Time travel
I wanted to take break from Q to recollect a recent thought. I was thinking about Frequency (of all things) and decided that while the game itself is trés cool, its sound engine is pretty run of the mill. If your timing is a bit off, especially while completing a vocal track, you can hear the samples being spliced together. This in turn reminded me of an article I glanced at in a recent issue of Game Developer's Journal about "reactive" audio engines that are able to vary various attributes of a game's soundtrack in response to the player's actions. The cover of course had some tagline like "Learn how to incorporate the latest reactive audio technologies into your game," a tagline which successfully piqued my interest. I flipped to the article and directly found a section describing several video games' use of an amazing new reactive audio technology: MOD.
Uh... what? Talk about stepping into a time machine back to my childhood when SoundTrecker was the latest thing. Haven't we progressed beyond MOD since then? Consider the fabulous SSX Tricky, which has an audio engine that is way better than it deserves. I don't mean to demean Tricky in the least since it is perhaps one of my most favorite games ever, I'm just trying to note how frickin' awesome it is when it comes to audio. Not only does it have continuous mixes of perhaps two dozen songs, but it can vary the song's tempo and section, in addition to being able to overlay the "tricky" theme when your trick meter is full. The section variations in particular are impressively subtle: if you 'board off the main course, the music will segue to a mellower downtempo section. Return to the path more traveled by and the main theme will return.
Next thing you know GDJ will be publishing articles about tricks for displaying more simultaneous sprites.
Posted by ned at October 14, 2002 10:39 PM