Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
the player rather than the player moving through the ambience. The slow character movement and the quiet audio spaces enhanced this effect. Needless to say, we dropped it pretty quickly. I've been trying to put my finger on the issue and narrowed it down to the lack of parallaxing between sound objects. For me, what spatial sound gives to game audio is less about the additional height channels and more about the increased sense of audio depth. Sonically, what we discovered worked the best for spatial audio were sounds that move against each other. So, we ended up creating a lot of individually placed spot sounds and sounds that run on splines that move across the environment. Also using the heights to separate out different ambient sounds worked well, so rain on the roof or the tree canopy coming from the heights. On the master mixer, Kit Challis, our senior technical designer, spent months looking at the best mixer structure and ended up with a 7.1.4 channel mix—we didn't use any additional dynamic objects, mainly because for the type of game we were making, the extra work of adding and maintaining them across all outweighed any benefits. We used this across all platforms, including PS5 3D (which natively wants to output 5th order ambisonics). Our previous games, we'd mixed with 7.1 in a more traditional LCR mix: player dialogue, Foley in C with music, ambience L/R and some pushed into the rears. For Alan Wake 2, we used the center speaker as part of the speaker array, and allowed for example, the player character dialogue to come from its natural screen position—so slightly left of center. It is a testament to advancements in hardware and software that you can create a clear mix with so much refinement in spatial positioning. RR: The dynamic weather system, particularly the rain, almost feels like its own character. Can you walk us through your approach to designing the weather system? RL: One of the hardest audio designs I've ever been a part of, it took us almost two years of experimenting to get it working. Our weather system is completely dynamic and has separate controls for rain and wind, from nothing to storm. There are a lot of Saga explores Coffee World, a suddenly-abandoned theme park, during her investigation of Bright Falls. M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 95