Crackdown Audio

At the weekend I was speaking to Roland Peddie, one of my old colleagues from the games industry. He mentioned that his last game, Crackdown, received a BAFTA for its use of audio, for which he was the programmer.

Team Xbox have an interview with Raymond Usher, the audio director, about The Audio of Crackdown in which he refers to the code Roland wrote:

"a revolutionary audio shader that uses the surrounding geometry to dynamically color and time delay the direct and indirect audio reflections."

"When we heard the results of our complex Reverb/Reflections/Convolution or “Audio-Shader” system in Crackdown, we knew that we could make our gunfights sound like that, only in real-time! Because we are simulating true reflections on every 3D voice in the game, with the right content we could immerse the player in a way never before heard."

Real-time "early-reflection" processing might be useful for our current project as a way of situating the user in a complex and dynamic environment.

Funkhouser, Thomas A.; Tsingos, Nicolas; Carlbom, Ingrid; Elko, Gary; Sondhi, Mohan; West, Jim. Interactive Acoustic Modeling for Virtual Environments <http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~funk/acoustics.html> (Last accessed 22nd November 2007)



Crackdown. Real Time Worlds (Microsoft Game Studios: 20th February 2007). Xbox 360.

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