Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546054
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 115 MP: Brian and I were at that one. There were a lot of legends and icons in that room, so it was amazing to be included. It was great to be in the same room with them, and be part of that experience. It was amazing. That was an important moment for us to get that nomination. EM: And final question, what's one game audio tool that you're excited to use on your next project? AC: We're creating a brand-new dialog tool for writing, recording, and tracking. It will greatly reduce headaches that we've run into with writers, who we have found to write in whatever tools they're comfortable with. We've always been plagued by getting from one tool into another tool, which then has to ultimately, get into Unreal. This new tool we're building is an all in one tool. Our narrative team is on board with it, and it's linked to Unreal Engine. When it's done, it'll be glorious, so I'm looking forward to that. BF: I'm looking forward to using the newer version of Audiokinetics Wwise. We were locked into a certain version during development and it became a little bit too risky to upgrade at a certain point. Some of the new features that are there, especially the features centered around loudness normalization, and being able to be more fine-tuned and granular, would really help us in the mix process. In the past, we've had to do that manually with less metering and standardization. So I'm really looking forward to that. AC: Having more than four effects slots in Wwise would be great. That would open up a lot more opportunities with our dynamic headgear system, to have more processing available for a bunch of different types of helmets. JP: My lifelong interest is in pushing the boundaries of musical interactivity. You can take a three-minute loop and break it into segments and layers, and orchestrate movement between them. What I'm really interested in is … can we split the atom and get into more real- time parameterization and synthesis of music? Because that would let us get even more granular in our approach. BF: Another thing that I'm looking forward to is something that we only scratched the surface of on Borderlands 4 - our Faust integration. It's something that Julian spearheaded. The integration allowed us to write our own custom Wwise effects and DSP effects, which the helmet system uses. It really opens the door to new things. Like what if we had a Transient Shaper at run time to sculpt the weapons a little bit better? We only scratched the surface of that sort of stuff, and it really opened our eyes as to how powerful that can be. JL: There's a lot of exciting stuff in the new versions of Wwise. Faust was really cool‒that was one of the tools I used to prototype the acoustic system. We started off with just an ambasonic delay plugin, and then tested it out in a test map. There were some things I wanted to be more generative instead of being pre- designed sounds. I had big dreams for our Digi-struct system, which is how we digitally construct stuff in the world. That was all going to be real time and parameterized- based, which was based on how big and how long it took to generate something in-game. Unfortunately, the system didn't manifest in time because in the end, it was actually really hard to write a really cool sounding synthesizer versus just doing something that sounded good enough in a DAW. That system is a project for myself to see how much more we can synthetically create that sounds shippable. EM: It was great to learn about all the amazing work you all did on Borderlands 4. I appreciate you all taking the time to chat today! MP: Thanks for having us here! Music tracking session for Borderlands 4 at Valve Studios in Dallas, TX.