Game Developer - January 2011

ADoBE PHo ToSHoP

//// Adobe Systems l www.adobe.com

FMoD DESIgNER

//// Firelight Technologies l www.fmod.org In reference to Adobe Photoshop CS5, the 2010 Front Line Award winner for art, I’ll paraphrase a tag line used by a popular company, “We don’t make the art; we make the art better.” Photoshop has been making the art better since PS 1.0 was introduced in 1990. I know this personally. When I broke into video games at Cinematronics in 1983, there was no Photoshop. I developed 2D sprites using a Z-80-based art station cobbled together by hardware wizard Alex McKay. What I wouldn’t have given to simply lasso an object, or to pick a color with a color picker.

¶ Autodesk 3ds Max 2011

¶ Autodesk Softimage 2011

¶ Allegorithmic Substance Designer

¶ Pixologic ZBrush 4.0

In the mid-90s Brett Paterson had been writing and releasing MoD files, a file format for music used on titles such as Shadow of the BeaSt and Unreal. Little did his fellow composers suspect he was also preparing a super-fast code base for what would later become FMoD, one of the most widely-used audio middleware engines. FMoD brought speed and efficiency to the table where other engines were too legacy oriented, too expensive, or too bloated and still getting on their feet. Now, FMoD provides a wide range of features and a huge bang for the buck along with its streamlined performance on just about any platform. FMoD has been used on such recent titles as Starcraft II: wIngS of lIBerty and lego UnIverSe, and has an integration scheme for most popular middleware game engines such as UDK and CryEngine.

FMoD has a Designer tool as its user interface for the sound designer, voice over integrator, and music integrator. It allows you to set up your audio files and organize them however you wish for loading, streaming and playback, as well as many properties that can also be manipulated at runtime. It also allows you to connect them to in game events. But what makes FMoD unique (apart from its speed) is its sandbox and its specific interactive music integration pipeline. The sandbox gives a 3D space that developers can use to audition sounds in proper context rather than the age-old method of previewing in a sound bank manager or other auditioning tool.

Bringing audio designers that much closer to going from sound design to integration in the same session is a big step forward. For interactive music, one can create something similar to a flowchart of a dynamic music flow and preview it in the Designer tool, adding events and layers to create a rich score with easy testing of transitions and crossfades without the hassle of doing so in a standard digital audio workstation environment.

Another useful feature of FMoD is its abstracted Event Layer. The ability to readily link events to the audio engine without time consuming hard coding practices allows for a much more sound designer-controlled connection between game events of any kind and audio objects, whether they be sound, voice, or music.

Finally, one of the best features of FMoD is its wide support of platforms. It supports all the major platforms (PC, Mac, Xbox 360, Wii, PlayStation 3) and several ones you might not expect (iPhone, Linux, Solaris). With these features and near ubiquitous platform and major middleware integration, FMoD deserves a serious look from anyone serious about their game audio.