The Sound of No Man's Sky

okay good morning everyone thank you all for turning up morning cat appreciates Friday morning not actually the easiest one to attend so if I keep coming you know by now all the house rules I make sure you folks don't go off then in and in there okay I'll exit with it fine okay so i'm paul weir i'm composer sound designer basically do any audio production if you're going to give you some cash i'm quite happy to do and you think i've been around for quite a long time now i'm the audio director of hello games as well as being an audio director for microsoft so today's young freelance with with two jobs which is quite nice to be in that position and but today i'm going to talk a little bit about the process of sound designing no man's sky and the music creation process we went through as well i'm going to talk a little bit about

some of the tools that we created and hopefully show them to you some stuff will almost certainly crash I'm going to warn you now it can be a little bit of having to make up things so just bear with me I get that in early I just again quick your hands I hate doing this but and are you familiar with game demands sky a particular so not I've all knots fine most people okay Pat fine so no one sky is a precision Airy driven science fiction an action-adventure game and it's quite a cost as several different genres you can tutor pure explorations you can treat it as an ambience experience if you want and all you can choose it more its kind of proactive trade kind of a little bit like a least in some ways there's there's no real story structure to it and it's very open-ended and we have some light narrative on top so there's no real voiceover we got a little bit of

focus but it's mostly about the experience hello games if you don't already know is if a small company we're still a small company so throughout development is probably between about 12 we made part developed when I was involved about 1215 people for the insides of admin team which is obviously still quite small and so the audio department there's obviously me that was it and but I had a lot of help from other people so I just want to first of all just give some thanks for some people who involved because important sometimes like I'm seen as the audio person for no mine sky but had Harry Denham who is a program at hello games who isn't an audio programmer but bless them helped me with all my audio issues with a wise integration things like that super fantastic super useful to have a coder is on the side of audio even if they're not the audio coder someone looking out after it's really lovely and I've got a DSP programmer called sandy white so if you're British and old like I am sandy

wrote anti-tax back in the 80s I was a tech spectrum super bright guy if you've ever been to any my talks before I've talked about him past he often does kind of my tricky DSP problems and and right at the end of a development I also had a freelance audio character called Angie Hutchings to help profile wise and gal performance up to scratch so it's just important because I don't want it to make it look like I did everything and I did all the creative contents and technical design but in all vijaya had helped with my vendors so I'm going to show you a short video now which is just a series of Clips a different examples of sound design from the game and just to kind of show the range that you find in the game

[Music] [Music] [Music]

it's a the obvious challenge with a game like this is both its its scope and the simple fact that I don't know what a planet is before it's created and if you've been to any good talks for hello games guys it's the same problem how do you generate a landscape with all the features of a landscape without knowing in advance what the elements of a landscape what the landscape is so we had to develop certain tools in order to understand the environment around us in a normal game take

an example things like like maybe building a normal game you've got a building geometry you know where the builders can be advanced you can pre-baked things like obstruction occlusion and or you can add extra geometry to cope with that but we don't have any of that so it's I I don't know anything until the engine reports back to me so we had to build and wise a lot of systems which are very heavily state driven and switch driven in order to make decisions in real time so that's some of which I'm going to show you some those little tools there this'n exercise screaming nothing can you too many of you but I think for our game in particular it was really important but we moved away from simple one-on-one event-driven audio so something happened to a game it triggers a sound now obviously we still do that right with the UI sounds but we're going to do that under certain set animations that don't change so we'll do that for that whoever possible I'm trying to boil down by all

the audio behaviors and all the actual audio content into as few actual two events as possible so good a good example that which I'll show you next is how it handle immune sounds so that it goes system driven if you can do it because you do need data coming back from the game it has to be a two-way relationship makes a flexible mix very extensible so for example biomes every plot the planet type has its own kind of atmosphere its own characteristic so you might have a like a jungle planets or frozen planet so if we introduced a whole new planet type I don't need a program accelerating for me miss you forgot just tells me what the name of our planet type is I go off and do all my audio and I just allocate that as a new state and pops in save for ship engines we have a new ship engine don't need any coding support decided straight in as a new state submits could be switching whether understand so it gives me as a sound

designer a lot of flexibility and a lot of control I'm not trying to sell wise and was really a good solution for us a lot of institutions available and so I was going to show you as I'll get to your example in a second so as a sound designer though there's certain like key things I wanted to achieve right from the beginning and I always had in mind the sensation of like being in spaceship that parked on a planet and having vervain on the cockpit window like which is very emotive and for a science-fiction game well I've tried to as much as possible is a very relatable sounds like sure the sci-fi science absolutely ships a sci-fi but where the possible the planets make it familiar like wind water birds are all a very emotive sound of all stochastic sounds and through evolution you know we've learned to associate them with with peace and

with calmness and the certain kind of feeling we get with them I think some of the nicest feedback I had was on Twitter with someone saying that when he was in the ship it was raining it kind of reminds him of being unjust like his dad's farm in America you know it's in the pickup truck and just sitting there waiting for my storm to pass and that's that's lovely that's that's an emotive moment I'm trying to manufacture those kind of little emotive moments and but I can't plan for that I can build the systems that will allow for that I don't I don't have a key event where that's gonna I know it's going to happen and so it's going to show you these how we handle events so this is a good example I can attempt to show it to your wise when I do that we'll see how ambitious I am so we have one wise event with this known that handles all our global um instances all our local ambiences the weather effect whether the creatures or not there's a

combination of four biomes it's going to be state so you can only ever exist in one planten's time select a global ambience for localized ambience visitors switch so for example it could be a forest and we have to work out through very casting which I'll show you what a forest is because there's nothing in the game to say I'm the farthest painful water like again in a normal game you would have some kind of emitters placed on water in waters generated or you know every water is so you play some geometry and you know hear my sound emitters I'm some type of water I can't do that like I don't know where there's going to be water so go where we haven't calculate stuff all in real time and then the vein it's ended up being bit of joke like I keep telling Tony Shore movie but we've basically built terrain stimulator because I can't get enough rain into the game let's love rain sounds and so we started off with just the rain is on a lot but as we've

updated again we have things like are you near a building in which case place some rain on building are you near some trees so play that so it's all additive they're all multiple layers I'll show you video in a second of what happens when it's raining and you go into a building I'll talk over a little bit it will explain how we're using systems States and in real time controller lives that kind of mix different elements in and out and it's fine if as a player you don't notice this and that's kind of I think it's a game it's one of the curious things about this particular game many of the games have worked on you want those big moments right especially it's a sound designer like yeah we've got fairly big egos so you kind of want to get into a key event and you want to fly off you only make it sound really awesome you go well we only have those moments we just got long stretches of gameplay whether it's do a play of what they do I quite like that so well I've tried to do is add all these little subtle layers that maybe you pick up or maybe you

won't and it kind of combines into a bigger thing where it makes it more of a believable environment not realistic I'm not and realism and but I want to give you a sense of presence in that in that planet or that space so let me show you this video about rain Sailor Moon so what you'll see is raining outside I go inside and I'll talk over a little bit as I explain what's happening those we carry inside the indoor venue play and that's mean dependence but we're now also detecting whether you're close to a window just like a Rotarian against windows

another go care because it's moving dependence then that we can have a very non glass without the glass surface we've all little veins a loop so spectacular and exciting you know you defecate remain okay thank you Leandra wait till the end inside I'm early it's not English it's not showing it's just well it is but again I don't know that there's a window there like we don't know so we have to keep detecting a mynheer glass it's a glass of wings out in which case then start to vamp up that particular sound and we also do a little thing which would quite like to read it early on is when you change States when you come from indoors to

outdoors we boost all the ambiences by 6 DB just for a few seconds just to give you that kind of sensitive rush same is when you come out come out the ship and so it's a difficult game to mix as you can imagine of all these different elements so well how we do that they trusted is really important too for us so again like VAE casting is commonly done for various different audio purposes we're using it to detect the environment so have beams that go up to detect enclosure or enclose it nests that's not a word but you know when I'm saying which is how covered am i and then we don't know that so that's an analog value so if you're partially covered I will start to change some the sound design will have some kind of like the rumbles coming in will start to have a low-pass filter and some sounds but after a period of time if a vert casting system goes I'm a hundred percent closed there for the logic is I must be in a cave so if I'm in a cave will change

state and that won't affect the ambience is it all set for veins or affect old mix and filtering of external sounds same from water so we have to detect am i close to water is there anything obstructing me from the water I know we've got we've got beams that go straight down to detect footsteps as well whether you're in contact with the ground that's a bloody hard problem if you if you worked on games before even normal games it's actually sometimes quite hard to detect am i in contact with the ground when you've got a surface which is continually changing over time it's a real issue and then we've got another beam which heads towards a stone have absolutely no idea why we've got that program put it into some reason I'm simply from a water so we use a dynamic emitter system from water again why's handles this kind of thing so we don't want loads of sound emitters stretched across the water and if you watch it

live it's quite quite cute because these little emitters kind of dance around and kind of follow you around so we're always tracking your position so that you hear the fact that was water but if you go into like free come and go and live water you won't hear the water because it doesn't know the camera's never water so we're always kind of just building stuff around you to give you perception of things are happening when it's yeah in a sense it's all a lie but also we had lots of stuff for free so you come into the water if you walk out of the water you're going to have wet footsteps alright because we have that day to a system so because we've gone so state-based I'm getting overstated back we can get loads of stuff for free I don't need any any more support for that a good example really simple example is storms again nice weather effects behind the scenes technically the storm signs are playing over time but they're on the slider to go is it really stormy if it's not politically zero so all this audios

just as virtual voices but we know if you indoors or outdoors so recently I was like okay well I know you enjoy let's just have indoor storm sounds like okay don't need anyone to do that for me I just need to pop your door in we are lucky in that we stream a little bit of textures occasionally but pretty well Olga streaming audio like 90% of streams for Joe so I don't have any limitations on how big my file sizes need to be which is splendid and so you know we don't need to have a 30 second rain loop I can just have a three-minute main loop and up until now of no complains at some point some code is going to tell me off for doing that so again sure enough concerns like the game the actual game install it's like five hundred Meg from the game nore assets and originally was one half gig for audio which is compare and it's kind of grown and grown going it's really nice to say we've got a game where 2/3 3/4 of it is just audio which

is a win for young people and they happy rather okay so if you move on to the idea of procedural generation and as it relates to audio like you're probably familiar with the discussions have been going on with people talking about procedural audio and I'm going to try and show you some examples of how we how we do that just first of all to talk very very briefly on what is procedural generation content just in case you're not familiar won't spend much time on it so you can define it as any kind of algorithmic related content so any computer generated content based on some logic system so very common to use it for things like textures for things like landscape regeneration and it's super useful where there's an issue of scale so handcrafting landscapes is hard and time-consuming cific can get the

computer to do it but so much better and it's not either/or so usually you would have some digital content but then fully offered content alongside it the summit difficulties there are procedural content and it's quite common to do level design with procedurally as well is to give the sense of its kind of meaningfulness like like like it feels like it's handcrafted like an audio equivalent would be and we'll come back to this well my big issues is that if you have procedural audio the perception of it has to be as good as traditional audio it's no good if you compromise they go well it's procedural and it sounds a bit but didn't matter because it's procedural that's that's not acceptable as a sound designer I can't accept that and that's easier visually you can get rid of it it's harder in terms of audio so this is problem of does it feel guided does it feel crafted when it's not

and also this really interesting issue that we kept coming up against in the game which is you can generate variety you can generate infinite variety but as humans we don't perceive that we perceive this kind of sense it never really changes ironically because it's always changing so to illustrate that would be safe sky colors if you have all the colors of the rainbow possible from the sky very quickly you go how it's just such a pink sky planet I liked all the same to you this it's not the same but it feels the same because you're single for graduations so even though it's possible in fact what you end up doing is kind of chunking it up it's almost like quantizing it and going okay I'm not going to give you all the shades I'm going to give you specific shade we could generate all but we're not and that was also relevant to put some of your dough technology I'll show you yes it's possible to do wide range but you don't pick up what you want these kind of are I haven't heard that before that's different I notice that's different so

a good example of that then a touch of our procedural generation and landscape generation so the textures are photo textures but the landscape is mathematically collected it calculated as Terrigen and then we get into the tricky problem to my audio what is procedural audio right and I'm not saying that I've got the definition I've got a definition not saying it's the definition but as I've done it I'm going to say it's the definition I'm allowed to do that here but this is real ambiguity like what actually is procedural order what does that mean I have no end of students kind of give me the master's thesis and essays and wanting to interview of up refugio which is fantastic but no she's clear like what the hell is it so it could be for example physical modeling of science so

that could be a good good explanation so it's nothing mathematically creating sounds and that would seem to fit quite well so really simple example Russ with previous Valen sound Porcello [Music] I'm not just reactor with a physical modeled stringed instrument would be trying to play it on my keyboard kind of failing but yeah there's no sample is no the causing it's all mathematically calculated and string instruments and wind instruments work relatively well like that procedure law could involve granular synthesis stored yesterday on that subject and oh I've often seen is only a formant synthesis could be procedural or Joe or anyone I've seen people talk about just

using DSP effects so probably I have with that is it can't just be DSP effects right because we've used reverbs and filters and distortions you know literally for decades alright so if you're going to say that's procedural olive and just basically everything's digital an audio and it's pointless and I've given I'm synthesis because from the 80s late 70s early 80s that's what games we're doing the arcade games had a little often EMI hardship and we're creating the sound live music synthesis so yeah okay maybe that's perfu geology but because it needs to be more than that right a granular synthesis against not a new idea being around in games for at least a decade often used for comics and games if you pay quantum break from our time dilation order effect as a granular synthesis effect it's very nice and if we use physical modeling is that in itself just enough is it does it mean

just I'm modeling a sound and that's it that is procedural so my question is if it is just that and everyone's talking about it where is it like where the games that are doing it okay and I think with certain issues I'll get to a definition what I think it is but if you're going to make new audio technology it's hard hard to justify the cost I think it's a very good thing to do I think you should do it but it's a difficult argument right because everyone's cultural virtuals or we have a job to do we've got lots of sounds to make in a very short time available money right so we need to get on with it and to me and have to say excuse me I can't do anything like six months because I need the programmer to builders for me it's a very hard argument to make but it's also very much a multidisciplinary problem so you need sound designers or audio directors who are either programmers themselves I'm not a programmer or very technically literate and they're able to define a problem for programmer to solve in a way

that is coherent and the programmer can understand and many other doctors are know very good not when you take out of that and assume people struggle to communicate in an effective way with Kotov there aren't any commercial tools yet there are some very very nearly out of market but it's still a lack of off-the-shelf tools to build things yes you could use pure data on maps MSP flowstone as never one but they're difficult to implement in games we're not really game ready I love the existing procedure or Jove that heard they tend to pick off a really obvious simple examples I'm not criticizing for that but it does tend to be things like wings and vein and sounds like that now as a sound designer I objected to that on a moral basis because it's almost like an it streeting sound as a function rather than a creative emotive element so we've

already talked about vein but wind there's a thousand different types of wind it could be the gentle wind in the trees which is reassuring it could be the winter wind through a crack in the door it could be the spooky wings in a holler felt like it has a character has a life to it and that's what we do we we caught these sons and we got that's gonna make me feel a certain thing and so it have wind that is essentially filtered white noise I'm doing going to service that you get my point is saying okay this wind like we solve that let's move on and there's a bit of noise and we have to filter it and that can be aa vein I will move on and there is a place for that it's not where I want to go so what I'm saying is a procedural Joe to make it different to make it procedural it has to be driven by the game right so something where it's not just his

assigned place and it's what are you doing going I'm going to react to that in some way and that's going to be reflected in the sounds I'm producing in order to do that has to use some form of real-time generated sound so maybe it could be recording called multiple layers of DSP or maybe it could be real-time synthesis and what you're trying to do is avoid a sense of repetition again I'm not looking for realism I am looking for something to be believable I are one of the huge benefits if you're generating all of this in real time if you can avoid repetition right and finally I really like the idea of making use of merging properties so that you end up with all these inputs community of sound generation and it starts to do things you don't necessarily expect it to do I it becomes a bit chaotic and that's hard sometimes because we want absolute control another how things sound but there's also really freeing to go actually I don't always know what's going to do and like for our game we

agreed that sometimes it may sound really awful it made you someone get sounds a bit broken but that that was an acceptable trade-off in order to give us the range and flexibility so I'm going to tempt to sum that up a definition and so I would say that siege of audio is a creation of sound in real time using synthesis techniques such as physical modeling with deep links into game systems welcome to discuss that later or take some questions on that but that's my attempt to at least define what I think procedural order is so let's move on to an example of that and what we try to do for the game so we've built a system in order to synthesize the vocals of the creatures right and that was a very very early decision because I knew that was going to be a problem like doing creature sounds is tricky in normal times but to

do it for such a massive variety of different types of creatures different sizes different appearances yet I knew that was gonna be hard sure we could use recordings but we have to use huge library recordings and so literally from beginning when I was involved I was like let's attempt to synthesize it because synthesizing a vocal tract is a known problem like it's been a mental science you know it wouldn't be the first ones to do it so that in itself is very showing I'm not trying to cover new ground I'm trying to take what's already there and we ended up building it as a wise plug-in which has its pros and cons wise it's getting better it's still a little bit limited in synthesis to capabilities and building a sizing plugin it's much better with just processors audio effects we love working but we also quickly realized and this is a key part to procedure audio that's not just synthesis that there has to be a

performance aspect to it but something has to drive the synthesizer i if it's an engine sound it could simply be how fast am I going but if this sort of like creature vocals where's that performance going to come from alright so you can try and mechanize it which one things we did we'll talk about it all you approach it from a different angle so in the game if you've played it all the creature sounds are created using volcanion including over bird sounds of young beats in background which I would have never mentioned and a nice and that does give us flexibility to go it's light time change what the birds are doing like literally change your vocal tracks birds start a circle tracks but change the sound of birds are making depending on the time of day make them tweet less make sound like different creatures gives us all that flexibility so rock alien sits within wise and I'll show you the structure of how that works

it has to be low latency has to be really low CPU because it has to run ps4 I'm after multiple instances and it's a game console game it has to be super reliable and now as we know developing code particularly chaotic DSP code that is also a hundred percent reliable as close as we can get it is a difficult challenge so involves lots of testing and when we're building it one option is to go with digital wave guides which is a known technique where you P compute those link frequencies like in a pipe is typically used for that that's problematic because the patents are a little bit ambiguous I think Yamaha own the patents that's not clear they're still applicable or not so which I did not to go that route so what in the end rock alien is is essentially a pipe and the pipe has a reed at one end alright there's no traditional sound generation generator

in it so there's no sine waves there's no noise generators in itself is not you know generating a sound it's much like feedback from a microphone right you wouldn't say where's a sound generator in the feedback all right so it's a bit like swinging a pipe around your head and it and it whistles at you so essentially what we've got is a feedback loop with rezulin points within the pipe but because we've got the reed at one end then the air is traveling backwards or forwards through the pipe as we read pushes it back in note so there's a whole feedback literally a feedback loop in it and if you stimulate it enough you'll start to get these little these points of noise which ways where you start to use really sharp filters you can shape into what sounds like sounds like essentially sounds I did with a kind of mouth element at the end which is your phoneme filtering so it's really phonemes or VI or our by just moving of your mouth so it's a filter right I'm

filling in filtering is very well understood so you could apply all the typical phonemes in fact invented a couple of new phonemes because we're alien creatures there's also super important to heart the sense of movements okay so not to create a pipe it's just static that sounds really artificial and so our system has to be also has to be chaotic alright so we've built into it taught that things are always going to be jiggling around like values are going to be jiggling around and that is the hardest part out of anything we've developed it's not creating the code it's not the implementation it's the fine-tuning of those algorithms I elites you have to sit there scientists out there literally fiddling with numbers to get those points where it sounded acceptable and it had wide enough range but it didn't explode and just create burst of noise at you or howls of sine waves and things like that which it did during development I am going to attempt to show you this live it should work it

is a high probability so it's going to crash okay so I'll show you an image first where you have to give you 30 seconds while I fire everything up because if I keep it fired up it will crash and you'll get the idea okay so mark alien flips and wise that's where all the DSP stuff happens but how do we control it and it's really tricky to control it effectively we've created a wind instrument and so we used an off-the-shelf MIDI control system and built our own MIDI control surface to sit on the iPad so it needs a synthesizer and this is a MIDI control surface which I'll actually I'll attempt to get up and there's actually multiple tabs so you can see at the top but lots of a main page and just a very quick even flip this enables me to example change the length of a pipe we're actually not one pipe with four different pipes stuck together like to create added complexity it allows me to add some filters and we've got these

abstract terms of harshness and screech and that's kind of like the roughness of it it's like the energy go into it how refer energy is so you keep all those low you'll get a very kind of pure sound we have so I said haven't got traditional synthesizer we have just got some noise generators but their effect we use frequency modulator x' so again it gives it kind of shaking this roughness you wouldn't otherwise get and then traditional volume envelopes attack how long what if the Sun comes in release and then the really fun stuff is all those presets over for Manta filtering which is your phonemes and the energy to bottom like that so that we usually play this without touch to a gyroscope which you I went for the iPad so you can say you remove the iPad you can change what what sound is I would say one were really clever things that Stanley did was preset morphing again if you've used reactants the same console

each of those 26 slots can be a different creature sounds but we will interpolate between each of our sounds so we could use it we do use it to say a creature is happy it's just burbling away given to the whales through to the other extreme webs you're shooting it and it's dying and it's screaming at you alright so they're different setups but we can slider but more slider and you'll hear that it's a performance and we capture all that as well so I'll show you how we capture it and then otherwise side you won't be able to read this or a trip you can this is what we've seen wise which effectively like the meta controls so it's like how big can you sound ever get in terms of frequency range how small can it be so we're just kind of bounding it a little bit just to give it a little bit of control and it is you know this could be general much much better like this is a bit of a mess we need to evolve that so

let's attempt to get this aluminum well I will say that if it crashes it's not why is this fault it's not even our DSP it's because we have to give it flakey windows things of getting MIDI in to the PC and routing it internally and all the MIDI is bi-directional and it's really like Windows really - like that so if you if you if you look at it in wrong way it will kind of fall over never do live demos well I can do though is it's not as impressive so your control service I will get this working after the session I'm going to waste your time and you can come and see me and you have a play to the front like playing an instrument well I will show you though is so [Music] it's less impressive to here because I can't perform it so you're getting one

sight of static sound this is running live now of you're performing it as an instrument what we end up doing is capturing that is middling so we're each your motor state or we have about ten in States from idling through to little growls who dying each of those is a certain MIDI performances so I said before but in a problem how do you perform it well it's performed because I perform it right so it's performance capture and but we don't literally use use of the MIDI so we jitter the MIDI a lot we shake the values around we do things like change of speed and things like that so we load a MIDI file into wires on here and so what you're hearing straight from wise is just I said the static preset when I perform it when you play it in the game what you're also bringing in is that performance capture element which is moving those morph targets and moving kind of the energy in it and it becomes more more lifelike not always quite where I'd like it to be so this is my cat which sounds a bit like a fart and

I've got the slide on size even just triggering it straight with no performance data at all it will always sound little bit different I can a try and apply the performance data at Katie's very small striking impact and so you get your same so much pulling in all that different bits of data and if you're that way inclined as well and show your profiler just using less than 2% about one half percent per voice on on a PC is just as good on ps4 okay

okay so that's the structure of how we work and we've got the control surface not working that at bidirectionally communicative wise so that if I change preset on here that sends information to eyes they'll also change the volume wise that goes back and we need it hooked up into some kind of door or a sequencer in order to capture MIDI performance to bring it in then on the game side we've got those MIDI files and optimizing MIDI files for games is actually surprisingly tricky as well because we can't take impure MIDI going up running into volcanion and then the game is tending or the RTP sees to go our symptom switches go what creature type our light so we have about a dozen worth archetypes a creature a club like creature which can be very different at my rodent style creature but the sizes will vary from minuscule through to you know dinosaur science and so therefore

we've got the RTP C's there the controllers to go what size are mine and also what's the ratio between my head in my body so that changes like how nasally the sound is going to be so they're all the values are coming in when we we were thinking about how do we perform it and so initially we thought about using Perlin noise because the game gives us pounding noise already but as they kind of regular noise shape and it sounds very artificial interesting like if you say landscape generation people who know about pearly noise will pick it up otherwise it looks okay but when you hear it you can immediately detectives regularities and doesn't work so well and also it's hard to kind of create a sense of kind of this little with Vegeta's that you want to hear but you're expecting you don't really get that encoded so I've kind of kind of covered this a little bit primetime so we'll move on a little bit but certainly a potential move forward and give us a super change

of subject and so obviously after our slides on it it would be some kind of machine learning that would be much more optimal so that we can train it to go this is what a creature dying sounds like this is the kind of thing I always do I always shake it in this way I always throw these sliders this way and now divided from that you get your markup James survive from that a typical performance and then let it run that'd be much more efficient we use less memory and give us an more variability so if I'm to be critical and it will be critical of what we what we've done in the game and my performance capture in the game isn't always great like I play the game and it makes me cringe sometimes a what creatures sound like so hopefully in a future update I'm going to squash all that and redo all the performances because it is like learning an instrument all right when you're finishing off game of it it's chaos we need everything doing everything in and working we didn't spend enough time on that performance and it was also incredibly cumbersome now we've we've

improved all that so a whole pipeline is much smoother now and it's not you know the synthesis element is not that bad but as you seem like resolvers to run in cloud of things that needs to be plugged in that's not trivial that takes time to learn to kind of iterate on edges give her this so one took a little bit about music as well okay so for those of you have ever come across wipe done before you'll know I'll often build like gentle music systems for games will be involved in them and essentially they're glorified Bunton file players with a little bit of logic stuck on top I like doing that stuff I do a lot of commercial installations for things like shopping malls and airports I'm just a one for a cruise liner unfortunately I can't get to go on cruise liner very nice so we thought like this is a perfect opportunity to again build a system for the game right why wouldn't you in the

game like this we had a van call 65 days of static who wrote the music and Shaw movie is a big fan of a band and from beginning wants to get them involved and we were kind of really adamant that as a band I did not want to interfere creatively with our process so we always say right and our them I could just write us an album and we're not going to start telling you how to do that because you know how to do that because you're abandoned right so we let them go off in my of a traditional album but in the knowledge that we were going to come back to it later and just rip it all apart so it wasn't a question of saying just give us the stones and we'll do it it's like no no no go right back deuce more performance is a take up bit gives more Jung Loops perform new guitar riffs you know create new stuff based almost like kind of remix ink your original tracks so that in the game you don't get the album the game soundtrack is bits of what appear on the album it's lots of lots of bits that aren't on the

album but it feels feels me like then it militarily cohesive a chair album so again I've got another little video which shows you some of our music so you get a sense of their style most of music is not generative it's just it's prevented sections we have them game [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and this is where we're seeing about working with the buttons and you know just write the album but keep all the bits that so we built the system after making the album but we just had in mind how we were going to work so

our music system is called pulse I will briefly show you that I'm aware it business takes individual waves individual elements and bundles them together into what we call an instrument and we have sets of sound scapes so we have climate sound scapes space wanted which is combat and map some of the special cases we have as well currently there's sixteen thousand six or sixteen steps of sound scapes so that works out about almost fifty actual sound scapes in the game got more to come and and all this sits and wise as well so our tool is ugly it's very functional just which is what you need in game design I'm not gonna make a pretty twisted time and so we have instruments we have a little audio editor as well in case you ever want to use it so someone could create a stem literally a stem and will automatically edit it and ship it all up chop it all up and stick it in to our system but

where you keep it is we have this like canvas on which we place these groups of sounds and the X&Y coordinates are just controllers and the controllers are dependent on what's happening in the game so this is like looks complicated not so complicated this is the map music which actually what I did and it's all directional so the little star actual sewing space depending which where you're facing different elements music will come in now at different drones will come in out if you're moving or not moving that also affects mix but if you're on a planet on a planet it's how close you are to a building or if you've been working for amount of time and nothing's happened to you will start to raise the level of interest just add something to our environment so that batter we composed over music in the game now I should be able to so that's pulse up there what I am going to vainly

attempt is to win the game again dangerous [Music] he musical plays and attend us one demised its vendors we've got like 50 different options and was one of you choose say when the game starts it will randomly choose after wait for it local tickets blah blah blah and they said it's dualist different because that's all the universe generation perfect that's what's doing it's not loading is generating the core the maps so I think a spritz quite clever where the vendor Star State at same time and this is the engine running this is the artificial this is a game of cell phone so

[Music] we have like most games report our own editor tools we've got some music systems after work for this piece music finish for a kitchen soundscape fine but what you can see is we've I can choose from here what time scope set we're going to play where we are and then I can manipulate where we're sitting within that so once it finishes and this will relate to the way it's done running to this I go to variation six arm planet so it will start previous and scope getting up now and we had a little bit debug information what's playing how many voices are playing device [Music]

to see interest levels I got you I was hired to know we try to for one [Music] so we could have won two rocks we could have 6070 hundred variations of each class of sounds and when you start the game we just create a random playlist and we'll just randomly shuffle all the different soundscape so it's not based on what type of planet is just a random playlist but we'll also look at how long are playing for so if you being on the planet is paid for more than happens like fifteen minutes then we'll wait for the next sunrise or sunset and then start to kind of change your soundscape

based on that or if you go into space and come back down change planet will go okay so take long enough will this change in music okay so wanted maybe if [Music] drums of tricky if you've ever built ami systems like having a loop of different drum loops to actually same time when your game engine is maybe dropping frames dropping out you have to learn on our own thread whether you've really super careful actually it does work really well until the game completely [Music] okay so to conclude limit on time no

matter I did offer a really interesting opportunity with a unique opportunity to kind of play valve and earnest in sound like an example I could have shown you a limit on time and I'll our first laser sounds and composer I really enjoy ceding control to the computer and just you know letting it run giving it rules and letting of them I think it's a really wonderful potential huge audio but I don't think we're at the point where either the tools are there or that we really realize what the whole process the whole pipeline is in fact that process needs to mature a lot it it's easy for me to say because I see opportunity to do this but it is wonderful to be able to develop your own audio technology I said that a start that's hard you know but if you're able to do that if you can convince your producer if you can have a DSP programmer for a few months or even

longer I think it's an important part of our jobs right game or two people to not just accept it what's there but to be able to build new things if we can and I often get asked if like any our tools be commercially available you wouldn't want them right really well and we wouldn't want to support it and the fact is an awful lot of this too in a nice way of smoke and mirrors right it's not as complicated as it looks I've shown you what it is you can do it yourself you know the lots of bits to do but it's really not that hard it's just more understanding the process the actual coding is I'm not saying it's simple and but it's not it's not a massive hurdle okay so I better end in fact I won't take questions because we're all late and sorry but but I will hang out sighs I'd be very very pleased to talk to you and so thank you all for coming it's lovely to you thank you

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