MIDDLEWARE // AUDIO TOOLS | BETA
ASTOUNDSOUND Company: GenAudio
www.genaudioinc.com
GENAUDIO’S ASTOUNDSOUND FOR gaming tech gives developers the ability to control sound movement in real-time to help present a realistic 3D sound field through placing and moving sounds around the listener. Plug-ins are available for Audiokinetic’s wwise, Firelight’s FMOD Studio and Microsoft’s XAudio2, in addition to allowing for custom integration into proprietary audio engines, ensuring a flexible tool, whatever a developer’s pipeline.
There are three AstoundSound 3D audio spatialisers, including the mono to stereo 3D audio processor 3D real-time interface, multi-channel to stereo fold-down processor FoldDown and stereo expansion and enhancement processor Expander. These spatalisers are scalable to different platforms, from mobile devices to high-end PCs, and help provide precision 3D audio spatialisation using XYZ coordinates of game sound objects, and are compatible with any stereo output during gameplay.
Licensing options are available on a per title or per-platform basis.
MILES SOUND SYSTEM Company: Rad Game Tools
www.radgametools.com
THE MILES SOUND SYSTEM has been around since 1991, and is still being used by developers today. In fact, to date it has been licensed for more than 5,200 games across 14 different platforms.
The audio toolset integrates sound authoring with 2D and 3D digital audio, and features streaming, environmental reverb and multistage DSP filtering, as well as optimised audio decoders for MP3, Ogg and Bink Audio.
The latest features in version 9.3 include a completely redesigned toolset designed around iteration and soundscape debugging, allowing designers to capture a game’s sound event stream and replay it as many times as they choose. It also includes editing for audio pre-sets, events, environments, filters, and mixing.
The Miles Sound System supports a range of gaming platforms including iOS, Android, PC, Mac, Linux, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, 3DS, Vita and also the powerful new generation consoles Wii U, PS4 and Xbox One.
CUBASE 7.5 Company: Steinberg Media Technologies
www.steinberg.net
CUBASE IS A digital audio workstation that offers dedicated tools for designers to record, edit and mix audio.
The audio engine behind Cubase delivers 32-bit floating-point resolution and 192 kHz sample rate. It supports both small and large recordings, and its user interface uses customisable track views and custom colour schemes for tracks to differentiate types.
Users can also integrate VST Expression into the tool, which offers a way of working with instrument articulations, dynamics and multiple controller values. Other features include the
Instrument (t)rack, which supports multi-outputs and multi-inputs and merges the instrument tracks with the Instrument Rack, LoopMash FX for real-time breaks, tape-stops and stutters and remote recording plug-in VST Connect SE 2. The tool is used by a number of developers, and has previously been used in games such as Pokemon Black & White and Tron: Evolution.
FABRIC Company: Tazman-Audio
www.tazman-audio.co.uk
FABRIC IS AN audio toolset built by Tazman-Audio for the Unity game engine that offers a number of features and custom user interfaces to create audio directly within the tool itself.
Sound designers can make complex audio structures and use the event-based system to reduce the dependence on programmers. The tool allows the design of multiple types of audio behaviours, and all the game audio assets are
located under one hierarchy, to help make it easier for users to manage and locate assets.
Fabric is written entirely within Unity’s scripting language, meaning external native plug-ins are not required and it can support any gaming platform that the engine itself does. Other features included with Fabric are a custom user interface, an event system, a VolumeMeter component to measure audio levels of a specific node and the ability to use the Unity engine’s object- based hierarchical structure to build complex audio behaviours.
JULY 2014 | 45
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