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Anatomy of a Video Game

Vol. 2, Issue 8
January 10, 2000 

Sound system

These days sound systems are getting more and more complex, what with Dolby Digital 5.1 speaker systems, 3D sound systems, and 3D accelerated sound cards. Add to that mix real time music mixing, midi playback and environmental sound, and it starts getting really complicated. Has anyone here ever seen a movie without all the incidental music and sound effects? Looks really weird doesn’t it? Well games are no different. Sound and music are becoming more and more important for scene and mood setting, as well as aural cues to what’s going on. In the PC world, there are three main sound systems. Direct Sound - created by Microsoft. This is bad news, not only does it not work correctly, when it does work its pretty hit and miss. Plus the fact that its not supported under NT makes it the worst choice. We use it as a fall back system in case all else fails. Then there’s EAX, created by Creative Labs, the people that brought you the Sound Blaster, and most recently the 4 speaker system Sound Blaster Live! This is a pretty damn good system, with lots of built in effects, like echo, as well as sound reflection and on the fly sound modification. Lastly there is the Aureal A3D system. Like EAX, it’s pretty good, with all the clever stuff done to the sounds inside the card, rather than in software, which is always good.

These days not enough is done with sound, it tends to be the last thing that’s thrown in at the last minute. On the other hand it is a burgeoning discipline - we now have one programmer that is dedicated to handling sound issues. Sound on the consoles and in the arcade is handled a little differently. Again, like the renderer, the sound system is always known in advance, which is handy, since once you've written a sound system, you can use it again and again, since sound systems are the one area of code that traditionally doesn't change much between projects. One thing to bear in mind though, is support of both sound compression systems and multi-speaker support. Sounds are one the biggest memory hogs we have in games. I use samples in our games that are bigger than the entire memory of a Commodore 64. Since this is a memory waster, we can either go with making the sample itself smaller by down shifting the sample rate, a make it sound crap, and inspiring the wrath of our sound designers, or we can investigate sound compression systems.

MP3 is one that springs to mind, however, we do have to balance CPU time required to decompress these samples on the fly with the rest of the game. And for those interested, I don't know of anyone that actually generates sound effects on the fly anymore, like we used to have to do back in the dark ages. Lastly, in these days of Dolby Digital and AC3, we are finding more and more people with multi speaker systems. And we need to support them. While its cool, it does actually have some practical game applications, for instance in a four speaker system, you can actually hear where some one is in 3D relation to you, which believe me, if your in a crucial situation can spell the difference between wasting time hunting for some one and not. We are just starting to get to the point in games where we can start to do clever stuff like aural occlusion, so if someone is behind a wall and shoots a weapon, their sound is muffled. This is a subtle thing, but can be very helpful. For this, of course, we need accelerated sound cards; in much the same way we need accelerated 3d graphics cards. I don't believe you'll see this kind of effect on this generation of consoles, and in the arcade environment its pretty pointless, since your not going to hear it in the din of an arcade, and the speakers are too close together anyway.

Control mechanisms/physics

How is your game going to be controlled? Mouse? Trackball? Joystick? Keyboard? Controller? There are many different ways to allow data entry in a game. Being able to cope not only with the data entry, but also translating it into meaningful responsiveness on the screen is a key element of a good game. At the root of all the other systems is the main controlling element that runs the game. This is what scans the input devices, and translates what they say into motion and activity on the screen. At the root of every good game is a blazingly fast and extremely comprehensive input system.

Take Quake for example, while not particularly fast, it has that extremely useful and helpful console system. Its like having a dos shell within a game. What you have to do is create an intuitive interface between the player and the game. This is one area where we start getting into game design rather than implementation, so rather than discussing what controls are best, I'll talk about how we implement them. For instance your game may use digital joysticks as well as a normal mouse. You, as a programmer, have to figure out a control system in your game that can handle both digital inputs from a joystick - up down, left and right, and the analogue input that you get from a mouse.

Not as easy as it sounds, since they both have 'feel' right. Then of course there is force feedback, something relatively new in the games world. This is where your control mechanism reacts to events occurring in the game via internal motors. For instance, getting shot and the joystick jumping in your hand to reinforce this event. Mostly events like this are tied to sound cues in the game. Most always an event you need to be felt through force feedback has a loud noise attached to it. All things that have to be taken into account, and a bad or rushed implementation of this stuff is probably responsible for more games failing that could have been fun, than anything else.

Physics are integral to the player movement system, since it affects how the computer player responds to your commands and controller manipulations. Something to be aware of here is that almost every non game developer keeps going on and on about true physics systems making games more realistic. Well, speaking as a developer, I’m here to tell you that true physics may be more realistic, but they definitely are NOT more fun. If Quake or NBA JAM had real physics in them, there is no way you’d be running around at 40 miles an hour from a standing start! Sometimes, what ‘feels’ right in a game has nothing to do with real physics. Actually, the modification of true physics into ‘game’ physics makes a tremendous difference in game play, and the correct balance of the two is definitely a skill. All of that is quite apart from the fact that implementing a true physics system, with moments, friction, forces and so on is pretty expensive when it comes to floating point computation. It might be right, but its CPU expensive and often not that fun.


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Credits: Illustration © 2000 Durrenberger David (dines). This article is © 2000 Jake Simpson. All other content is © 2000 loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited. So don't do it, or we'll dissect you.