Notice how Sound Design isnt even mentioned on the meme. That’s how far down that is in everyone’s minds.
But it should because we’ve been suffering for over a decade of flat non surround or abysmal volume mixing. Dialog that is just too quiet while everything else is loud. But I guess as long as we have separate volume sliders in game that’ll fix it. If only every game came with em.
Also we’ve been pushing graphics all the time but Sound has basically tanked since the invention of the Sound Blaster AWE64 or something. What’s a sound blaster? Well kids we used to buy sound Cards for our computers much like you do GPU cards. That’s how much sound tech has stagnated. We had 5/7.1 setups in the late 90s had games with EAX support now everything is just whatever, play sound.wav. I guess Dolby Atmos is a thing but it’s a thing with a subscription fee.
Proper spatial / binaural audio in games is a game changer for me and it’s wild that I have to buy something like DTS Sound Unbound (and before that, X-Fi sound card with CMSS3D) just to kind of “emulate” it in games. This is tech they figured out in the 90s.
There was a point I used to turn down SFX because I wanted to listen to the music. At some pointed I started to turn down the music so SFX was more punchy like it used to be.
As a professional generalist/gameplay programmer, imo sound isn’t far off from 3D graphics in terms of complexity, perfs issues and hardware fuckery. That is, if you want to do anything “fancy” with it, of course. As you said, the “play sound.wav” approach is way overused…
I do care about shipping the best SFX I can, and obviously so does our sound guy (who also deeply cares about mixing btw) but unfortunately, as opposed to graphics it doesn’t translate into better reviews/more sales in the execs’ mind so any substantial programming work in that area usually goes on the backlogged pile.
Ironically, I think that situation used to be better because there was a time where you basically had to have a dedicated sound programmer on the team since the software side was also a giant mess.
Notice how Sound Design isnt even mentioned on the meme. That’s how far down that is in everyone’s minds.
But it should because we’ve been suffering for over a decade of flat non surround or abysmal volume mixing. Dialog that is just too quiet while everything else is loud. But I guess as long as we have separate volume sliders in game that’ll fix it. If only every game came with em.
Also we’ve been pushing graphics all the time but Sound has basically tanked since the invention of the Sound Blaster AWE64 or something. What’s a sound blaster? Well kids we used to buy sound Cards for our computers much like you do GPU cards. That’s how much sound tech has stagnated. We had 5/7.1 setups in the late 90s had games with EAX support now everything is just whatever, play sound.wav. I guess Dolby Atmos is a thing but it’s a thing with a subscription fee.
TLDR: what about sound
If the game requires you to use the volume sliders to have a decent sound design, then it’s kind of a “mix it yourself” game.
Proper spatial / binaural audio in games is a game changer for me and it’s wild that I have to buy something like DTS Sound Unbound (and before that, X-Fi sound card with CMSS3D) just to kind of “emulate” it in games. This is tech they figured out in the 90s.
There was a point I used to turn down SFX because I wanted to listen to the music. At some pointed I started to turn down the music so SFX was more punchy like it used to be.
As a professional generalist/gameplay programmer, imo sound isn’t far off from 3D graphics in terms of complexity, perfs issues and hardware fuckery. That is, if you want to do anything “fancy” with it, of course. As you said, the “play sound.wav” approach is way overused…
I do care about shipping the best SFX I can, and obviously so does our sound guy (who also deeply cares about mixing btw) but unfortunately, as opposed to graphics it doesn’t translate into better reviews/more sales in the execs’ mind so any substantial programming work in that area usually goes on the backlogged pile.
Ironically, I think that situation used to be better because there was a time where you basically had to have a dedicated sound programmer on the team since the software side was also a giant mess.