This makes me happy because as you know I've been tirelessly advocating the use of Pd in games.
Aaron McLeran: quote: "As far as I can tell though, it's the only team in the industry doing anything like it."
Not quite. Recently been talking to the developers of a popular game audio engine about incorporating Pd (or a Pd like fork with real-time graph reconfiguration) for procedural game audio, so it can be used in all games. Hopefully we'll see more of this, and eventually I can get some of my work on game audio into the mainstream.
Very true about maintaining a good natured and enthusiastic attitude in your work Kyle. Some people are naturally good at steadily promoting their ideas and themselves while still doing original hard work. Eno is certainly one of them. He's championed proc/algo compostion for who knows how many years. In a way it's the culmination of everything he's been waiting for, a game like Spore is the only vehicle that can realise the full potential of those ideas, because a recording can never capture a procedural composition.
It is still a bit frustrating for me though, because although games developers are ready to embrace procedural score generation they are not yet ready to deal with the general case of procedural audio, in fact I experienced quite a bit of resistance to and lack of understanding about the idea. I was so puzzled by this I interviewed and discussed with many developers to understand the obstacles and wrote about it in some detail.
http://www.obiwannabe.co.uk/html/papers/proc-audio/proc-audio.html
Many people actually said they thought it couldn't be done. "We don't have enough CPU cycles" etc... old school thinking. We have entire cores that can be devoted to sound now. The presentation I gave at Fraunhofer was designed to be proof that it works. Think it was very well received and made a few people wonder seriously about where game audio should be going now.
(If anyone wants a copy of that proof, a 100MB file, please drop me an email)
The fundamental problem is no longer computational/technical, but about training content producers and toolchain development. As I said two years ago, it's slow painful baby steps to drag the business away from a love of the inflexible data model (samples) and towards a coherent system that integrates the physics engine with sound (where it belongs). Anyway, this revelation re Spore and Pd is certainly very encouraging news.
a.
On Fri, 9 Nov 2007 13:28:52 -0600 "Kyle Klipowicz" kyleklip@gmail.com wrote:
Pretty awesome! Thanks for sharing. I love the tip about good-natured demeanor being a key to professional connection building. I think that tip should be emphasized more around here sometimes!
~Kyle
On Nov 9, 2007 1:20 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@eds.org wrote:
I just read this on the Max list:
http://www.cycling74.com/pipermail/maxmsp/2007-November/038995.html
Apparently, Pd is part of the EA game Spore. Makes sense, since Mark Danks, Gem creator and UCSD alum, is pretty high up at EA.
.hc
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