Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/115625
ing. Since XBLA (Xbox Live Arcade) games have a size limit of 2GB, Pamintuan was able to keep the sounds high-quality with minimum compression in Wwise. "We definitely had to use compression, but we weren't too worried about fitting into a certain file size. It was more about making sure that everything loaded at the times it needed to be loaded. We had to make sure the streaming and the loading were working properly." MEDAL OF HONOR: WARFIGHTER Medal of Honor: Warfighter, developed by Danger Close Games and published by Electronic Arts, is the 14th title in the series. It follows the storyline of the 2010 Medal of Honor release, which is focused on modern warfare as opposed to WWII. Bryan Watkins, game sound supervisor at Warner Bros. Post Production (http://wbpostproduction.warnerbros.com) in Burbank, worked closely with EA's senior audio director in Los Angeles (www.ea.com), Erik Kraber, to push the sound of the franchise to the next level. Medal of Honor: Warfighter was recently nominated for the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences D.I.C.E. Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design. In first-person shooter games, the weapons are the primary focus. In Warfighter, Kraber wanted to improve the weapon sounds by focusing on how they sounded in the game environments. Kraber, Watkins and five other members from their audio teams, recorded weapon reports and reverbs at three different locations. They went to Big Bear Mountain, an urban setting on the Warner Bros. lot, and BRRC (Burbank Rifle and Revolver Club), to capture the detail in the different environments, and from multiple locations within those environments. "At Warner Bros., we really moved around to capture the character and personality of the space as opposed to just the weapons themselves," says Kraber. They recorded onto 28 channels simultaneously. Several mics were set up at a close perspective, and several more, including a 5.1 mic, were set up at a distant perspective. They then had the shooter move around the space as they recorded the weapon reports and reverbs. "We got different reflections as the shooter moved around. We got lots of variety to pull from," says Watkins. Then Watkins, working with sound designers Mitchell Osias and Jay Wilkinson at Warner Bros. Post, took the field recordings and broke them down into weapon classes, based on the caliber of the weapon, and also the rate of fire. For each of the game's 40 weapons, a unique reverb tail was created to match each of the five game environments. "The single-shot weapons have a longer decay, especially the large caliber sniper rifle," reports Watkins. There is an urban reverb tail, a wide city reverb tail, an interior reverb tail, an open field reverb tail, and a canyon reverb tail. He had each session broken into small pieces, with tracks designated for the mechanical effects, the body sounds of the weapon, and any sweeteners they added. "We made very concise sessions so Kraber and his team could implement the weapons pretty easily." In addition to recording the weapon reports and reverbs, they also recorded Foley in the field, such as armor movement, actuating the bolt, loading a clip, taking the safety on and off, reloading and other noises the weapons would make. "We really wanted to make sure we captured as much of the weapons outside as possible," says Kraber. "Going into the studio is the obvious choice for low noise floor but the sound doesn't have quite the same personality as when it's outside." When recording on location at Big Bear Mountain, the team had some trouble keeping things quiet. "Most of the time the birds get quiet when the gun shots go off, but there was this pissed-off bird that just kept screaming every time we fired the weapon. The bird would just scream right on top of the entire recording." Watkins used the iZotope RX2 plug-in to clean up the field recordings. He found the plug-in particularly helpful in removing the bird noises. "I can get a visual of the frequency and literally remove it and then paste the sound together. If you start removing five or 10 bird chirps in a decay, it becomes obviously too short. Sometimes we'll pitch it down if we've had to remove a lot of little events inside of a report, and by pitching it down we can extend the tail a little bit. That helps." Warfighter uses the Frostbite 2 engine, which is different from the Unreal Engine 3 that Kraber had for the 2010 Medal of Honor. Using the Frostbite 2 engine to dynamically load sounds on the fly, based on how the sound assets were tagged, helped to keep the audio within its allocated memory budget. In the single-player campaign that meant structuring audio loads at moments when they wouldn't step on other elements trying to stream in. In multiplayer mode, Jeff Wilson, multiplayer audio lead/sound designer, spent a lot of time implementing the reverb tails for the five different environments in the map. "Each of the areas he would tag would not only switch the tails but it would also have other information about how to pro- cess other sounds with the DSP and convolution reverbs, or other things," says Kraber. With the Frostbite 2 engine, "we had to rethink the way we approached the sound in order to make it all gel together," says Kraber. "On our previous system, we broke a lot of our sound elements down into tiny layers. For a gun shot, we would potentially have 15 layers of sounds that are being fired almost simultaneously, or are being staggered in a way that would allow us to create a lot of organic variety." He was able to change the pitch, delay, and EQ for each of the layers, creating a large variety of sounds from a small number of assets. The Frostbite 2 engine isn't optimized for this type of layering. Instead, it offers more flexibility with real time DSP, and sound manipulation on playback. "We had to work to take advantage of those features. It was a different approach." MOSHI MONSTERS Moshi Monsters is a browser game geared toward children age 7-12. It's colorful and playful, with wacky monster characters. Daan Hendriks, lead studio designer at Mind Candy (www.mindcandy.com) in London, joined the company about a year and a half ago as the first in-house audio designer. Moshi Monsters was already available online a few years www.postmagazine.com Post0313_034-37-AudioRAV5FINALREAD.indd 37 Mind Candy's Daan Hendricks calls Moshi Monsters' sound design very musical. "We try to give the sound a bit of a whimsical feel." continued on page 45 Post • March 2013 37 3/1/13 2:13 PM