman series as a random example - a player who stalks quietly through the levels, avoiding unnecessary confrontations, might have a more ambient soundtrack, while a player who goes the spray'n'pray route (like I always ended up doing) and just machine guns the hell out of anything that moves is going to have a fast, exciting action soundtrack.
Hero's Journey is going to be a perfect application of this sort of dynamic scoring, mark my words.
Marsha, you can start reading again, and if you slipped up and read all that other stuff, uh, sorry I didn't call while I was in town. I didn't want to set up a time and not be able to make it, and I ended up not having any time at all.
In an attempt to keep on top of all the other projects I have going on while in San Fran, I am the owner of a shiny new Asus laptop. It came with Vista, and my personal jury on that is still out. So far, I like it except for the networking issues, of which there are several.
In other news, I hear Gameheads has made it through the major portion of the editing process. We'll be meeting back up this Saturday for some ADR work, and with any luck, I can get hold of a copy for spotting. I think someone else will be doing the majority of the music, which is no crushing blow to me and my thousand projects, but I'd still like to get an unscored version to do it myself at some point for fun and practice. I guess I should probably also write them a bio for the cast page, since the one they made up for me says I was raised by wolves, and I tried so hard to bury that part of my life.
Currently listening to: "Wish", Nine Inch Nails
