Final Project for AU375

Nexuiz is an open source First Person Shooter (FPS). The graphics are outdated since it is based on the original Quake Engine but it is a lot of fun to play on whatever computer you have. Since it does not require DirectX but instead uses OpenGL, you can run it on any platform which is a huge plus.

For the audio, most everything is in either ogg or wav form. I turned to a couple of programs that I had used in the past in order to create my sound effects and music to replace the current sounds in the game.

By unpacking the dataxxxxxx.pk3 file, I was able to enter into the sound directory where all the files are stored. For this assignment, I choose to make the modifications to the weapons because, well, weapons sounds are fun!

There are quite a number of files in there and at first I didn’t like the naming scheme they had chosen. It was just not consistent with all the other names.

Grabbing a sound library that I purchased at Sound Ideas, I was able to get a base sound from the library and then change the pitch, add echoes or resample to get the sound that was floating around in head. Using Sound Forge 9.0 I was able to achieve this.

The music was of a techno nature, which I enjoy the hell out of. I decided to try my own hand at creating a techno track using Acid Pro 6.0. Building the tracks was quite simple and changing the tempo and pitch was a snap! Exporting to the mp3 and ogg was very simple and made the process extremely easy.

I had learn much in this class as the lectures were very informative and for someone with no audio experience, I was able to pick up a lot that I didn’t know before.

I hope you all enjoy the sounds and music that I have created. Email me if you have any questions!

Music for Nexuiz

I wanted to try something simple to create my music. I am not trained in the art of music, but using loops, I believe I can get the hang of what I am trying to accomplish.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is get your ideas out of your head and into some type of program where you can test your ideas until they match.

I've been tinkering with Acid Pro 6.0 and I was able to create this music. I tried to keep the number of loops low but the more I used Acid Pro 6.0, the more I enjoyed using it. It was simple and straight to the point of sampling the loops that I wished to use and then draw them into the timeline.

I have included both a screenshot of the Acid Pro 6.0 as well as a link to my music that I created.

Find the music here:

jamesMusic

4 Sound Examples

I have been playing around with multiple sound engines and recently have created these 4 sounds with FMOD Designer and Acid Pro 6.0

I own a couple of Sound Libraries and I went through the track and cut and paste the sound bits that I thought would make a good selection of weapons. Then I resampled the bit to 44,100 and 16 Bit Stereo sound and chopped off the beginning and end parts.



Rather happy how they turned out. Here are some links to them.

electro_fire.mp3
hook_fire.mp3
nexfire.mp3
welcome.mp3

Fun with FMOD Chapter 5 Tutorial

After downloading FMOD Designer, I was working with the Chapter 5 tutorial. There are numerous errors that I currently have discovered but I was able to get this far with the tutorial.



Hopefully in class today I can ask the Professor the questions I have and finish this tutorial for everyone.

Sound Effects

I was able to take some sounds that I had recorded and imported into Sound Forge and saved as a mp3 format.

Using FMOD, I was able to change the Pitch and Pitch randomization and create the sounds I was looking for. When I was building the project to actually export the sounds that I obtained in FMOD, it didn't seem to export them as the mp3 format that created. I will continue to check, but I think it is a Vista problem.

I am uploading the FMOD project, and the 2 mp3 files.

http://www.cellblocstudios.com/au375/sf_EnergyWeaponSingle.mp3
http://www.cellblocstudios.com/au375/sf_MachineGunSingle.mp3

Here are the screen shots of the FMOD setup
http://www.cellblocstudios.com/au375/sf_EngeryWeaponSingle.jpg
http://www.cellblocstudios.com/au375/sf_MachineGunSingle.jpg

And the actual FMOD project
http://www.cellblocstudios.com/au375/sf_JSIMPSON.txt

Due to the internet extentions in IE, make sure you change your FMOD project file of "sf_JSIMPSON.txt" to "sf_JSIMPSON.fdp" in order to see the file.

Hope you all enjoy!

James

3D Engines

The Conitec Game Studios have been around the market since 1995. Their successful flagship product, the "A" series of game development tools are very large. Here are just a small list of their features:

Rendering engine
Six degrees of freedom, multiple cameras and render views, multiple monitors
Supports DirectX 9, DirectPlay, DirectShow, DirectSound
Adaptive Binary Tree (ABT) scene manager
Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) / Potential Visibility Set (PVS) (Pro Edition)
Indoor and outdoor support, seamless LOD terrain system
Light manager supports an unlimited number of point and spot light sources
Static and dynamic shadows
Fog areas, Camera portals, reflections and mirrors
Geometric LOD, detail textures, texture compression
Softskin models with shaders, bones and vertex animation, animation blending
Animated sprites and decals
Material properties for static and dynamic objects

PARTICLE & EFFECT Engine
Programmable particle generators for multiple particle types
Beam generators for laser beams and tracer paths
Pre- and postprocessing shaders, supporting shader models 1.0, 2.0, 3.0
HLSL and asm shader languages, FX file import
Bump and environment mapping, light mapping, Multitexturing (up to 8 textures)
Layered sky system with sky cubes, sky domes, clouds and backdrop bitmaps
Weather generators for rain, snow and tornadoes
Programmable effects like lens flares, bullet holes, distortion, fisheye, etc.
Shader workshop and Shader viewer
More than 40 included shaders combining water, cartoon, environment, gooch, bump, lambert, blinn, phong, parallax, occlusion, blur, bloom, dilate, displacements, erode, bleach, sepia, emboss, posterize, lens, and many more effects

Physics & Collision Engine
Polygon level collision detection
Physics objects with gravity, damping, elasticity, friction
Hinge, ball, wheel, and slider joints with motors
Water physics with dynamic wave generation (Pro Edition)
Arbitrary axis rotations for space and flight simulators
Bezier path tracking for camera, actors or vehicles
Mouse picking and manipulating of 3D objects
Slow motion / quick motion effect

2D Engine
Multi-layer system
Animated 3D and 2D sprites
Movie player for fullscreen and sprite-projected movies
GUI panels with various button, slider, display and window types
Truetype and bitmap fonts
Screenshot generator

Sound Engine
Static and dynamic 3D sound sources with Doppler effect
Multichannel streaming sound player
WAV, OGG, MID, MP3, WMA, CD support

Network & Game Engine
Save / Load system for resuming games at arbitrary positions
Multi-player client/server mode for LAN and Internet (UDP)
Multizone/multiserver support for MMOG (Pro Edition)
Expandable through DLL plugins





Because of the nature of game engines is so broad, I have provided a link to the cost benefits of other popular engines located at
http://www.conitec.com/english/gstudio/faq.htm#was1

Post 1990 Game with sound effects

The game Full Throttle from Lucas Arts used a good deal of the sound library from the Lucas Arts archives. They also had music from a band called "The Gone Jackals" and some of the sound elements they incorporated into the game such as wind blowing in the desert, thunder in the plains or roaring engines on the road.

http://www.csoon.com/issue7/fulltrot.htm

The sound design, voice acting even holds up in this modern era. They had stars such as Maurice LaMarche (Brain on Pinky and the Brain) and Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker) and Roy Conrad as the main character Ben.

Much of the tracks are smoothly assembled, and while much of the music is in MIDI, it seemed to handle better than most MIDI of the same time period.

http://www.joltcountry.com/trottingkrips/ftreview.html

According to Gamespot.com, the sound department deserves a major applause.
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/adventure/fullthrottle/player_review.html?id=169582

To learn more about this game, visit Gamespot at
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/adventure/fullthrottle/index.html