Ahh, the great outdoors. We've all spent time basking in the endless variation and myriad ways in which nature conspires to astound and delight us with the magic of it's soundscapes. We are taking steps in every console generation toward true elemental randomization, positional significance, and orchestrated and dynamic ambient sounds. Some of the lessons we have learned along the way are being applied in ways that empower the Sound Designer to make artistic choices in how these sounds are translated into the technical world of game design. We are always moving the ball forward in our never ending attempts at simulating the world around us, or the world that exists only in our minds.
Oblivion & Fable 2
-Enabling Variable Ambiance
"The part of the game’s audio that I’m most excited to tell you about is the aforementioned great outdoors (look for Noah Berry’s team diary detailing this amazing aspect of the game world). The team has put together a truly stunning landscape, complete with day/night cycles and dynamic weather. Covering so much ground -- literally, in this case -- with full audio detail would require a systematic approach and this is where I really got a lot of help from our programmers and the Elder Scrolls Construction Set. Working with audio programmer Mathew Krohn, I laid out a short list of features that we’d need in the Construction Set where I could specify a set of sounds for a defined geographic region of the game, give them time restrictions as well as weather parameters (Example: I only want this type of bird to chirp in the early morning hours, but I also want it to cease during a rainstorm and I want this all to take place only in the Great Forest)."
"Creeping down into the darker, opposing end of the spectrum, we have the many windy caves, abandoned fort ruins, old mines, ancient Ayleid cities, city sewers, and other dungeons of Cyrodiil. Here you will find no birdsongs, chirping crickets nor gentle breeze, but rather the deep rumbles of the earth, dank and dripping catacombs and howling wind channeled through dark passageways. This is the polar opposite of the world above and the most comforting sound you’ll find here is the warm crackle of a torch clenched tightly in your hand to light the way as you explore. This emphasizes what I think is another strong point in the audio of the game – contrast. The creepy quiet, distant moans and rumbles are a claustrophobic experience compared to the feeling of space and fresh air upon emerging from the dungeon’s entrance into a clear, sunny day. The game’s innumerable subterranean spaces got their sound treatment by hand as opposed to a system-wide method. The advantage in doing so was the ability to better highlight certain rooms or corridors in terms of sound."
Lionhead Audio Director - Russell Shaw:
"My involvement with the ambient sound effects with the team we have here is I designed a system whereby we could paint ambient layers onto the actual Fable2 maps. So that as you're running through a forest for instance, we painted down a forest theme, and the blending from one ambiance to another is quite important so the technology was layed down first of all"
Lionhead Audio Programmer - Neil Wakefield:
"The ambient sound has progressed quite a long way from Fable1 where we were able to lay sounds down on a map say here is a river, here is a set of trees...but we were always constrained by the amount of CPU power and the amount of memory. So we went back to the drawing board and found ways of expanding the systems that were available to the sound designers, the tools, the processes. So we can now take things like...say there's a tower over in the distance we can actually factor that in, so if you want a distant hum with controls for that...it's easy enough to actually place that and the sound designer has the level of control whereas in Fable1 we couldn't have done that"
Article Oblivion: It’s quiet…almost too quiet
Lionhead Audio Director - Russell Shaw: