Thank you ! I'm glad you're enjoying it guys !
@Firesteel Interesting approach for IMS, but i'm pretty sure that it's not going to become a game changer. For several reasons :
- The audio is bundle in the game datas, if you need high quality samples and you are using a lot of instruments, there is no way it's going to be good for low memory systems (aka consoles)... and since most of the market is designed around consoles... well you know where i'm going with this. It could work for percussions, but there isn't many games with "percussion only" score.
- Even with high memory systems it's gonna be hard to replicate some of the percussions i can use on my DAW. For instance, i have some loaded percussions for HotDS over 100mb, and if you combine every single percussion instruments it can go from 500mb to 1gig in memory. If you optimize audio and reduce the number of samples, you are definitely loosing quality and details. I'm not sure musicians and composers are going to like that. (I'm not linking it just thinking about it)
- Since the audio is driven by midi files, you can indeed play with the tempo. That's the strength of this system, but besides that, you don't have much more possibilities. Yeah you can analyze the midi and do some fancy snapshots with audio levels and creating dynamically transitions between them, but you can replicate that with FMOD.
- You are always artistically limited when using this kind of techniques. I mean : fillers between themes, human variations and details in the instruments, really odd rythmic schemes extending from one measure to another... and so on. Music is really difficult to replicate and that's why there isn't a lot of middleware in the industry for that.
- Why trying to replicate something with a procedural system if you can do (almost) the same thing with less memory usage and high quality audio.
Basically what i'm saying is : use FMOD if you have a musician in the team. NOPE i'm not here to sell FMOD, but the tool is insanely flexible and allows you to do whatever you want with your music. Monolith nailed it a long time ago with NOLF2. You can do a really cool dynamic soundtrack with no creative limitation and really good quality. FMOD allows you to do exactly the same thing as in NOLF2 but with better tools and a gorgeous sequencer.
The only problem is : you need the composer in the team... there is a bunch of work to make a dynamic soundtrack work.
@Ace yup i thought about that. Mike deals with everything related to the sound design, i didn't discuss much about the potential changes atm.