Audio design
From modwiki
Audio design is the art of creating audio-content for a game. This field is generally seperated into the following categories:
- Sound Design
- The creation of sound effects such as gun shots and audio-rumbling machinery to be used either as parts of actors and objects or as looping background sounds for the environment.
- Musical Composition
- The writing and creation of muscial tracks and scores for a game. This includes menu music, level tracks, sounds for credits, cutscenes etc. Depending on the scope of the game the musical design can become very complex.
Contents |
Audio Format
All audio files used by the Doom 3 engine employ either the .OGG or the .WAV file format. All valid sound files have to be either 1 (mono) or 2 (stereo) channel, 16 bit at 11025, 22050 or 44100 Hz. Any sound made with the intention of being used for surround sound should be in mono. Any sound intended to be used with shakes should be a .WAV file if using Doom 3 (the game, not the engine). If you are using Quake 4 an .OGG is perfectly fine as long as you run shakesGen to create the shakeData first.
Sound Shaders
Creating Sounds for the Doom 3 engine has been refined compared to older games. This is similar to the Texturing process which has become more complicated and powerful through the addition of material shaders. Something similar was introduced for sound design, the so called sound shaders which are contained within .SNDSHD files.
Sound Editing Sites
- vox feminae A sound website created by Raven's "Hellchick". Includes sound tips, free sound samples and articles by several people in the game indsutry.
- Acid Planet They give away 8 royalty free sound loops every week. They also include info on making your own music with Sony Acid software.
- Sound Dogs Large sound effects and royalty free music for online purchase. Download samples and pay per channel, per quality, per length and per sample. Samples run from $1-$4 each.
Sound Editing Software
Many people pay thousands of dollars for top notch modeling/animation software while just looking for cheap/free audio software. The Sony (formerly Sound Forge) line of audio software is top notch and it all comes in "Home" and "Profesional" versions.
- Sony Soundforge Excelent two track sound editing software. Used for mastering trimming and looping.
- Sony Acid Excelent loop based music creation. Obtain free loops from Acid Planet. There's even a free version of Acid for use.
- Sony Vegas Excelent multi-track audio/video editor.
- Audacity The Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor. Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.
