Sonic Frontiers had a fun take on the music for boss battles, with each song being broken up into not-so-obvious loops, with the action masking transitions so that each phase of the boss fight always goes with a specific portion of the song. If you can lean into the cheesiness it's very fun.
Dynamic music and sound techniques for video games
31–37 of 37 posts
Re: Dynamic music and sound techniques for video games
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might find this software interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT-sKtR970 I don't know if any of the state of the art flight/driving simulators are doing this kind of engine noise synthesis already, but they should be.
The problem here is mostly computational cost. Simulating finer grained details needs a proportionally higher tick rate. In this case although the engine sim seems to be 2D and the gas sim 1D but both would need really high resolution to output sound synthesis. Driving games for now are largely putting that work into tyre dynamics as it’s such an integral part of the driving experience. Maybe there’s head room to do…
With modern systems having so many cores there's plenty of compute available for at least simulating the player's engine sounds more elaborately... They don't have to do it for every vehicle in the sim.
Re: Dynamic music and sound techniques for video games
#33I just recently played Nier Automata for the first time, and was amazed by not only the soundtrack, but the way it handle dynamically changing as you interact with other characters, or when certain story elements are triggered. There’s even an in-game jukebox that lets you explore the music, and it’s crazy to see how nested it gets based on different environments. Definitely recommend checking out if you, like me, ar…
I especially like the seamless transitions between different orchestrations of the score when moving between certain areas, and the chiptune transition when entering the hacking minigame, e.g., from
https://archive.org/details/nier-automata-original-soundtrac...
to
https://archive.org/details/NieR_Automata_Original_Soundtrac...
Re: Dynamic music and sound techniques for video games
#34Reminds me a bit of a game dev talk from a Valve employee. Having trouble finding the video, but one of the interesting things that stood out to me was all the challenges with sound effects in VR. For a door, you can’t just have “door opens” being a simple creak . Because in VR the user physically drags the door open. They can drag it part way, they can open the door quickly, slowly, etc. What in other games was a si…
That might be from their hour-long talk on Doors: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9kzu2Y33yKM
Re: Dynamic music and sound techniques for video games
#35I just recently played Nier Automata for the first time, and was amazed by not only the soundtrack, but the way it handle dynamically changing as you interact with other characters, or when certain story elements are triggered. There’s even an in-game jukebox that lets you explore the music, and it’s crazy to see how nested it gets based on different environments. Definitely recommend checking out if you, like me, ar…
They wrote up a pretty good blog post about how they made the music transitions work: https://www.platinumgames.com/official-blog/article/9581
Definitely on my list of games I wish I could play again for the first time.
Re: Dynamic music and sound techniques for video games
#36Tangential to this topic, my favorite example of dynamic music is in Need for Speed Most Wanted 2005's police pursuit soundtrack: https://youtu.be/YtSQCYStwew
While certainly much more primitive than modern games (it's merely looping segments of a premade track), Most Wanted 05 does a great job of live scoring the pursuits, playing, looping, and smoothly segueing between the track segments. From experience I guess it selects the segments based on the heat level, player speed, police proximity, and other factors that I'm not even sure about.
There are 4 pursuit soundtracks in the game, I highly recommend people listen to them if not try the pursuit mode itself in game. If nothing else it's thrilling as hell, a feeling that the modern entries still somehow fail to capture fully.
Re: Dynamic music and sound techniques for video games
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem here is mostly computational cost. Simulating finer grained details needs a proportionally higher tick rate. In this case although the engine sim seems to be 2D and the gas sim 1D but both would need really high resolution to output sound synthesis. Driving games for now are largely putting that work into tyre dynamics as it’s such an integral part of the driving experience. Maybe there’s head room to do…
With modern systems having so many cores there's plenty of compute available for at least simulating the player's engine sounds more elaborately... They don't have to do it for every vehicle in the sim.
That’s certainly the hope how well it matches reality is the problem.