Gamasutra met up with the audio director for the EA Play Label Rob Kauker at the Audio Engineering Society’s 125th Convention and spoke him on his past works of the various Maxis game’s he has worked on. He explains what tools they came up with to help recording the Simlish for the Sims series, as well as other geeky interests of audio.
How does Max/MSP work into your production process?
RK: The MSP stage came out when I was still in graduate school, and it was the first step to digital processing without a big expensive system. So going back again to that creative sandbox that Mills kind of fostered for us, that’s where we started playing with it.
Now, in The Sims world, in the Spore world as well, because Kent Jolly should get all the credit for kicking this off in both worlds — we took these problems that we were having, recorded voice. The Sims voice-recording problem is this; we have 12,000 to 15,000 animations that need to have dialogue recorded in. That dialogue cannot be repetitive directly and it needs to be emotional, so we need voice actors. The other problem is we can’t tell the player what the game’s about, because our players define the game.
So that’s why Simlish comes into being. A standard digital audio work session takes a minute to load up a video, name a track, get it setup for record, you hit record, you record a three second video. You record five variations of that. OK, you spent 15 seconds recording and a minute setting it up. We looked at this problem, and we went “Yuck.”
So, we solved it using Max/MSP to build apps. We built a recording app, we built an editing app, that’s a companion that scripts drive. It’s very, very fast, it’s very efficient, and it takes advantage of all the techniques that Max/MSP lays out for you. It’s fairly simple. Jitter was the video component of it. That was the key that enabled us to do the tools that we did.
So it makes our recording pipeline very fast, very efficient, and very customizable. So what we did, Tiger Woods PGA Tour took and modified. They literally took out a huge chunk of what we did, and put in a simpler recording model.
The fundamental problem remained the same, was the way to quickly record through a script, without huge issues of using an alien interface that’s designed for general purpose.
In The Sims 2, the voice of the robot, who is essentially a character of the game, is generated with a plug in I wrote for Max/MSP, a VST audio unit. Nothing fancy, not rocket science. But it was something I could make that could be used in a VST or AU audio chain.
We use it all the time now to mock up prototypes any sort of game scenario we want. We have USB game controllers mapped to it and then we go to the set up any time we need a prototype.
