Video Game Audio Prototyping with Half-Life 2
This paper describes how to utilize the Half-Life 2 (HL2) Source engine and Open Sound Control (OSC) to communicate real-time sound event calls to a Pure Data (PD) sound driver. Game events are sent from Half-Life 2 to the PD patch via OSC which triggers
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Abstract. This paper describes how to utilize the Half-Life 2 (HL2) Source engine and Open Sound Control (OSC) to communicate real-time sound event calls to a Pure Data (PD) sound driver. Game events are sent from Half-Life 2 to the PD patch via OSC which triggers the sound across a network. The advantage of this approach is that the PD sound driver can have both the sample data and the sound behaviors modified in real-time, thus avoiding the conventional need for a lengthy recompilation stage. This technique allows for rapid iterative game audio sound design through prototyping which increases the efficiency of the work-flow of the game sound artist working on the current seventh-generation consoles and PC video games. This method is also of interest to researchers of game audio who wish to experiment with novel game audio techniques within the context of a game while it is running. Keywords: Video game audio, video games, prototyping, Half-Life 2, Open Sound Control, OSC, game coding, game audio research.
Fig. 1. Screenshot of Half-Life 2 utilizing the Source Engine with debug output for audio
1 Introduction With the release of Sony's Playstation 3 (PS3) and Microsoft's Xbox 360 (360), home video game console hardware now supports sufficient computing power to allow advanced levels of audio synthesis and processing. Older console systems, such as Sony's Playstation 2 (PS2) have very limited audio capabilities. The PS2 is only capable of 48 channels of ADPCM (3.5:1 compression factor) and had an architecture that R. Adams, S. Gibson, and S. Müller Arisona (Eds.): DAW/IF 2006/2007, CCIS 7, pp. 187–198, 2008. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008
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made it difficult to perform even simple processing such as filtering. When using their MultiStream audio library on the PS3, Sony now dedicates an entire core from its 3.2ghz cell processor thus allowing significant amounts of audio processing, such as over 512 channels of 128kbps MP3 (10.7:1 compression factor) decompression [1]. To take full advantage of the increased power of the current consoles, game audio sound designers must also develop new techniques that allow them to utilize the new systems to their fullest potential. Game audio sound designers are now faced with a paradigm shift of learning how to consider their audio designs as generative procedures that can create new results each time a sound is produced, similar to the way sounds are produced in nature. One of the best ways to gain control over a new system is to experiment with different techniques by utilizing prototyping early on in the development process. One successful technique when prototyping games was summarized as: “Enforce Short Development Cycles (More Time != More Quality)” [2]. Prototyping should allow the sound designer to quickly bridge the transition between inspiration and implementation of an interactive audio concept. 1.1 The Importance of Prototyping Game audio prototyping enables the rapid implementation of dynamic real-time audio behaviors. Prototyping is effec
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