I’m blown away. I have heard audio heaven, and it is programmed via FMOD. Now, years ago, I heard about FMOD and was immediately interested in it, but didn’t know where to go from there. I’m on a mac, so I don’t have access to UDK/UnrealEd to really test out whatever I could make in it (my Presonus and WinXP don’t play nicely together, so sound design via bootcamp just isn’t happening anytime soon). Plus, it was an extremely complex program. Needless to say, I was disheartened by what seemed like a huge brick wall in front of me, made worse by the fact that I could hear the wonderful, gorgeous, dynamic sounds of Bioshock on the other side of said wall.
Well, today, I’m just checking around online, and I pop over to my new favourite sound blog, Designing Sound. Right there, as the recent update was a post about how the FMOD dev team have begun posting video tutorials of FMOD. I excitedly started watching, and didn’t stop until I had seen them all. I didn’t stop because I couldn’t stop.
I think I’m in love. My heart is pounding, I feel dizzy, all I can think about is our future, myself and FMOD. And I wouldn’t be half as excited if I hadn’t brought it up to a few important people at work, and they genuinely took an interest in perhaps integrating this into our programming and games!
Wow. Wowee wow wow wow! /Walken
Now myself and my fellow sound designer can’t stop imagining all of the possibilities that would be opened up to us, if we start using this. Right now, the programmers take our sounds, just as we make them (music and SFX both) and just place them into the games. There may be some looping, or slight volume adjustments, but nothing truly dynamic. And to be fair, doing that is a TON of work, and it’s not like we just put out one game every 2-3 years.
But if we used FMOD (and I’ll admit, FMOD isn’t the only sound API out there, but it seems to be among the sleekest/most user friendly), then we, the sound designers, can have that much more control over our content, and exactly how it works in our games. Right now, if we have a game that involves tiles being smashed like glass, and they want a random sound, that means that we have to create 3-4 different sounds, and the programmers just set them up to play randomly.
With FMOD, as you’ll see if you check out the videos, I could take those same 3-4 smashing sounds, and put them into one smash ‘event’. I would then tell this event to randomize the pitch by a set number of semitones, randomize the volume from 0 to perhaps -3dbfs, increase the polyphony and timing, and voila! I’ve now created a virtually-endless set of sounds to occur, and all the programmers have to do is call on that one event. FMOD handles the rest.
This is something that I will definitely be pushing for. A lot of people may think of FMOD as something that’s used in most big-budget retail games, but it’s actually applicable to anything you may wish to program, outside of Flash.
Here’s hoping. Either way, I will definitely be spending a fair bit of time outside of work playing around with this, now that I at least know how to get started.
