Continued From previous page.
Mark Kilborn 4:51
So how do you record the cars in the first place to prepare them to be implemented in this way and to get all the pieces that you need?
Fraser Strachan 4:57
We have used multiple different types of roads. chording methods throughout the years on all the all the different horizon games that I’ve worked on, really to try and find what we think is the best method for our game, you know, we’ve we’ve recorded cars and dynamometers. With regard to cars on tracks, what we found is we actually need to figure out which physics parameters we actually need to be feeding into to understand what we then need to go out and record. So we don’t really go and record blindly if that makes sense. We now have quite, comprehensive checklist when we go out to record cars. So we we play going games use granular synthesis, hybrids, looping engine technology, which sounds complicated, it’s, it’s a little bit less complicated than it sounds, we like to come up with fancy names for things just to make it justify our profession, right. Because we use granular synthesis, we much prefer to record our cars out on track on a on an airstrip, or even just out on the road. Sometimes if it’s you know, if it’s an electric car that that it’s possible to actually record on just a straight, but we need to record the car from idle, basically driving up to the red line, and then back down again, roughly in like second or third gear, because that’s, it’s less of a technical constraint. And more just because that gives you a roughly the right amount of length of time that you need for granular synthesis, you’re looking for a sweep that’s around about 10 to 15 seconds long, so you have enough information. And if you drive it too quickly, then you’re not gonna have enough information in that short sweep to be able to flatten the loops. I think something that I have learned over the years is that getting the recordings of the cars that sound great for granular technology is only really 5% of what we actually record when we’re right on track. A lot of the time, it’s fairly quick to record the car doing what it does best. And then we we end up kind of going like, right, great, I think that’s it, but we actually, because horizon is such a cinematics based game, we actually spend a lot of time making sure that we’re, whilst we’ve got people on track that have turned up with these really super rare cars, like we’re actually making sure that we get them to do loads of different interesting things with the cars that potentially you would never, you would never do if you were just recording it on a dynamometer in in a garage, for instance. So I think it’s really important for us to be getting those cars to be doing things like driving up a gear shift down, and then like back up another gear. We’re almost imagining what cars do in our cinematics in the game, and then asking drivers to do that sort of stuff. And that’s normally where the drivers sort of go like, wait, you want me to do what? Alright, okay. And they don’t quite understand why we’re asking them to do that. But it’s, it’s because a lot of the time when we use recordings in our games for cinematics, for instance, we’re not actually being 100% true to what the physics of that car would be doing. Because a lot of the time a car driving along a road isn’t, it’s gonna sound a little bit boring, it’s probably going to be mid throttle. So you know, we’re we’re trying to figure out like, how do we get the ups and downs and the shifts and the Pops and bangs so that every shot that we’ve got is interesting. So most of our recording sessions are actually capturing those cinematic sounds as opposed to the sounds that we’re using within our granular engine. Cool. Cool.
Mark Kilborn 8:23
That’s interesting, because I’ve historically thought about recording vehicles in the context of a game versus vehicles in the context of a film. And you’re kind of doing both it sounds like because you need both. So once you have these recordings, what is the process look like to prep them and process them to put them into the game. For the interactive component?
Fraser Strachan 8:43
we take the recordings back to the studio once we’ve got them. And we have these big multi channel sessions where they can seem pretty monstrous to begin with, knowing which parts we need to chop out is kind of the key, finding that sweep up and sweep down like the acceleration and the deceleration that we’re going to feed into our tool is kind of the first thing that we will do. Regardless of of which channel we end up using. We want to find an acceleration that has a good sweep up and down. And then once we have those we try to work from templates. So I come from a post production background. And I very early on learned the benefits of working from templates and making sure that everything was consistent across the templates. And that was something that we early introduced on Forza Horizon 5 was working from scratch, starting again and everything every single session was from a template so that we knew that if we opened up any one of the 500 cars that we were working on, you can go straight to the section where we have the sweeps the backfires, the burbles all those different Foley sounds, you would know that it was going to look exactly the same every time so, yes part of it is about processing the actual sounds, but a lot of it is about actually constructing these sessions across the 500 cars. When it comes to actually processing them, once we’ve got the sounds that we actually need from the session, I’ve kind of shifted to trying to do as little as possible to the car effects as as we can, because we used to do a lot of stuff where we would like smash some distortion on it, or we would, you know, EQ the hell out of some of the channels. But the thing is, like most cars actually sound great if you get the right sounding car with like, some custom exhaust and stuff. When you’re out on track, you’re like, that sounds absolutely killer. And if you’re having to do loads of stuff to recording, when you get back to the studio, it probably means you haven’t recorded the right car. So we we really try and make the recording sing as much as possible by not touching them, having them translate to the game as as much as we possibly can from real life. So we actually use I don’t know if you guys use it, but we we use the vocal plugin from Waves Vocal Rider on a lot of our cars, which I use that on everything, I think it’s I think it’s such a good plugin for everything. Above and Beyond voiceover where you we can we can run it through that and it effectively equalizes out the the volume of it. Without smashing the recordings through compressors and limiters, it’s kind of something I like to avoid, most of the time in any of our effects, processing chains is just avoiding too much compression and limiting. And so we equally, we kind of make sure that the sounds are kind of not quite sausage files, but the relatively don’t have too much dynamics in them. Because we add that back in, once we get to the mixing stage of the cars, it’s with load sources like this, it’s actually much harder to go upwards and is to go backwards. So you know, if you’re, if your call recording is fairly consistent and load, then once you get into the game, it’s easier to turn it down than it is to like ramp it back up because of the massive dynamics in it. Yeah, so I mean, without going too much into all the other plugins that we use on the on the cars, that is that is kind of how we end up processing them. And we have this sort of five channel .wav that we end up feeding into our granular synthesis engine tech that we use for the game.
Mark Kilborn 12:23
Is that five channel a surround? Is it storing engine and exhaust and other things within a single file?
Fraser Strachan 12:30
Yeah, exactly. It’s, it’s storing engine, exhaust, intake, and interior left and right within the one file
Mark Kilborn 12:39
multi-file OK.
Fraser Strachan 12:41
Yeah. And then we can we can also like change which channels are configured where and stuff like that, funnily enough, like a lot of the time we, we wanted to bring in the ability to configure which channels were chosen in our tool, because when you export from ProTools, and it thinks it’s a surround channel, then it likes to choose its own channels, assign stuff to so yeah, it’s one of those Lazy Game Dev things. We were like, let’s just write a tool for that.
Mark Kilborn 13:04
Oh, don’t reinforce the lazy dev idea that somebody on Twitter will kill us.
Fraser Strachan 13:08
Yeah.
Mark Kilborn 13:10
You’ve mentioned you mentioned an interesting word that I think about when I play the game consistency. You mentioned that a few times. How do you handle keeping these cars? I mean, I want to say how do you handle the loudness consistency? How do you keep them all relative to each other? You know, one car should probably in the real world be louder than another or be more exciting? How do you manage that across 500 cars and and how do you know what these cars should sound like beyond just recordings? I mean, are you all just driving and listening to tons of cars? Like how do you make sure that this one sounds boxy enough? And this one sounds gravelly enough? How do you how do you pull that off?
Fraser Strachan 13:47
That is a great question and one that we didn’t have a very good answer for until the start of Horizon 5. You know, I think I think when people were when they would have complaints within the community about how a different car sounded, a lot of the time they were picking up on inconsistency within our processes in previous games. We were really thorough this time round in doing a lot of research. At the start of the game, we pretty much know which cars are going to be featured in the game even though we saw a massive amount of cars. We did a massive YouTube search just for every single car got about three different videos of the cars in real life for for each of those cars. We built this database where we essentially had like you know, a massive Excel spreadsheet where you could click on the links straight through to the YouTube videos for each of the cars sometimes for you know the different upgrade levels that you could have like this one’s got this kind of exhaust it’s got this other kind of carbon exhaust or something. But also one of the other things it doesn’t trip was over but it’s it’s probably unique to Forza games is that the community have such a good understanding of what the car sounded like in Horizon 4 Horizon 3, Horizon 2 and even all the other motorsport games, and they hold us to account if they if they think that one sounds better than another. So we actually, we wanted to make sure that we weren’t just referencing YouTube videos of what the cars actually sound like. But we were also listening back to what each of our previous games sounded like so that we basically had this tick box exercise, where were we were signing them off, we’d say, does that sound like the real car? Yes. Does it sound amazing? Yes. And does it sound better than every other car that we have been able to see in any other game. So I know, it sounds really labor intensive. But we did have references for pretty much every other car racing game that exists to make sure that we were able to say to ourselves, we think that that sounds better than or to our ability, it sounds better than any other game that we have have listened to. And now of course, that that becomes subjective very quickly. But, you know, we tried as much as we could, when it comes to the reference scouting, when it comes to actually getting them consistent in the game, you can tell a lot from just sitting down and playing the game, whether something objectively sounds far too loud, too far too quiet. And we will start off by mixing the cars to a rough volume that sounds close to three or four cars that were our reference cars, these are the level that we want all of our cars to sit up because the whole mix works around the car. And that’s kind of our anchor point, we knew that so many cars have so like so different frequency content to them. So some cars, like a boxer engine, you mentioned is really basically doesn’t have too much high end, and might carry a lot of pressure to it, which perhaps another like two rotor car that is really whiny and nasal, doesn’t have to it. So in order to get those two cars to sound equal, you actually have to go above and beyond what you think is the right volume. So we actually developed a piece of server tech that essentially loaded up the game every single night. And it ran each of the cars up and down a straight piece of road. And it recorded a file of that car in Chase, bonnet and cockpit view. And basically, every night we could pull those files down from the server, and pull them into a big Reaper session. And we’ll be able to look at the waveforms and see that one looks too quiet or that one is completely silent, there must be a bug on that car. And it was very quick for us to identify where the where the stray cars were. And that was super useful for us. Because I think it wasn’t until this game that we actually managed to get that consistency across the board. You know, I think a lot of people would wonder why we need to do that some cars are louder than others. But when the car is your essentially it’s your player, it’s the thing that you drive, or you know, if it was an RPG, you’d be walking around the world and that’s your player, it kind of needs to be a consistent volume. If you load up the game and you’ve got like a tiny little car that is quiet an everything else, you’re going to calibrate your monitors to that you’re going to turn your TV down, then all of a sudden you hit a cinematic and it’s going to blow the roof off. So it’s super important that the cars do have a consistency to them.
Timothy Muirhead 18:16
When you say there’s 500 cars, you couldn’t have done 500 car recording sessions, right?
Fraser Strachan 18:22
We try to to the best of our ability on this game, it’s it’s one of the things I’ve learned the most from production on Horizon five is that we were never going to be able to achieve what we wanted to achieve with this game, and have as many car recordings as as we wanted to have that sheer amount of variety in the cars without asking for help. So we knew that as a team at playground games, we we can record a lot of cars within a year. But if we looked at the history of Horizon 3 and Horizon 4, typically as a dev team, whilst we were doing all the other stuff that we do to make the game like cinematics voice over all the other implementation for all the other systems, we were only really managing to get out and record 20 or 30 cars as the audio team at Playground because we’re so busy. But to reach that, that number for Horizon 5, we reached out to multiple different partners. So we worked with Sounding Sweet, who do a lot of car recordings and, you know, add over at Sounding Sweet. He actually used to work with us back in the day. So that was really great to work with him again. And we also worked with Pole Position productions to kind of see what stuff they had in their libraries that we could purchase and kind of source for a lot of the cars that we didn’t already have. So by sort of reaching out and working with Sounding Sweet, with Pole Position productions, and also us PG going out and recording cars we were able to manage to get I think we ended up with just over 320 or 330-ish
Timothy Muirhead 20:00
Wow,
Fraser Strachan 20:00
unique engines that we recorded. That’s kind of okay for when you’re looking at 500 cars because not every car has a unique engine, right? You’ve got something like a Toyota GT 86 will have the same engine exhaust as a Subaru BRZ. So, you know, it’s kind of okay for those cars to share share the same platform. And that’s where we found our saving to make sure that we weren’t like, basically retreading the same ground.
Timothy Muirhead 20:27
That’s impressive.
Fraser Strachan 20:28
Cool. Thank you.
Mark Kilborn 20:28
So the acoustics of Horizon 5? It sounds like you’re doing something a bit different than you’ve done in the past. I’m curious if you can kind of walk us through what the process is like for getting the world to respond to these cars driving through them?
Fraser Strachan 20:43
Yeah, sure. So when we started on fourth horizon five, we knew that one of the biggest things we wanted to overhaul was the acoustic system. And the reason that we wanted to do that was because cars are so loud, that 50% of the experience of what you hear in cars is kind of how they react with the environment as well. You know exactly where a car is, if it’s in the middle of a city, you can almost pinpoint which road it’s coming down, based on the acoustics of it bouncing off all the buildings. Likewise, out in the middle of a desert, on a on a runway, you can you can hear how different that is at a distance, we didn’t feel like we could do justice to all these cars that we were recording in the the 11 distinct biomes that we have in the game without making sure that the acoustics in each of those different areas was was sounding reactive and different. For every every part of the map, we looked at a few different techniques, the first one that we looked at was a kind of pre baked system where you would essentially take your game world and you kind of run it on the server overnight. And it creates almost like a voxelized map, which gives you a point source that says like, hey, you know, at this point, there’s reflective concrete. And over at this point over here, there’s actually there’s actually nothing. So you’ll be able to say that you can, you can send the sound around that corner, we struggled to be able to use that type of system, because of the speed at which our game moves, like you can be moving 200 miles an hour, which is faster than any other main player in any other game travels through their through their games. So just streaming that sheer amount of data and all that information that you would need was just a logistical nightmare. And, we also kind of thought like, you know, is it even worth it? Like when you’re traveling at that speed, you kind of just want the really obvious data that is there a building there? Yes, like, give me some slapback reverb, a real time re-check methods where essentially we are sending re-checks out from the player car to each of the positions of our surround sound speaker. So including Atmos height speakers. And we’re essentially saying like if it finds a wall, what material is that made of is it made of wood is it made of concrete is it made of grass, and if so, apply an absorption coefficient to it. So every material in the game is marked up with an absorption coefficient, which essentially is just a value on a on a curve. So it knows how much to roll off perhaps some top end, we’re also then delaying that signal by the speed of sound. So that like it takes the time of flight into into account on it. So we’re using that system for early reflections, which gives you that sense of the car bouncing off of all the buildings around you. We’re also using that system for occlusion now as well. So we’re we’re kind of detecting all the other I think there’s up to 12 other cars that you can see at once in the game. And we’re detecting if, if you can see that car using these ray-checks, and essentially that controls how filtered those non player cars are so that if you’re playing multiplayer for instance, you kind of know whether to head towards the sound or whether to go down the road and and cut it off when it’s coming around the next corner. So that was only one part of the acoustic system. The other part was that we we moved entirely to using impulse responses for the reverb throughout the world. So up until now we’ve been using the algorithmic reverb in Fmod. That was fine it you tend to find with plugin reverbs that you don’t get the difference in tone that you really want from a plugin reverb as you do from using like tons of different impulses. We now have the different areas in the world like you’ve got swamps, we’ve got the jungles, we’ve got the deserts, two different deserts actually in the volcanic crater, one heart to the city. They all have different impulse responses based on the ambience markup zones that we have in the game. Everything that you hear, not just the car but even like the collisions the some larger ambient sounds even all the animated objects pretty much everything that we could we know feed through the both of the reflections and the reverb so that it really ties everything together and makes it feel like everything is now grounded in the world. Because I think that’s one of the biggest problems we have in games is, is actually not just making something sound good. But how do we make sure it then all gets tied together and has that glue that really kind of pulls it all together.
Mark Kilborn 25:22
So when you sit down to mix this game, you have a lot of stuff going on, you have up to 12 cars on screen, as you said, the player car is you know, unlike mixing a game with a character running around like I’m normally working on, you’re not dealing with footsteps and body movements, you’re dealing with a very loud broadband noise source of vehicle engine and exhaust. How do you mix this frequency wise and loudness wise to make sure that the players hearing what they need to hear? And how do you decide what they need to hear at any given moment?
Fraser Strachan 25:50
That is a really good question. And there’s not really a simple answer to it. But the I guess, where I start is with is with my thinking on how that player car sounds. Which is, you know, if you look at any other game, like take an RPG, for instance, you’re running around, you have footsteps, but it could be kind of quiet. So you can still enjoy the ambience and stuff as you’re playing that game. And then imagine that player character was just screaming constantly just “AHHHHHHHHHHHH” just like wielding the sword just like running through the countryside. Eventually, at some point, you’re going to turn the volume knob down, because you just can’t listen to that constantly. So Horizon is kind of an interesting game in that it has to be something for everyone, you have to hear the engine to know how well you’re driving. But at the same time, we have this concept of different mixes for the game. So at the core of a Horizon games mix, we have what we call the free room mix, which is essentially meant to be something that you could jump into the game for 30 minutes, and just drive around with the radio on and not feel fatigued at all. And that kind of requires us to have a really delicate mix between what the music is doing, what the car is doing, what the voiceover sounds like compared to all that you’ve got radio DJs. And pretty much there’s always someone trying to grab your attention in Horizon and it is a it is an audible nightmare. But the free roam mix is the kind of laid back version of it. And from there, we we use FMod studios snapshot system to really change quite drastically how the mix sounds depending on the area that you’re in. So one of our favorite areas to work on is the initial opening drive, which is kinda like the first 10 minutes, we tried to put our best foot forward. But it’s also the most cinematic 10 minutes of the game that that we have. And for those sections, we we really dialed up to 11 where we can so and to be able to turn it up, you need to have a mix that is not already at 11 we use overriding snapshot mixes to essentially say hey, you’re in these big gameplay sections like the opening drive, or these big adventurous expeditions that we have in Horizon 5, or you know, the showcase races. And that’s where we we take the mix up a notch, that’s where your car is going to be far more dynamic, the music is going to fight a lot more with with the car. And you know, in each of those race sections as well we have a lot of dynamic mixing going on where depending on how fast the car is moving, that will depend on not just like what volume the music is at, but actually the surround sound spread of it as well. So we we’ve really taken advantage of the surrounds and the heights for this game. We actually worked a lot with Dolby themselves to kind of figure out like how were how are people mixing films using Atmos these days, and they had a lot of different different ideas. It always changes depending on the film, obviously. But they did see that quite commonly, people will will really pull the music back and let other things like dialogue and whatever action is happening take center stage in the middle. So like they’ll use the heights and the surroundings more for music. And we we really kind of decided to borrow that technique when you’re in races and stuff. It changes as well depending on pack density. So if you’re if you’re right in the middle of five other cars tussling out for first position, then the music is going to take a seat back and we’re going to focus all those engines a little bit more. Whereas if you’re in 12th position, whun whun, and you’re just kind of like tossing it up. You’re basically just at the back of the pack, kind of just enjoying the game really like you don’t really care if you win, we’re just going to turn the music back up for those sections and let you enjoy the radio it’s it’s something I do commonly when I’m actually testing the game because we rarely actually drive competitively. We find it funny actually, a lot of a lot of fans always say like, why are you not actually good at your game? And it’s like, well, I was concentrating on doing the mix. I have yet to concentrate on actually getting good at driving.
Mark Kilborn 30:11
I’m not usually enjoying it when I’m in last place, but I try. Yeah, I think that’s consistent with game development. In general, the vast majority of us are nowhere near as good as the players and it blows my mind some of the things they do, once they get their hands on our games. It’s nuts!
Fraser Strachan 30:30
yeah, it’s one of the one of the most enjoyable things about games development is kind of creating a toolbox of sounds that you’ve got a car, you’ve got collisions, you’ve got all this sort of stuff that we’ve implemented, but seeing how players just try to break every single thing when, when they get into the game, we implemented a new feature called Event lab on Horizon 5, where you can basically pick any prop in the world and just like make all these different races, but we also exposed sound effects to that. So we have car horns in the game, like there’s hundreds of them now where you can play like a Duck QUACK if you want or, you know, dislike Ahhruuuga horns and all sorts of stuff. But you can set up all these rules where like, you know, if you smash through a cactus, it will play a chicken. And then if you smashed through this gate, it will it will play like a donkey or something. It’s kind of nice when the game launches to realize that all the systems you implemented just about hold together, but make this wacky, wacky sounding thing that you could just never have. Like, if I if I’d showed that to my boss, I probably would have been fired like, hey, let’s take a race sound like this. But UGC is a wonderful tool.
Mark Kilborn 31:44
One last big topic I wanted to cover was the the sounds of the environment. You know, you all have done Colorado, France, you’ve been to a lot of places with the series this time it was Mexico. I’m curious, you know, how do you go about gathering sounds not just from you’re not just doing a small location, you’re doing multiple towns, like these huge sprawling areas? How do you gather the sounds for that kind of environment? How do you approach putting them in? And how, how does it differ from doing that for a game where it’s character focused?
Fraser Strachan 32:15
Yeah, absolutely. I think ambience is an area that has become increasingly more important to us on Horizon because the car is the methods by which you get around the game. But we’re making these massive sandbox open worlds that we have this type of gamer who is literally just an explorer, they’d love to load in and just go and drive around Mexico. And wa knew fairly early on roundabout when the pandemic hit, actually, that this was going to be something that people would love to jump into and just explore Mexico, because maybe they’ve never been there before. It might be the first holiday that they actually get to go on in and God knows how many years and you know, we really wanted to do service to the world because you can drive it 200 miles an hour, but you can just stop and listen to the streams and the lakes and the, the ambience around you. So we actually worked with a team at Pinewood and Molinare postproduction who Glenn Gathard over there. He helped us out massively and worked with us for a long time to figure out which sounds we wanted to go and record and we set up a list of stuff that we wanted him to go and capture in Mexico. And he headed out a couple of times and managed to gather
Timothy Muirhead 33:35
This is Glen? Glen Gathard went to Mexico?
Fraser Strachan 33:37
Yeah, and yet he is so up for that sort of stuff. He he just loves getting his hands dirty and, and really recording the best source that he possibly could. He was he was doing some really crazy stuff. Like, you know, he hired canoes, and he was like sat on the front of a canoe while someone else was rolling along through the mangroves in the swamps. With this parabolic mic capturing all the all the birds and the wildlife and the monkeys and stuff. He even he managed to get a something we were really keen to capture was howler monkeys, and he managed to get lots of them. I didn’t realize quite how prolific Holwer monkeys are, but turns out they hate cars. So every time a car was driving past, he was able to get these howler monkeys like screaming at these cars. And he fed back to us he was like, Are you really sorry, but you know, it’s really hard to get these howler monkeys not to shout at the cars when they’re going past me. Well, that’s great. Let’s try and get that into the game. So we actually, oh, it started out as a joke. And then we ended up implementing it properly, where we have this crowd excitement value, where if you’re in one of the festivals, and you’re doing donuts and skids are like driving faster doing skills, the crowd get more and more excited and they start to play like air horns and cheer and whoop and clap. And we decided to use that same parameter on the howler monkey system in the jungle. So it’s one of those Easter eggs that if you go to certain parts of the jungle, I’m not going to tell people where they are. But if you if you drive around and kind of honk your horn and all sorts of stuff, then howler monkeys will start to shout at you in those jungles, which was a nice little, a nice little nod to how they worked in real life. But yeah, it was, it was really interesting doing the ambience recording trips out in Mexico, certainly a challenge for us to to get that stuff back to the studio and implement it into the game world to do as much justice as possible. Because one of the things that we really try to achieve in a horizon game is to make sure you never hear something in a surround sound recording that makes you want to drive around the corner and find out what that is because it can be really confusing for the players. So even when you’re recording, you might think you’re out in the middle of nowhere, if there’s like a stream or something just off in the distance. If you’re recording and surround sound, you can basically tell straight away like, it’s somewhere over to the front, right? So we had to try and record as flat a bed as possible without any of that directionality in it at all. So that we have these really good basis to work with. And we try and chop out each of the birds and the various different animals that we capture as part of those quads. So that they don’t become repetitive when we have to loop them in the game, then we build up from there. So we have our base, we have all of the kind of 3d sounds, we would say that we scatter randomly around the place. And then all of the positional sounds that will always stay in the same place like rivers and streams and waterfalls. There are various different types of wildlife in the game that you can have a bit of fun driving through and scaring off like flamingos and seagulls and parrots. And they really bring the world to life when you when you find a flock of them and managed to make them flee. So all of those were on our list of things that we wanted to capture. And Mexico was such a vibrant place to go and record that we were privileged to get the chance to try and do justice in a game
Mark Kilborn 37:16
you had mentioned earlier, you are using a biome system. And I assume that’s because you’ve got like 40 square miles of ground to cover. So you’re probably selectively choosing what you’re going to hand place and the rest of its kind of systemic. I would assume?
Fraser Strachan 37:28
it’s a little bit of both. Yeah, so we we used to do a lot of manual markup, I think 50% of it is it’s fairly manual. Still, just because we we want to be like really specific about where we put those crowd excited howler monkeys. But we did, we did develop a system. On horizon 5, the environment teams were moving towards more of a procedural method where they’d be able to randomly place bushes and trees, depending on what the biome, I guess, recipe was that they were using. And we actually hooked into that. So every night when the procedural world would get built from everything that the environment artists had checked in, it would then use the what they called masks, which is kind of like a painted down section on the ground. And you’d have this huge map made up of all these different sections. So you’ve got like little bits of jjungle little bits of swamp, we would know where all the rivers were as well. And then that would build all of our ambient zone trigger zones, basically off of what the size and shape of those masks were. Which means that we were able to just load it up the next morning and tweak it wherever we needed to. Or we had a kind of coarseness value where we could use this slider to say do we want it to be super detailed? Or do we want it to not be as detailed as as they’ve made it? And we did kind of go about 50% on where where they were taking the detail to because it was it was just getting to the point where you’d be driving along and you would hear….it’s the swamp. Oh, no, no, it’s the jungle. Oh, it’s the swamp again. And now it’s the jungle and you we kind of needed to make sure it stayed fairly consistent when visually when you’re driving through the world, it didn’t seem like it was changing that much.
Mark Kilborn 39:10
So aside from howler monkeys, are there any other things we should be listening for as we explore the world of Horizon? Anything else hiding out there that you can give us a hint about?
Fraser Strachan 39:19
Um
Mark Kilborn 39:22
He’s grinning. I can see him on the Zoom call. The listeners won’t hear that. You are thinking of something?
Fraser Strachan 39:29
I think it will leave the listeners to go and explore the game. That sounds like a plug for the game, but go and go and check it the game and see what what other exciting easter eggs you can find in there….
Mark Kilborn 39:39
Nice. Okay, silly question. I have to ask, Do you have a favorite car or cars either that you’d like to play or that you liked to work on?
Fraser Strachan 39:46
I do have a soft spot for I mentioned that earlier, but the Subaru BRZ and not particularly because it’s my favorite car, but I do love the way that it sounds and that was from a particular really interested, shall we say colleague of ours who owned that car and we’d come to my door every single day to see, it still doesn’t sound like my car does, is still doesn’t sound like my car does. So we’d gone tweak it, hey, how does that sound. And eventually, when we managed to make him happy I was I was super happy. And it’s always the case when somebody feeds back something, it probably means that there’s an element of truth to it. And, and he really helped us to take that car to the next level to where it needed to be. And also let us know that that level of detail was required on each of the cars that we are working on. So I do love that car. It has a special place in my heart, he’s a good friend of mine. I also I love the sound of the Jaguar XJ 220. It’s just a really rare car. It was wonderful to get to go and record that in real life, and to just hear the glorious V6 engine just sing and it translated really well to the game as well. So yeah, those are probably my top two. But I think the team did a fantastic job on the rest of the cars as well. So I’m not gonna disparage the rest of their work as well.
Timothy Muirhead 41:09
Do you want to give us the names of some of the people that worked on the audio team? ,
Mark Kilborn 41:12
That’s a good question.
Fraser Strachan 41:13
Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, I think one of the proudest things I’ve had working on this game is developing the team and, and seeing how the team have pulled together through really hard times over the last last year or so. So you know, big shout out to Richard Blackley, who worked on all of the car audio, and you know, he had to put up with sitting down with me, reviewing these cars constantly. There’s a lot of content to review and record and process there. And he did a phenomenal job, the sheer willpower It must take to put up with the feedback that comes from me. Ruaraigh Chapman is one of our senior sound designers. And he did a fantastic job on tons of the cinematics in the game, he is really got the a fantastic ear for for detail. Most of the time, I have to tear him away from the computer, like because he wants to just add one more sound. And that’s that is a testament to how brilliant he is. He’s great at sound designing because also great and mixing these pieces for the game and understanding how to weld the The in-game sounds with the linear track lay that he does as well. And then we have Mattia Zucchelli, who worked on a lot of the voiceover systems for the game. He worked on last cinematic sound as well, there is there was also another guy called Christoffer Hulthe, who is no longer with us at playground, but he was a massive part of the team and a huge help. There’s tons of other people I would love to call out. But that is that’s the core team here at playground games and super proud of what they’ve achieved.
Timothy Muirhead 42:49
You should be it’s quite an achievement.
Fraser Strachan 42:51
Cool. Thank you very much. So it really means a lot.
Mark Kilborn 42:54
Game sounds fantastic. And it’s just a tremendous joy to play.
Timothy Muirhead 42:57
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us today. Fraser, it was really great to learn how you guys tackled everything. And as we just mentioned, the game is quite an achievement. And it’s not just us saying that it’s everybody saying that you you Google the title on an all you get is amazing reviews. So congratulations. It must feel really great to be part of such a successful campaign there.
Fraser Strachan 43:16
Yeah, thank you very much for having me. It’s it really is a privilege to work with a team and you know, a privilege to get to speak to you guys about you know what we do kind of the best thing that we can we can have a sound designers as how people listen to what we do. And you know, I’m just glad that everyone seems to be enjoying it. So hopefully, here’s too many more.
Narrator 43:36
Produced by Timothy Muirhead, Rene Coronado and Teresa Morrow. theme music is by Mark Strait. Send your emails to [email protected]. Follow us on Twitter via @thetonebenders and join TonebendersPodcast on Facebook. Support this podcast. You can use our links when you shop at Amazon or b&h or leave us a tip. Just go to Tonebenderspodcast.com and click the support button. Thanks for listening.
Timothy Muirhead 44:05
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