BETA | MIDDLEWARE // AUDIO TOOLS Turn up the volume
As developers aim to immerse players in brand new experiences on mobile, new generation consoles, PC and beyond, audio is playing an increasingly important role in captivating audiences. Craig Chapple uncovers the top tools to ensure your game sounds as good and clean as possible and lives up to consumers’ consistently rising expectations
FMOD Company: Firelight Technologies
www.fmod.org
AS ALREADY FEATURED on page 19 in this issue, Firelight Technologies’ audio tool suite FMOD Studio is widely used in the games industry. In recent times it has been used in Supergiant Games’ Transistor, Turn 10’s Forza 5 and in Evolution’s upcoming Driveclub.
The tool is used for creating sound generators and effects, among numerous other uses. The recent release of FMOD Studio 1.4 also added extra platform support and enhancements to the profiler to feature live game output recording, playback and scrubbing, as well as support for a host of new data tracks including per event instance, voice, CPU, parameter values, 3D values and instance tracking.
WWISE Company: Audiokinetc
www.audiokinetic.com
ONE OF THE most popular audio tools used in games, Audiokinetic’s wwise suite has been built for both indie and triple-A developers to use. The tool can be integrated into a number of engines, including Unity, Unreal Engine 3 and 4, CryEngine and development
toolset Marmalade, and supports 14 platforms in total. The tech features HDR audio, a number of built-in effects and has a series of plug-ins available, including SoundSeed, which we have also profiled for this guide (below). Recently the tool was made free to indies via a limited commercial licence, which allows devs using less than 100 sound files in their wwise project to use it at no cost.
3DCEPTION Company: Two Big Ears
www.twobigears.com
BUILT BY SCOTTISH outfit Two Big Ears, 3Dception is a real-time, cross-platform binaural engine designed to make it possible for users to hear sounds at specific in-game locations. It is currently available as a plug-in for Unity on Windows, Mac,
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Linux, Android and iOS, with more platforms to be announced in the near future.
The tool simulates the way humans hear and how we can find the location of a sound in the surrounding environment. It does this by making calculations in real-time to filter the sound in a way that makes such an effect believable. Its creators tout the tool as ideal for virtual reality games.
SOUNDSEED Company: Audiokinetic
www.audiokinetic.com
AS WELL AS developing wwise, Audiokinetic has also built a useful plug-in for its audio toolset in Soundseed, a family of interactive sound generators.
Synthesised sounds can be used alone or combined as a layer on top of other pre-recorded sounds to
generate audio. SoundSeet Air can be used to create “infinite” variations of wind and whoosh sounds that can change based on what’s happening in-game. SoundSeed Impact meanwhile uses modal synthesis to create variations in the resonance of a base sound.
Licences for SoundSeed cost between $750 and $5,000, with further costs for each extra platform the middleware has been used for.
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