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The Week in
Review: May 27 - June 2, 2002
Last week's features at
3DsoundSurge
Last week's sound news
Drivers and bugs
- New Vortex Control Panel for Windows XP
A new version
(v2.10 beta 2) of the Vortex Control Panel for Windows XP has been released and
according to reader Chris Day, the early reports are good. Note that this is the first
version works with AU8810, AU8820 and AU8830 chips and not just on the AU8830 (Vortex 2)
as with prior versions.
New games, demos, patches and bugs
- Tsunami 2265 Will Feature 3D sound effects
Action Vault has posted conducted an
interview with 3 of the developers behind the Tsunami 2265. The game is described as
"a futuristic action shoot 'em up incorporating adventure elements". Here's the
short but interesting sound bit:
To fulfil the atmosphere, the sound effects are adapted to the
visual contest, with impressive 3D effects and soundtracks specially matched to the mood
of every single level.
- The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Features Great
Use of 3D sound
A review of
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind on Gamepen claims the game takes great advantage of
3D sound. Here's what they had to say:
The voices in this game are delivered quite nicely and come out
of my speakers with a high sense of clarity. I splurged on a decent set of 5.1 speakers
and I’m glad to find a game that fully takes of advantage of them. You’ll hear
guards shouting at you from the rear speakers and you run from them after a failed
robbery. The sound positioning is good and clear enough so that you’ll be able to
tell exactly where it’s coming from without even having to think. The best part of
the audio comes from the beautifully mastered sound track. If you own a copy of the
Collector’s Edition (which came with an additional music cd) you’ll know exactly
what I’m talking about. If you have a great sound card and a decent set of speakers,
you’re in for an aural treat.
- New World Order MP test
Project Three Interactive/Termite Games has released the MP test (direct link to
92MB demo) of its upcoming New World Order. New World Order is described as a
team-based multiplayer game which features environments that could easily be taken right
out of a film. It's fast paced team-action simulator with gritty attitude. The game
claims to feature HRTF audio 3D positioning on all hardware but then in the requirement
list you need a 3D soundcard. In addition to enable/disable 3D sound the demo will allow
you to enable/disable early reflections, late reflections and occlusions filtering. Not
clear if it use its own software engine or if they take advantage of EAX Advanced HD for
these features.
- Doom 3 interview
Game spy has posted an
interview with id Software's Fred Nilsson and Christian "Disruptor" Antkow.
The focus is of course on Doom 3. Here's the audio related bit:
GameSpy: For working on the sound, do you have any special tools
to help facilitate getting stuff into the game?
Christian Antkow: Yes. Robert Duffy has made an in-game sound
editor, so what this allows Trent to do is come up with an entire list of sounds; while he
just builds up his repertoire, and then he can walk around the world in real-time, in 3D,
and drop sounds, tweak them, so it spares him the angst of working in the editor,
top-down, which probably isn't the most intuitive way of doing things for someone who's
never worked on a 3D game before.
So yes, we have written special code to accommodate getting sounds
into the game, and to make it easy to work with.
Christian Antkow GameSpy: Trent did all the sounds for the demo…
Christian Antkow: …that's correct…
GameSpy: …but you're still in negotiations for the full game?
Christian Antkow: Yeah, we're still working that out.
GameSpy: How has it been working with [Trent] on this project?
Christian Antkow: Really well, I think. He's enthusiastic, and he
comes up with excellent suggestions. The guy's just a total professional. He thinks,
"well, what if we did things like this?" or "can we do this?" and you
sit there and think about it for a while and go "yeah, you know maybe that's worth a
try."
Our audio background isn't nearly as extensive as his. He gives us a
lot of suggestions, and we implement all that … it's worked out really well. It's
just great having someone so enthusiastic about the project to work with, and having that
communication channel open that way.
- More DOOM III Audio
GameSpy has posted the third
part of their interview with staff from id Software. Again there is a section on
audio, this time with Graeme Devine who wrote the sound engine for DOOM III. Here's a snip
from an entire page on sound:
GameSpy: What is your role in the development of DOOM III?
Graeme Devine: I wrote the sound engine, and I wrote the particle
engine. We're trying to take the sound from where we were in Quake 3, (Return to Castle)
Wolfenstein and so forth, up to the next level. We're doing full room acoustics on the
fly, so as the room gets smaller around you, you can hear the echo of your gun, with
reverb. We're also working in 6-channel sound, real-time 5.1 mixing.
GameSpy: Are there any challenges with working on a 5.1 channel game?
Graeme Devine: Well, the hardware's only just come out to support
multi-channel out of the card, so … the challenge is the hardware, as always. You
find little things that you need to get fixed in the actual hardware itself.
GameSpy: What was the reason you wanted to go ahead and support the
new technology?
Graeme Devine: DOOM is all about getting immersed in the world and
really putting you there. We really wanted to really provide both a graphical front end --
the graphics are just outstanding - and a sound front end which would really put
everything together. You can have a great game with great graphics and OK sound… you
can have a great game with great sound and OK graphics … why not do both? We have
enough manpower and programming time to be able to do both well.
As before this raises around the differences between what they are
doing with the Doom III engine and the range of other 3D audio games that already support
the 6 channel sound cards on the market. It also reads like he is working with a specific
piece of hardware. Rather than speculate further, we will try to get some specific answers
around the Doom III audio.
Reviews of soundcards, speakers, headphones and MP3
players.
- PoGo RipFlash MP3 Player
EXHardware has posted a review of the PoGo RipFlash MP3 Player.
This unit is unusual in its ability to also directly record MP3s from analog source
material, but it's not clear from this overall positive review what the recording quality
is like and if it can be set at different rates.
Other sound news
- Creative Invests In THX
Well it looks like where there is smoke there is fire. Earlier this week (see below) we
posted news of rumors of Creative Labs investing in Lucasfilms THX division. Two Asian
business sites have additional coverage of the story with confirmation from Lucasfilms and
Creative representatives. The first Asian site,The Business Times, lists the Lucasfilms
representative as the source in their story.
A second site, The Straits Times, has a much
more detailed report including information directly from Creative spokesman
Wynne Leong. Leong confirmed that the Creative was "invited to invest"
in Lucasfilm's THX division. The Straits Times reports that analysts said that Lucasfilm
could have been attracted to Creative because of the Singapore company's worldwide
catchment of 170 million users of its soundcards. Leong declined to say how much was
pumped into the previously wholly-owned unit of Lucasfilm, adding that it was not a
"material" transaction and therefore did not require Creative to provide details
to shareholders. You might recall that the May 28th story reported by
High Fidelity Review was that according to "a number of reliable industry
sources" a 60 percent share of THX has been sold to Creative Labs for the sum of
$8,000,000, but there is as noted no word if the financial details are accurate. If it's
accurate I find it surprising that a 60 percent stake in THX could come for what is
relatively so little. Additional analysis and coverage can be found via the linked
stories, particularly the second.
- Rumor: LucasFilm Sells Share of THX to Creative
Labs
High Fidelity Review reports that according to "a number of reliable industry
sources" a 60 percent share of THX has been sold to Creative Labs for the sum of
$8,000,000. According to the report the THX division of LucasFilms has yet to comment and
Creative Labs (Public Relations Manager Phil O’Shaughnessy) responded by saying
"thank you for your inquiry. As a company policy, Creative does not comment on
rumors.". For the full
story visit High Fidelity Review. While I don't know what the licensing revenues for
THX are $8,000,000 strikes me as a little low for a 60 percent share. Stay tuned for more
as it comes available. Thanks to DMG for the pointer.
- ABIT - MediaXP Front Panel
Digit-Life has
news of a new product from Abit called the MediaXP front panel. I don't see any
mention of it on the Abit site yet but you can check out a picture of it at the link
above. According to Digit-Life, the MediaXP, which is compatible with ABIT AT7, IT7 and
MAX series motherboards will deliver the following:
- Media XP card reader
- Compact Flash Cards type I & II
- Memory Stick Cards
- Secure Digital Cards
- Supports IEEE1394a / USB2.0 interface
- Supports Headphone / MIC
- S/PDIF optical Output
- Remote control kit
- New Odyssey Digital Audio Players From e.Digital
The gap between PC and Mac users will be bridged by the new Odyssey line of digital audio
players coming from e.Digital Corp. Each of the three new Odyssey pocket-sized,
flash-memory-based digital audio players have unique features. All come with embedded
flash memory, a SmartMedia card expansion slot allowing consumers to add up to 128 MB of
additional storage, and e.Digital Odyssey Manager software, which is compatible with both
PC and Macintosh platforms. Lots of details on this new line of players including photos
can be found in
the full press release.
- Analog Devices' SoundMAX SPX Revs Up Test Drive
For PS2
Analog Devices, Inc. has announced that its advanced audio rendering technology, SoundMAX
SPX, has been incorporated into Infogrames' recently released PlayStation 2 game Test
Drive. SoundMAX SPX's "animated audio" - interactive, event-driven sounds that
respond to game physics, environmental variables and user input - allows for
hyper-realistic audio as the player races across tracks from around the globe in a wide
range of high-powered cars. Additional details and several quotes can be found in the full
press release.
For more news from last week check out our news archive.
Upcoming features at 3DsoundSurge
- Reviews that we are currently working on:
Updated Santa Cruz/Sonic Fury and GameTheaterXP reviews
Hercules Fortissimo II
Terratec DMX Xfire 1024
CMedia CM8738 Reference Review
Full Audigy Review
Full Philips MMS305 Review
- There are several other hardware reviews in the pipeline
including, but not limited to the following:
Guillemot Maxi Sound MUSE
Terratec m3po
DigMedia MusicStore
Philips Seismic Edge
Lots of other stuff on the go in including several guides and major site revisions that we
will soon be releasing more details on.
As always if you have any ideas for products we should review or
features we should do, please let us know.
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