Killzone Shadow Fall's surround audio system has commonalities with DICE's acclaimed surround sound set-up, but the addition of MADDER - Material Dependent Early Reflections - which shapes the sound of your gunfire according to the surrounding environment. We bounce the shock waves of the gun off every surface in the game, all the time." One step beyond 'HDR' audio. "Everywhere in the game you have materials - walls, rocks, different things - that for geometry purposes are tagged with what material they are. A key example of this is how the sound of the player's gunshots are shaped by the player's current environment, just as they would be in real life. Killzone Shadow Fall is a remarkable audio experience precisely because of this new workflow. In essence, coders now create the tools that the designers use, rather than writing specific code based on an idea that may or may not work.
We can do all of these things in a tool and the actual sound programming now happens at a lower level."
Now we're moving to a point where everything is state-driven. "Previously sound engineers were the guys who make these wave files, and the sound programmer would put them in the game and make them all work and connect everything together. "On this project we've tried to move away from lots of work being done by the sound programmer and to a direction where if sound engineers have an idea for how a certain system is supposed to work they should be able to get something like that up and running by themselves," says senior tech programmer, Andreas Varga. When they sculpt new assets, they are translated into raw, procedurally generated code executed on the PS4's x86 processors. Killzone Shadow Fall has seen a radical change in how these game elements are handled instead of bespoke high-level code being generated by programmers on direction from the creative element, a more low-level system has been created, allowing designers more access to raw game data. During the course of our visit, we swiftly discovered that next-gen isn't just about better graphics and sound, although clearly those play an important part it's about the opportunities this new level of power offers to developers, and how it allows them to more fully express themselves as creators.Ī key part of this is procedural generation of in-game assets - animation and audio are two systems that benefit from this the most. As journalists we are almost always outsiders looking in, and not privy to the design process itself, so this unprecedented level of access would make for a very different article. Just before the launch of Killzone Shadow Fall, Guerrilla Games offered us the chance to visit its Amsterdam studio - to meet and talk with every major design and technology discipline within its walls.
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