Michele Postpischl is working hard with RIOT – Civil Unrest creator, Leonard, to create the game’s audio effects. As they’re both a touch crazy you’d expect them to have some pretty unorthodox methods of working too.
Imagine two guys in the Appennino region (the mountains and hills just to the south of Bologna). Unlike the tranquillity of nature all around them, these two are up to something that shatters the peacefulness around them. Armed with boxes of firecrackers the pair is creating explosions all over the area in a bid to record a wide range of effects using the natural echoes of their surroundings. In particular they discovered an abandoned cave that created a close up noise and a hill that provided an awesome reverb to the exploding firecracker. Trying to create sounds digitally is not easy. Nature and reality add a lot of variety and depth to the effects.
We needed to record lots of different voice samples for the crowd; single voices, group voices, large crowd voices (it was pretty easy to achieve, there’s a lot of protests in Italy right now!). We also had to cater for the mood of the crowd; nervous, calm, angry, afraid. The game dynamically interpolates crowd noise based on the status of the crowd or the police units – it’s different every time. We’re still working on the real-time mixing system and the crowd noise will be slightly muffled as you’re observing the action from a viewpoint that’s away from the action.
https://youtu.be/2X5RjpbsTSs
Sound effects are all recorded individually. To create a wide library of effect we have tried to record about fifty samples for each object or action. When you extrapolate this to include objects interacting with each other you begin to understand the scale of the task. For instance, when a glass bottle hits the street – the force of the impact, the road surface and the overall pitch all combine to create a huge spectrum of sounds.
https://youtu.be/_uIeYmJcSvs
The Police units have different sound samples for each scenario too. We’ve implemented a meta-language (in order to avoiding crazy dubbing). Police units have different sounds for different statuses (angry, afraid, calm, nervous, etc.), after all the Police are just regular guys too.
So, in summary, Michele Postpischl has been recording thousands of different effects - more that 200MB in mp3 clips! It all helps give RIOT – Civil Unrest a more realistic and atmospheric feel.