2. Introduction Who are we? Paul Martin – Started out in the industry 1996 as PlayStation programmer – Currently a technical director and one of the principals of Slant Six Games – Special interest areas; data pipelines, technical management, graphics rendering, special effects – Technical lead for SOCOM: Confrontation Ken Felton – Entered the game audio world in 1994 from Film/TV/Music business. – Currently Sound Design Manager at Sony Computer Entertainment America- Foster City, CA – Special interest areas; Remote recording, run time audio DSP – Audio content manager for SOCOM: Confrontation

3. Introduction This talk? Audio development for SOCOM: Confrontation Challenges Solutions Collaboration between SCEA & Slant Six Surprises

4. Introduction A Movie: SOCOM: Confrontation – Audio Showcase

5. Features / Specs: 32-player simultaneous online multi-player Extensive online community support Third-person, tactical shooter genre Online only Up to 32-player simultaneous multiplayer - 4 vs 4, 8 vs 8, 16 vs 16 Up to 35 on-screen characters (32 + 3 AI) Large rich environments 7 game modes 3-D audio Voice chat 1 st title to ship with PlayStation™ Headset SOCOM: Confrontation

6. Audio Technology Audio emitters: Any audio source – Static (e.g. environmental audio) – Dynamic (e.g. character interactions) Virtual Emitters: Emitter proxy for occluded/indirect audio path network Virtual Emitter network: Defines pathways between Virtual Emitters

7. Virtual Emitters

8. SOCOM: Confrontation Crossroads Level: Virtual Emitter Network

9. Virtual Emitters

10. Audio Occlusion Problem: – Audio filtering due to occlusion can be extremely expensive Many ray casts! – Large PPU cost on PS3 Solutions: – Virtual Emitters – Careful placement of virtual emitters – Batch ray casts & process on SPU Latency not frame-critical for audio –can wait for results – Optimize code!

11. Audio Occlusion Takeaway- – Can be extremely expensive to implement well – Sounds incredible if you do it right – Use virtual emitters! – Optimize your ray casts – Use SPU if available!

12. Audio for Physics Objects Problem: – Audio simulation of real-time physics objects E.g. rolling or bouncing objects Settling sounds Audio can be triggered frequently Strategic gameplay considerations Solutions: – Count collision contact/exit points Can determine rules based on this for bouncing vs rolling Tunable parameters per object – Priority-based audio – Batch similar emitters based on locality

13. Audio for Physics Objects Takeaway- – Priority-based approach (critical vs non-critical audio) – Priority for gameplay always wins – Can get expensive in a hurry – code smart – Exploit locality of audio sources

14. Audio Build Iteration Times Problem: – Very long iteration times between builds makes sound design/content editing difficult, and progress hard to evaluate. e.g. 4 wks w/o new build during summer ‘08. Solutions: – Careful tracking of delivery items using project management software so we don’t lose track of what has been delivered. – Bi-weekly conference calls with sound, dialog, music, and developer/production staff to discuss progress and any changes to design or schedule. – Recruiting additional sound designers to play builds and regress implementation of delivered sounds.

15. Audio Build Iteration Times Takeaway- Offsite sound support services will be dependant on the game developer for implementation of assets. The sound team’s job is not complete until the assets work well in the game and production signs off. Shorter iteration loops make a better sounding game. Sound teams should discuss build delivery schedules in pre-production and have a back- up plan for making progress even without updated, regular builds.

16. Sound RAM reductions Problem: – Sound RAM was cut by 50% of its original size. A significant SRAM cut after the Beta Milestone. Solutions: – Streaming of all character grunts/dies/etc. We saved ~2MB of Sound RAM – Streaming of helicopter extraction sequences. – Streaming of scripted sequences when possible – Man weeks of careful review of all SFX samples in the game- delete, down sample, trim, etc.

17. Audio Memory Budgets

18. Sound RAM Reductions Takeaway- Plan for worst possible case RAM scenario – Sony Sound would have leveraged our streaming grain feature far more, and designed the sound scape very differently, if we had any idea that our final sound RAM cap would end up at 50% of the original budget.

19. Talk to Us Ken Felton: ken_felton@playstation.sony.comken_felton@playstation.sony.com Paul Martin: paul@slantsixgames.compaul@slantsixgames.com

20. Q & A Any questions?