Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546054
80 M PS E . O R G evaluate, and narrow that material down? Tom Wright: When it comes to Foley and handling, we deep-sampled absolutely everything we had access to on the days of recording. Bolts back and forward, mags in and out, every rattle, every shake, every switch and every fumble. We recorded most of these actions with different intensities also - which would later on allow us to account for different speed reloads, weapon inspections and other potential features that could appear down the line. With Foley, performance is absolutely key and this approach paid off massively, as each and every handling sound in the game ended up being sourced from these sessions. After these recording sessions had concluded, we had the enormous task of synchronizing everything within a Reaper project and then tagging every weapon, action, perspective, and environment so that we could render these recordings down into easily accessible and usable sound libraries. From there, whenever a new weapon landed on our desks, we had all the materials necessary in order to build an accurate portrayal for each one. Battlefield weapons feel highly dynamic depending on distance, location, environment, and combat intensity. How much of that variation is built editorially, and how much comes from runtime systems? David Jegutidse: It's a heavy mix of both. Especially for weapons fire, we try to work with bespoke content for different scenarios such as distance and environment on a per-layer basis. The content, which originates in natural recordings, is the bread and butter of the weapon sounds. On top of that, we use runtime DSP and per-layer pitch, and amplitude, and filter behaviors to add infinite microvariation. With the many layers such as transient, short reflection noise and long reflection tails, bolt mechanics, LFE, rattle, and unique per-weapon flavor each with many variations, mixed together with situational and continuous dynamic behaviors, we try to keep the weapon organic, and moving at all times. Then we smooth out edges where we don't have bespoke content with more DSP and math. The weapon firing is an ecosystem in itself, and a large piece of logic that inherits ideas from all previous Battlefields, iterated and polished and combined with new tweaks. Something that is sometimes assumed is that there is some kind of reverb system that generates the reflections. We have impulse response reverbs, but weapon reflections are much too complicated and varied for an IR to come close to the real deal. In the end, it really comes down to playing the right content at the right time. Were there any weapons that were especially difficult to get right, or that changed dramatically once they were experienced interactively in gameplay? Tom Wright: For sure. I would say that for some of the weapon reloading, we struggled to achieve a typically 'satisfying' sound for magazines being removed and inserted. With one of our