Thread by @lkctools

Does the future look grim?

(On next steps of interactive audio authoring)

1. A thread 🧵...

#gameaudio #gamedev #sounddesign #reaperdaw #audiokinetic #wwise #fmod #ue4 #unity3d

2. The most difficult thing is making decisions!

(because you have to think)

3. Making decisions requires bravery, experimentation, and exploration of the unknown.

If you are not practicing that then you are just gambling.

4. Taking risks is also necessary, but wise people do their best to remove as many uncertainties as possible.

This way, they reduce the suffering to a minimum.

5. Wisdom comes from a detailed analysis of all factors, but it takes time.

This brings us back to the value of time and how we spend it as a resource.

6. Let’s pick game dev as a great example to discuss this topic.

Video games are either trying to mimic reality or to create a new one.

This usually includes sound as an integral part of that reality.

7. It is a virtual digital reality (sometimes blended with the real world), affected by user input, simulated inside a computer, and experienced through screens and speakers.

8. The world of video games is an environment where sound sources exist and where they propagate according to some laws that we define.

In that way, we simulate reality and evoke emotions.

9. Technically, it’s something like this:

SOUNDSCAPE = SOUND DATA x SOUND SYSTEM

10. With this in mind, we can view interactive audio authoring as a process for organizing various sound sources and manipulating them in real-time using all sorts of DSP to get the desired soundscape.

11. The responsibility of the sound designer then comes down to this:

- Design Sound Data
- Design Sound System
- Connect Data and System

(order is not guaranteed)

12. During the authoring process, both data design and system design influence each other back and forth.

13. It’s all about feedback and iteration.

You need to hear things in context to be able to make judgments on your design.

14. However, DAWs are still struggling with catching up to the demands of interactive audio, mostly because they are tools initially designed for music and the post-production of linear media.

15. Game engines are focusing on the best way to implement audio modules.

Regarding sound data, they generally expect the assets to be already prepared.

16. Here comes the middleware, which focuses specifically on this, with more or less success…

17. When preparing audio assets, you need to:
- name them properly;
- import them into middleware;
- create hierarchical structures that define the behavior;
- create events from containers;
- place them in proper sound banks.

18. All these phases are mainly done manually, and you spend huge amounts of time making selections, grouping objects in folders, naming containers, dragging them to proper places in the structure, etc.

19. It is important to keep this freedom when exploring different possibilities.

However, while game audio is a creative field where you need to find new solutions to problems, not everything is about that.

20. Actually, a big part of your work is just doing stuff for which the design is already set.

You know exactly what you need regarding the assets and the structure.

21. Unfortunately, a lot of these tasks still waste time and energy because the workflow is not optimized.

22. Things are much better than 10 or 20 years ago, but we still have a big separation in a form of:

DAW => MAKE SOUNDS
MIDDLEWARE => ORGANIZE SOUNDS
GAME ENGINE => TRIGGER SOUNDS

23. Simply put, our tools are too introverted and care very little about anything else except their own stuff.

The solution is to make them more open toward each other.

24. What can we do about this?

- Advance bidirectional communication
- Redefine the responsibility of daws
- Evolve integration procedures
- Focus on the synergy between data and structure
- Improve iteration workflows

25. Making all these steps will take a lot of thinking and effort, but here’s the first one:



End of thread.

(thanks for sticking :)