By adding drums and vocals, and giving the drums the space they required, we would have to triple the number of stereo tracks to nine.
In early versions of Guitar Hero, there were, at most, three stereo tracks per song: guitar, bass or rhythm guitar and everything else.
#GUITAR HERO 3 CONTROL PANEL MANAGE MULTIPLE SONGS AT ONCE PLUS#
We needed a system that would give us great audio streaming performance directly from a disc, a number of audio tracks with per-track digital signal processing, almost instant player feedback plus an audio visualizer, as well as atmospheric audio spatialization and on-the-fly reconfiguration for all of the above. It not only had to have great performance but also all a lot of new functionality to support the features we had planned, including: adding drums and vocals letting players play the instruments they wanted, even if that meant doubling up allowing a new drop-in and drop-out party mode and giving the player even more of a sense of location and space where their virtual band was playing. This led to a number of goals for our song audio player. That meant really sitting down and looking at the technology we had on hand, and how we were going to use it. It was also obvious that audio would be a major part of how we'd do it. When we were given the honor of tackling the next Guitar Hero in 2007, we knew that we had to build on what the game offered to keep the series' momentum. We used FMOD as our sound engine, so some of our approaches might be more applicable to people who are familiar with the software, But even if you use a different engine, I hope that you might understand what we were aiming for, and why we did the things we did - and find this info useful.
In this article I'll look at some of the things we did in the audio and how we did our part to take Guitar Hero up a notch. There's a lot going on behind the scenes to help really put people up on that stage and to make sure it's fun, even as players clang a few notes.