Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
and out. In other cases, some ef ects may have a pulsing component
where they rise and fall naturally or regularly and this can be taken
advantage of when designing your loop. Loops can be tricky and
sometimes it takes a little bit of practice to get them right, but it's really
worth it to get it right before you send it out the door!
Audio Format Choices
When i rst deciding to take on any kind of work, you dei nitely must
understand the limitations of your audio budget, and make decisions
accordingly. In some cases this means the use of compressed audio.
In previous levels we covered many dif erent types of compression
schemes, and each one has advantages and disadvantages. For example,
MP3 encoding tends to ruin your carefully tailored seamless looping.
Though there are various tools and strategies for dealing with these
problems it may be more convenient, less labor intensive and show no
quality dif erence to just use a dif erent format.
Here is where knowing your operating systems and hardware limitations
is extremely helpful. For example, if I'm creating sound for a PC/Mac web-
based game and I'm having an issue with MP3 loops that skip, rather
than trying to i x my MP3, I might simply switch to Ogg instead. However,
I can't do that with an iOS game. I either have to solve my MP3 issue
through coding or tools, or switch to an AAC based i le. These are the
kinds of educated decisions a game audio professional frequently has to
make. So get used to keeping up on the latest and greatest formats and
hardware and operating system capabilities!
Keep in mind that in some cases you may be asked to compress the i les
yourself, and in others you will deliver only uncompressed WAV or AIF
(PCM) i les and the programmer will deal with it. In the i rst case, you
can use whatever commercial tools are available, such as a stereo audio
editor, DAW or even iTunes or Windows Media. You may even be asked
to use the tools provided by the game engine or platform to compress
the sound i les. In the second case, you need to be in touch with the
producer or programmer and should be able to speak intelligently with
them about the various compression schemes that are available and
what the trade-of s may be, so you can help them to make the best
decision as to which audio i le format to use and what quality trade-of s
they may experience as a result.
Conclusion
You can see that preparing your audio assets before putting them in
the game is an absolute requirement if you want the results to sound
