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.