Josh audio work

Audio in the Gaming Industry

These days audio in the gaming industry is generally very good and we do not encounter bugs as often as we may have done in the past due to the industry growing in size greatly and developers having entire studios dedicated to sound and audio production. Though you are still usually quite likely to find problems in in pre-release games in Alpha or Beta phases and sometimes just after a game has released.

Titanfall

One example can be found with the first Titanfall game. Though there are generally no bugs with the audio itself, the storage size can be for many users. The game as a whole sums up to around 50GBs of storage though roughly 35GBs of that is audio alone. This can be a problem for many users as they may not have particularly fast internet speeds thus meaning it can take many hours or days to download the game. For many users with this issue it can also cause frame rate stuttering or just worse performance overall, resulting in a more unsatisfactory gaming experience. A solution to this problem would be for the developer to properly compress these files allowing for a lot of time to be saved for the user. Due to the audio files being uncompressed or compressed poorly, this can also cause the audio to stutter or be absent from high intensity scenes during gameplay mainly due to poor hard drive or CPU performance. The sheer size of these files can be too much for some slower and cheaper hard drives and CPUs to keep up in real-time and can just be straight up missing during gameplay. In my opinion the best solution to this is for the user to go out and spend their own money on a better CPU or hard drive to retain audio quality and have a better gaming experience. Though the developer could alternatively compress the files at a potential cost of audio fidelity.

F1 2017/2018

Another example is a personal experience I had when playing F1 2017/2018. During multiple sessions when me and my friends were playing online together, we all encountered an issue when spectating each other or racing beside them around the track. The car would ‘whine’ as it could sometimes for unknown reasons be maxing out the rev counter no matter what gear. though this only was apparent to each other’s cars and not to our own. Although this was relatively annoying at first and somewhat un-immersive, we slowly disregarded the issue as we could not find a fix online. As of right now I do not know if this still remains an issue in F1 2017. For F1 2018, a few weeks after the game came out, they released a patch that resolved this issue. Here is a video of the audio bug –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKlBIJDVcbE&feature=youtu.be

I encountered another audio bug while playing F1 2018 once when I was leaving the pit lane. Upon leaving the pits you need to push the accelerator to raise the rev counter then press the clutch to leave. I did this and although physical gameplay was unaffected, all I could hear was the of the car if it were revving maxed out in first gear. Pitting a second time did not fix this. I could not find any other reports of users online encountering this issue and personally I never experienced it happen to me again. It is clear however that some reports were made to the developer as they released a patch with this exact problem being fixed. A screenshot can be seen below.

Short Story:

They don’t let me outside often, only when it’s part of training. They’re always testing things, needles with different colours. It concerns me, but it doesn’t frighten me. When they strap me down and shine a bright light on me. They’re always talking with concerned looks on their faces, then sending me to do more training. They feed me a lot. They tell me I need it to become big and strong. ///

I don’t remember how or when it started, I was too young. There are rumours about where we came from, about how we got here. I don’t listen to them, I just focused on the training. It’s funny how things worked around there. There were a lot of us training some slightly older and some slightly younger, but we all trained the same. Although many of the others were ranked higher than me, they still looked to me as their leader. They all did. I’m wasn’t the smartest or the strongest, but they all agreed I was the bravest. It became a reality I was the de facto leader when we were sent on a training mission when I was 8 years old. We were transported to a forest in a snowy mountain range and were expected to get to extraction safely on our own. There was one catch. The last one of us there was to be left behind or we would be severely punished. I refused to let that happen. I was surprised at first that during this mission the others looked at me as their leader, but I eventually accepted it. When we came up to the extraction point, I noticed it was guarded. I didn’t know at the time they were Friendlies, so I planned an attack and hijacked the transport ensuring I was last on so no one would be left behind. The chief was not happy I had caused severe injuries to his men, but he and the Dr both recognised my initiative and promoted me to squad leader. It was this mission that solidified my leadership over all of us as a whole. I soon went through dangerous augmentation procedures, I was one of the lucky ones to survive this process. Dr always said I was lucky. It was said I had the body of an 18-year-old Olympic athlete at the age of 14. We were moved to a special environment to recover. Upon my first visit to the gym I was confronted by 4 soldiers, their sergeant had ordered all 5 of us in the boxing ring. During the fight, I killed 2 of the soldiers, leaving the other 2 badly injured. This incident gave a bad view of our ‘unique’ training program to the entire marine corps. It was seen that this event was orchestrated to test the augmentations I had received. One thing was presumed by many, our pre-adult life was nothing like a regular soldier’s. We are super soldiers.

My gaming machines - Then and Now

My first gaming machine was an Xbox 360 that we got in 2006
Xbox 360 Specs:

CPU: 3.2-GHz PowerPC Tri-Core Xenon 

GPU: 500 MHz ATI Xenos

512MB GDDR3 RAM

Ethernet

Wired and Wireless Controller

Release Date: November 22, 2005

My Current PC Specs:

CPU: 4.7GHz Intel I7 Quad Core

GPU: 1279 MHz Nvidia GTX 970

24576MB DDR3

Ethernet and Wireless

Wired

Release Date: 2014

I like my xbox beacuse it was fun and occupied me for a lot of time during my youth.

Some of my favourite games on xbox were halo 3, the Gears of War franchise and Modern Warfare 2.
A the moment on PC I mostly play Destiny 2.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Me.

Hello World.

My name is Jason and I'm on a games design course at South Leicester College.

I am very interested in the games design industry and have a particular interest in the creative side of things.

I think the Halo franchise has a very deep and interesting story with at lot of depth and detail which many other games wouldn't bother with. Throughout the games you learn a lot about the backstory of many characters and I believe a great story mode and design makes an amazing game.