Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The CPU budget for all this sound decompression is definitely a factor. The longish
music and ambient noise tracks will certainly be streamed from a compressed source
rather than loaded into memory in uncompressed PCM format. Different platforms
and decompression algorithms will take different and sometimes surprising amounts
of your CPU time, so you should keep track of this. Do some benchmarks on your
own and set your budgets accordingly.
In-game character speech is a great design technique to immerse the player and add
dimension to the AI characters. Games use character speech to communicate story,
provide clues, and show alert levels in patrolling guards. Players expect a great script,
smooth integration of the speech effects with the graphics, and most importantly, the
ability to ignore it if they want to.
Random Barks
A bark is another way of saying
It usually describes any bit of speech
that is not part of a scripted sequence. Good examples of this are AI characters talking
to themselves or reactions to game events like throwing a grenade around a corner.
Some of my favorite random barks came from the drunk guard in Thief: Deadly Sha-
dows. It was perfect comic relief in what is normally a dark game with long stretches
of tension. If you hid in a nearby shadow, you
“
filler speech.
”
d hear this inebriated and somewhat
mentally challenged guard talk to himself for a really long time.
In the background, a piece of code selects a random speech file at random intervals.
The code must keep track of the barks so it doesn
'
t play the same thing three times
in a row, and it should also make sure that the random barks don
'
'
t overlap any
scripted speech the AI character might have, either.
Something that works well is a queue for each AI character regarding speech. Here a
high-priority scripted bark will wipe out any random barks in the queue, and you can
keep already barked elements in the queue to record which ones have played in
recent history.
Too Much of a Good Thing Is True
Back on Microsoft Casino, there was this
character
that was our first AI character installed in the game. She only had one
random bark:
“
blue-haired old lady
”
she would say,
waiting for her cards. We sent the build to Microsoft QA, and we waited
patiently for the phone call, which came way too quickly for it to be news
of acceptance. The lead QA on the phone told us that after just one hour of
“
Have you even been to Hoover Dam?,
”
