News: June 14 -  20, 1999

Sunday, June 20, 1999

Heavy Gear II FAQ - Mark @ 23:56 EST

We saw on VoodooExtreme that Activision has posted a new Technical Support type FAQ for Heavy Gear 2.
The support area includes an IAS walkthrough and also have a possible solution for no sound using a DVD-ROM. Here is that DVD Q & A:

FAQ: I don't hear any (redbook) music with my DVD-ROM in the game.

Solution: Your DVD-ROM may not have been recognized by EAR's auto configuration utility. This utility can be accessed by clicking "More" on the Heavy Gear II splash screen, then click "IAS Audio Setup." In the CD Setup tab, ensure that you have the box checked indicating that you have a DVD-ROM

Updated Unofficial A vs P Support Page - Mark @ 23:54 EST

We saw on AvPNews.com that their unofficial Aliens vs Predator Support Page has been updated and there is now an audio section where they mention some problems. The Vortex1, 2 and Yamaha solution is just to disable sound acceleration. For Creative cards it's to lower the acceleration.

Drakan Demo Updated - Mark @ 23:49 EST

This times its for real and consists of another huge (66.4 MB) download for those that are into it. If you did not check out the first demo, I can tell you its really cool and this update fixes a number of bugs including a voice-drop bug that a lot of people with 3d sound cards experienced as well as adding Arokh's new lightning attack, creating a more refined AI (Especially the spiders and adding the ability to pick up arrows. As per the usual you can grab the demo from 3Dfiles.

Saturday, June 19, 1999

Soldier of Fortune Update - Mark @ 07:41 EST

Soldier of Fortune Sound Designer Chia Chin Lee has updated his plan with the following very interesting information:

6/18/99

In order to maximize realism in Soldier of Fortune, Raven hired Mr. John Mullins to bring more authenticity to our game. After we repeatedly called him a "Mercenary", Mr. Mullins politely corrected our faux pas. Due to the negative connotations that come with the term "Mercenary", true professionals in the field prefer the term "Consultants".

Mr. Mullins retired from the Special Forces in 1981, after earning numerous awards including the Silver Star, Bronze Star with three Oak Leaf Clusters, and several Purple Hearts. Since his retirement, he has made his services available both to the government and civilian customers. Mr. Mullins has headed several operations in all corners of the world. These missions range from VIP Protection to Hostage Negotiation and Rescue.

Although Mr. Mullins has helped us with every aspect of the game, my primary interest lies in the area of Sound and Combat. During his visit at Raven, I was able to speak with our Consultant on this very topic. Our meeting was fruitful and inspiring, prompting me to approach the sound design of our game with a re-invigorated and fresh perspective.

I will now give a brief summary of our conversation, which I hope you will find interesting, if not slightly morbid. We are planning to implement these sonic details in our game, which will greatly enhance the gaming experience.


WEAPONS:
Overall, Mr. Mullins really enjoyed the unique resonance between the guns in Soldier of Fortune. He provided several constructive criticisms concerning some of the weapons ("this should be more muffled" or "this gun sounds much sharper in action"). The sonic signature of our weapons add a lot to the feel of the guns.


RICOCHETS, ETC:
There are lots of Ricochets sounds in combat situations, and whiiiiizzzzing sounds of bullets. When bullets hit around you (about 3 feet from your head), you hear intense SNAPPPPING of bullets. It sounds like a firecracker breaking the barrier of sound.

Soldiers learn to abide by the "Crack and Thump" rule: You first hear the FIRECRACKER CRACK! around you, then the deep THUMMMMP of the weapons. You can actually *count* the time between the Crack and the Thump to determine the distance between you and your enemy.

Depending on the floor surface, you can clearly hear shells hitting the floor. It has a distinct "tink" sound. Shotgun shells sound dull and hollow, while other weapons are metallic. One should be careful not to trip on the shells, as they can be slippery on hard surfaces.


AMBIENCE:
All your senses are intensified in combat situations, so acute that "you can hear a rat piss on a cotton ball". You hear all enemy movements clearly, including scurrying footsteps. The environmental sounds seem louder too, because of your heightened awareness.


SPEECH:
There are lots of tactical chatter amongst enemies, such as "GET YOUR ASS DOWN!", or "GET OVER HERE!". Swearing is (not surprisingly)commonplace in combat situations. Enemies usually don't taunt you, as they are too busy planning amongst themselves.


CARNAGE:
When asked what people sound like when they are wounded, the consultant replied: "Imagine a woman who has just lost her child. Now imagine the gut-wrenching, high-pitched cries that she lets out. That's what people sound like when they are hit." Some people are more vocal than others, however. Some soldiers pass out cold immediately when hit by a bullet.

Apparently, when bullets hit the flesh, it sounds similar to a watermelon being hit by a hammer. A juicy thud. Due to your heightened sense, you can distinctly hear wounded enemies, even as they are gurgling blood or wheezing from a blasted lung.


As a game developer and sound designer, I learned a lot from this experience. It pays to turn to a non-fictional source for inspiration and guidance. Although an active imagination can go a long way, the old adage "Truth is Stranger than Fiction", definitely holds true!

Xwing Alliance update 2.02 - Mark @ 07:32 EST

Lucas Arts has released a 2.02 patchfor X-Wing Alliance which incudes further enhancements to 3d sound support, plus new features and some mission updates. Its also compatible with all foreign language versions. Here is a list of the feautures:

The following features and mission updates are included with this update.

NEW FEATURES

The Film Room: The Film Room will allow you to record and view the missions you have flown. Instructions on how to use the Film Room will be shown after you have completed the update. This information is also stored in the file Update201.rtf located in your install folder (C:\Program Files\LucasArts\XwingAlliance\ by default).

Aureal A3D Interactive(TM) sound support: Provides hardware accelerated 3d positional audio. To enable this support go to the sound options menu in the game, and select on for 3d sound enabled. If you have an Aureal supported sound card it will default to A3D support.

Improvements to Direct Sound 3D support: We have made adjustments to our sound system to create a more fulfilling experience for users with Direct Sound 3D supported soundcards.

MISSION UPDATES

Prologue mission 3: Sometimes after a player would inspect 97% of the craft in Cargo area 2 the goal would appear as satisfied when it wasn't. This has been addressed.

Prologue mission 7: Changes in the ordering and triggering conditions that make the mission more cohesive.

Prologue mission 8: Occasionally the player's craft would inexplicably get disabled in the freighter region, this has been fixed.

Battle 4 mission2: Occasionally a mission critical container would spontaneously explode, this has been fixed.

Battle 6 mission5: On Easy difficulty only there was a problem with TIE Fighter AI, this has been adjusted.

Heavy Gear Audio Troubleshooting page - Mark @ 07:26 EST

Heavy Gear is now in stores and just incase you are running into any troubles with the audio engine which was done by Extreme Audio Reality they (EAR) are one step out in front of you with a Heavy Gear Audio Troubleshooting page. So far the only know error is in massive multi-player environments, sometimes an Access Violation is generated in the IAS audio engine. This is caused by priority shifting as more weapons are fired, etc. This problem has been fixed in version 1.57a of the audio engine which is available from EAR (Heavy Gear II ships with version 1.57.)

3D Sound in Doom! - Mark @ 07:25 EST

Extreme Audio Reality has released their WinDoomIAS 0.96. As it sounds, this port uses the WinDoom version of the freely-distributed source code for Doom, originally published by id Software, Inc. The port adds the following enhancements to the original game:

Enables Interactive Around-Sound®, a multi-speaker audio engine API

Makes all sounds 3D positioned

Increases the maximum number of sounds from 8 to "unlimited"

Unthreads audio from main application and runs externally, decreasing CPU strain

Added MIDI support to WinDoom code

New A3DXstream Drivers - Mark @ 07:24 EST

Thanks to Aureal A3D Central for pointing out that there are updated Turtle Beach Montego A3DXstream driver for Windows 95 and 98 (not NT) (4.06.1187) beta drivers available at Voyetra Turtle Beach. These drivers offer improved support for Acid. Note that they require Direct-X 6.0 or higher.

Friday, June 18, 1999

Aureal SuperQuad Review - Mark @ 20:47 EST

Games First has posted a short review of Aureal's SuperQuad Vortex 2 sound card.

Waveforce 192 digital Review - Mark @ 02:12 EST

We have just posted our review of Yamaha's Waveforce 192 digital. So what you say? Seen those already? Not quite...Most of the Yamaha Waveforce reviews posted over the past few months were before the release of their EAX supporting 1031 drivers. We held off reviewing the card in anticipation of that release (which happended in late April) and have finally done our review.

For a bit of background, the Waveforce 192 digital is the most sophisticated member of the WaveForce family. It uses Yamaha's 724 chip which is featured
on several other OEM products and motherboards. This PCI card features a S/PDIF with an optical output connector, a 16 bit digital to analog and analog to digital converter (DAC/ADC), Yamaha's XG synthesizer, Yamaha's exclusive physical modeling synthesizer and positional 3D technology from Sensaura (using DS3D).

As per our usual, the review offers an overview of the card, the bundle, installation and configuration. Then we get to the real exciting stuff. MIDI, DS, DS3D and EAX testing which includes subjective testing by Mikael Hagén and myself plus a bunch of new benchmark tests using ZD Audio Bench and Half-Life. These numbers are compared to several other sound cards in our benchmarking section.

AGN - Aureal @ E3 Show Coverage - Mark @ 02:06 EST

Aureal's Skip McIlvaine has pointed us in the direction of the All Games Network to a feature that we all seemed to have missed as AGN apparently did not announce it. To view the E3 show coverage from All Games Hardware at the show you'll need RealPlayer installed. When the video starts, you'll want to fast forward to around time index 22:40. Check it out as its supposed to include info on a new a3d feature that might be of interest. I have not checked it out yet myself so I don't know what it is...

Thursday, June 17, 1999

Iguana Audio Q & A - Mark @ 17:43 EST

Ear on Games has posted a Q&A with Tim Haywood - Audio Manager of Iguana Entertainment - discussing his current project Shadow Man. Here is a snip from the Q&A:

EoG: To what extent will verbal dialogue be used in the game?

Tim: There is over an hour's worth of speech in the game , featuring the above characters, and that applies to every version PC, PSX and N64!! The speech has been recorded in 5 different languages, English, French, German, Spanish and Italian.

EoG: What kind of atmosphere will the soundtrack add to the game?

Tim: It depends on where you are, in some areas the atmosphere is tense, in others it is spooky, others industrial, others ethereal, it ' s a very diverse game so the sound track reflects that. In some cases the music changes depending on who is around in the game, the serial killers each have a theme of their own and the areas themselves have musical themes

Quadzilla Lives! - Mark @ 09:20 EST

Planet Hardware is the latest site to post a Quadzilla review and its another positive one. Once again, look for our Quadzilla review in the middle of next week.

Descent 3 Review - Mark @ 07:44 EST

Thresh's Firing Squad has posted a review of the A3D, DS3D with EAX supporting Descent 3. Here is a small snip of what they had to say on the audio:

Descent 3 can use both Aureal A3D and Creative's EAX to enhance the sound effects in 3D. This helps you determine where you're being attacked from if you stumble into a dark room and you're not sure where to turn. The EAX effects also create a sort of echoing sound when firing your guns inside of a tunnel.

Wednesday, June 16, 1999

Rogue Spear Audio - Mark @ 23:02 EST

Rogue Spear is the sequel to Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. The designer logs at the Redstorm.com website contains the following post on audio from Greg Stelmack - Core Engineer:

There have been lots of questions lately about sound support in the forums. Let me put down the answer here in one place so everyone can see.

Rainbow Six supported (and still supports) DirectSound3D. We have always had positional audio. The software algorithms in DirectSound3D are not the best, but if you have a good 3D sound card you should get nice positional audio.

Rogue Spear is adding support for EAX. EAX is an extension built on top of DirectSound3D that enables us to add reverb and echo effects. This means we can easily make the weapons sound differently indoors vs. out.

A3D 1.0 was a standard devised back when DirectSound3D was first introduced to enable hardware accleration of DirectSound3D (something DirectX 3 did not allow). As of DirectX 5, DirectSound3D is hardware accelerated, and the A3D cards support DirectSound3D, so we have not seen any reason to add specific A3D 1.0 support.

A3D 2.0 is a wavetracing standard. To support it, we'd have to munge our geometry and pass it down to their API. This is not an easy task with our maps and so is not going to happen any time in the near future.

Dark Vengance 1.2 Patch - Mark @ 21:02 EST

Nothing audio related for the DS3D with EAX supporting shooter. Here is what the patch does:

Mouse look - Look in the Controls menu to turn on the new Mouse FreeLook option

Camera control options - Check out the new camera control options in the Controls menu

Multiplayer skins easier to use - Our multiplayer menus have been enhanced and we've put a tutorial on our web site!

Enhanced input support

Character combat transparency - This new option is turned on by default. See how you like it!

Other minor bug fixes and improvements

GameSpy and other Master Servers supported

Pioneer 6x SCSI DVD - Mark @ 17:44 EST

AGNHardware has posted a review of the Pioneer 6x SCSI DVD drive.

More Quadzilla - Mark @ 17:36 EST

GamePC has posted another positive review of the Voyetra Turtle Beach Montego II Quadzilla. We are targeting the middle of next week for posting our own Quadzilla review.

Sonique Media Player MetaTrust-Certified - Mark @ 13:15 EST

InterTrust Technologies Corporation, the MetaTrust Utility(TM), and Mediascience, Inc., a leading interactive content delivery company, today announced that the two companies had entered into a partnering agreement whereby Mediascience will produce a MetaTrust-Certified(TM) version of its advanced Sonique media player. By becoming MetaTrust-Certified, the new media player will use InterTrust® digital rights management (DRM) technology to protect and manage music content in multiple digital audio formats.

QDesign MP3 Encoding and Decoding - Mark @ 13:12 EST

QDesign Corporation, a leading provider of digital audio compression technologies, announced today the release of its MP3 encoding and decoding software.

The QDesign MP3 technology is available as a cross-platform software development kit (``SDK''). Developers on both the Macintosh and Windows OS are now able to license the SDK for easy integration of MP3 for digital audio encoding and playback capability in custom applications.

Terratec Launches Sensara MultiDrive Card - Mark @ 07:56 EST

The DMX , a high-end PCI audio soundcard utilising the Sensaura supported ESS Canyon3D DSP chip has now been made available to the world-wide retail market by Terratec Electronic GmbH, the well respected German based audio hardware manufacturer.

The DMX is the first ever retail soundcard to offer Sensaura MultiDrive, a true 3D multi-speaker technology, the result of nearly a decade of R&D into spatial audio by Sensaura Ltd.

This board looks to be a very serious contender! For more details check out today's press release.

Tuesday, June 15, 1999

10 Best Game Soundtracks - Mark @ 21:11 EST

Gamespot has posted an article dicussing thier picks for the ten best games soundtracks. Thanks to VoodooExtreme for the pointer.

Thief Updates - Mark @ 21:05 EST

I have finally been back playing a bit of the awesome Thief: The Dark Project as part of testing out the Yamaha 192d and Aztec 368 DSP for reviews that Mikael and I are working on. Anyway, there is a whole bunch of new stuff over on Thief-DarkProject.com including a new version of Gathering at the Bar" ,a high quality fan-made mission, tips on how to get it to work, news of a fan mad campaign and a whole much more stuff.

Another Quadzilla Review - Mark @ 17:52 EST

Computer Games Online has posted its Quadzilla review awarding the Voyetra Turtle Beach 4 speaker Vortex 2 offering 4 1/2 of 5 stars.

Updated Flatland Web Site - Mark @ 17:42 EST

Flatland which has created a web tool called 3DML(tm), a web language just like HTML that you can use to make your 3D mark on the web has redesigned their website...a new 3DML area, Spot Springs, is open for "business" (with ton of new features) and a new version of Rover (the web plugin viewer) is available for download.

Return to Na Pali Gold - Mark @ 08:01 EST

More from VE. Epic/Legend's official add-on for Unreal, Return to Na Pali has gone gold. Now all we need to do is wait for EAX to be fixed and A3D 2.0 to be implemented (the 224 patch disabled DS3D with EAX and A3D 1.x support). For more information on "Return to Na Pali" check out the website:www.gtinteractive.com/unreal/missionpack/

Drakan Demo Update - Mark @ 07:58 EST

I grabbed this from VoodooExtreme who in turn got it from Drankan.Net. Bottom line is hold of on grabbing the Drakan demo for a few days as the bus causing voice drop on 3d sound cards is still there. Here is the whole post:

OOPS... This is just dripping with irony... I'd like to amend the post I had made earlier (which I have since deleted from the site) regarding the v2a demo. Apparently the v2a demo is NOT a new build of the demo. Psygnosis released an updated installer exe, which takes care of the DirectX bug (the one that Surreal had resolved the day the original demo was released). This is the v2a demo. I had originally thought that this was the new demo, based on a later beta build, which was to be released later this week. This is not the case, which is probably why it went by unannounced. :-)

The good news is, the time that some of you may have spent downloading the v2a demo may have not been wasted, since the lightning attack did accidentally make it into there. This is a bug; the lightning is not supposed to be out in the open like that (which Duncan has stated in our Forum). Since this is a bug, I don't suggest you download the v2a demo just to see the lightning; wait until the REAL new demo is released.

The bad news is, that all those bugs that I had reported squashed, will still be there. This includes the redone AI and the ability to pick up used arrows. I am sorry about this; it is a simple case of miscommunication. The REAL new demo should probably be out later this week. No official word on this yet, but when it is released, you can be sure to find out here right away

New Games Unleashed - Mark @ 00:25 EST

Creative's Games Unleaded pages have been updated with two new games. One feature is on Drakan and the second is on Aliens vs Predator.

Ask Aureal - Mark @ 00:18 EST

A new Q & A has been posted in Aureal's wavetracings webzine. This one addresses the question of just what does the licensing of EAX by Microsoft mean to current and prospective Vortex 2 owners. For Aureal's response visit their Ask Aureal page.

Monday, June 14, 1999

Quadzilla Review - Mark @ 20:13 EST

Wewp! Entertainment has posted their review of the Turtle Beach Montego II Quadzilla.

SB Live Value Review - Mark @ 09:49 EST

CPU-Review has posted a review of the SB Live! Value. Lots of SB Live reviews out there but what makes this one stand out is they actually test it out under Linux! Thanks to Hardware-One for the pointer.

Xitel Storm Platinum Gamer's Pack Review - Mark @ 09:41 EST

AnandTech has posted a review of the Xitel Storm Platinum Gamer's Pack, which features an Aureal Vortex 2 board and force feedback headphones.

Week in Review - Mark @ 08:01 EST

We have posted our latest edition of the 3D Audio Week in Review covering June 7th to June 13th. This weekly newsletter covers new driver releases, games, patches and demos that support 3D sound including information on any new bugs, bug fixes and other tips. The newsletter now also includes links to all sound related hardware reviews on the web as well as updates on what we did and what we plan to do in the coming week. The 3D Audio Week in Review is a great way for busy people to be right on top of all latest in the PC audio world.

Updated Drakan Demo - Mark @ 00:15 EST

Another huge download for those that are into it. If you did not check out the first demo, I can tell you its really cool and according to Drakan.Net the update fixes a number of bugs including a voice-drop bug that a lot of people with 3d sound cards experienced as well as adding Arokh's new lightning attack. As per the usual you can grab the demo from 3Dfiles.

Montego II Quadzilla Review - Mark @ 00:09 EST

GA-Source has posted what amounts to another postive review of the Turtle Beach Montego II Quadzilla. As I noted before, look for ours to be up early next week.

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